The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Royal Festival Hall—a “Democratic” Space?
structure of legitimate expectations.” 9 The assurance of a sense of “equal social
worth,” in the face of actual and continuing social differences, was a matter
that only ideology could contain.
And in this containment, architecture had special value, for architecture
creates the settings in which life is lived: it is, in the French phrase,
la mise-en-scène de la vie. The Festival Hall—paid for by the state, and an ideological
project if ever there was one—was, it seems to me, a place where architectural
space provided the opportunity for the individual subject to
enjoy the illusion of his or her own “equal social worth” through the view of
others engaged in the identical act. Levin’s concertgoers would not leave because
inside the Festival Hall, if not in the “reality” outside, they were, relative
to one another, equal. And the glance of the woman whose eyes meet
you from the bottom of Gordon Cullen’s drawing likewise signals that you,
too, are included in this world where privilege and hierarchy no longer exist.
It has been said that because the clientele of the Festival Hall was
entirely middle class and moneyed, it is preposterous to try and understand
the experience it offered as “democratic.” The historian Kenneth O. Morgan
has written, “It was hardly for factory workers and their families that its
glossy vestibules and bars were designed.” 10 Of course this is true—the notion
that it was a “people’s palace” was a mythology created in the last days
of the Greater London Council. Its daytime use as a cultural center is a recent
phenomenon; previously the doors remained firmly shut outside performance
times. But to say that it was not built for factory workers and their
11.6 | Royal Festival Hall, roof terrace. Contemporary photograph.