Festival of Britain

A small collection of design sketches by James Templeton & Co, created for the Festival of Britain (1951), Festival Pattern Group. A number are grouped in pairs with both being attached to one board. None of these designs appear to have gone into production, and were certainly not the ones chosen for use in the exhibition.

The Festival of Britain (1951). As well as celebrating the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Festival of Britain was an attempt to give Britons a feeling of recovery and progress, and to promote better-quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities in the aftermath of World War II. James Templeton & Co were part of a select group who came together to form the Festival Pattern Group, a unique project involving X-ray crystallographers, designers and manufacturers. 'By studying X-ray diffraction photographs of crystals, scientists could calculate the arrangement of atoms within molecules. The resulting diagrams provided the inspiration for the Festival Pattern Group…. Highlighting the intricacy and beauty of crystal structures, these avant-garde designs stand as a testament to the optimism of the early post-war era and the vibrancy of 1950s design.' The company contributed a large number of designs created by various members of their designing staff. The five Templeton designs selected for display at the exhibition were based on the crystal structures of Perovskite, Quartz, Insulin, Pentaerythritol and Resorcinol. The carpets they went on to produce featured in many of the exhibitions that took place throughout the country, and in particular, in the Regatta Restaurant at the South Bank Exhibition in London, the principal showcase for the Festival Pattern Group. Templeton's chief designer, Hugh McKenna, stated that the designs are 'most interesting when examined at closer hand and offer almost limitless possibilities in the use of colour.'