The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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11.5 | Royal Festival Hall, bar. Contemporary photograph.
the possession of the building, and an absence of any commanding authority.
Levin’s ecstatic concertgoers who would not go home had very good reason
for their reluctance, for they had discovered the building’s secret: that it
belonged to them.
But I think there is also a historical significance to this—what I
have said is as true of the Festival Hall now as it was in 1951. Consciousness
is historically constructed, and what a building reveals to us now is not a
sure guide to the consciousness with which people in the past approached
the same object. In 1951 it was still the early days of the welfare state, the
purpose of which in Britain, as in other European countries, was to create a
consensus between capital and labor by providing universal access to a range
of social benefits and services, as well as by some redistribution of wealth
and income. There was, however, no intention of removing economic inequalities
in wealth and income altogether, despite a high value put on social
equality. As the contemporary political theorist T. H. Marshall pointed
out, consensual support for the welfare state relied on a readiness to believe
that “Equality of status is more important than equality of income.” 8 Recognizing
the inconsistency in this, he saw that the state could only satisfactorily
assure people of their “equal social worth” in the face of persisting
social differences by promoting the belief that change was taking place, and
that future standards of living would render social or financial differences
insignificant. As Marshall put it, “what matters to the citizen is the super-