the colourful past of the royal festival hall

The colourful past of the Royal Festival Hall

Patrick Baty

Abstract Opened on 3 May 1951, the Royal Festival Hall was to become modern Britain’s first public building. In 2003 I was asked to carry out an analysis of the paint in the auditorium and foyers as part of a major restoration project of this iconic building. The colours found were sufficiently unexpected and controversial to lead to further phases of analysis being commissioned. Doubts were initially expressed about the wisdom of reinstating such a scheme, but it has now been done. As well as describing what was found, the following topics are discussed: (a) contemporary thoughts on paint colour in buildings; (b) the indirect influence of Le Corbusier on the decoration of the Royal Festival Hall; (c) a brief account of the Hertfordshire Schools Project which led to much work on colour, and (d) the first range of colours designed by architects specifically for building purposes.

Keywords paint analysis, Festival of Britain, Purism, Ozenfant, contrasts, Archrome, Munsell, British Standard

Historical background

Even while German bombs were falling, plans were being made for the rebuilding of London after the Second World War. The County of London Plan drawn up by J.H. Forshaw and Sir Patrick Abercrombie in 1943 had pointed out one of the great anomalies of the capital. While the north side of the River Thames from Westminster eastwards was lined with magnificent buildings and an embankment road, the Surrey side had for many years been ‘the object of all the architec-tural scorn of England’ (Myers 1949 cited in Stamp 2001). They believed that: ‘Cleared of its encumbrances, equipped with a continuous strip of grass and a wide esplanade … this area … might well include a great cultural centre embracing, among other features, a modern theatre, a large concert hall, and the headquarters of various organizations’ (Forshaw and Abercrombie 1943: 131).

After the war, the government decided that the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition would be marked by a Festival of Britain, and the site chosen to house this would be the stretch of Lambeth riverside either side of Hungerford Bridge (Saunders 1984: 378–9).

In 1948, the new architect of the London County Council, Robert Matthew, was asked if a concert hall could be built by mid-1951. He believed this to be possible and assembled a team to carry out the work. Leslie Martin led the design, Peter Moro took charge of all detail design development, and Edwin Williams undertook contract coordination. As John McKean stated:

Those early post war years were filled with the search for methods of building houses as cars or aeroplanes were built. The corollary, of course, was the need to

design buildings like that too, focussing on the appro-priate and efficient use of technology; scientific man-agement, and the value of a test base in research and development. The architect’s authority would no longer be based on a mysterious sensibility but on the disinterested skill of the benevolent technician; the new design method would be the scientific method – identify the problem; research, analyse and organize; and then, somehow, the new method would produce the right result (McKean 2001: 2–3).

An analysis of the paint employed suggests that this methodical approach also appears to have extended to the colours that were selected for the Royal Festival Hall.

Opened on 3 May 1951, the Royal Festival Hall was to become modern Britain’s first public building. As built, it was severely compromised in various ways. Some improvements were carried out in 1963–64 and a major rethink of the build-ing has been taking place in recent years as part of the South Bank Masterplan. In early 2003 I was tasked to carry out an examination of the paint in selected areas of the auditorium and foyers. The report came up with some quite unexpected findings and it became clear that further work would be nec-essary to establish how other surfaces had been treated. A second report was issued in January 2005 and the combined findings have been used to guide the recent redecoration.1

Paints employed

Prior to the investigation it was clear that very little had been recorded of the paints originally employed in the building

THe COLOuRFuL PAST OF THe ROyAL FeSTIvAL HALL 245

although it was known that a variety of different types had been used:2

1 A flat oil paint was applied over a finely stippled stone paint on the foyer ceiling in order to obtain ‘a truly matt surface’ with a degree of texture. This was essential because of the large amount of light streaming in from the windows.

2 The suspended auditorium ceiling was sprayed with a ‘synthetic emulsion flat paint’. A water-based coating was selected because of the inclusion of lime-bound ver-miculite on top of the fibrous plaster and the need for the suspended scaffold to be removed quickly.

3 The acoustic slabs on the auditorium ceiling, which were made of woodwool, were sprayed with a distemper. As ‘distemper’ is a generic term it is not clear what type was used, although it was probably an oil- or casein-bound type.

4 Chlorinated rubber paint was used on the structural con-crete in the boiler house. In common with the surfaces in other areas it was appreciated that the high alkalinity of new concrete and plaster was likely to have an adverse affect on standard oil-based paints.

Work that I was carrying out at the same time had rein-forced my belief that the post-war period saw a great deal of change in the types of paint in use.3 The early alkyd resin paints had begun to replace the traditional linseed oil and lead paint, and a number of flat wall paints and enamels4 with either an eggshell finish or a gloss were available. Although bound distempers were still in common use, the early 1950s saw the gradual introduction of emulsion paints – these were sometimes referred to as plastic emulsion, latex paints, poly-vinyl acetate or polystyrene emulsion paints (Chatfield 1955: 330–38).

As far as the Royal Festival Hall was concerned, it had been thought that the main supplier of the paints might have been listed among the individuals and firms credited in the Architects’ Journal of 10 May 1951 (pp. 613–14), however this information was not published. It is possible that Messrs. Blundell, Spence & Co. Ltd, of 9 Upper Thames Street, London EC4, supplied some material, as their premises were less than one mile from the site and a low-key advertisement for the company appears in that issue of the journal (p. 612). It is known that they were selling ‘Pammastic Plastic Emul-sion’ in 1953 (Walters 1953: 587). Equally, their flat enamel ‘Pammatt’ or their flat wall paint ‘Bluntone’ could have been used. Information obtained during the second phase of the investigation, however, suggested that others may have been involved in the supply of paint.

Findings

A variety of different paint types was indeed revealed, but what was more surprising was the range of colours and their disposition. For, having been painted brilliant white for so long, a combination of dark reds, dull green and brown was uncovered on the main floor alone.

The initial phase of the project confirmed how a restricted

sampling regime will often raise as many questions as answers. With six floors and the auditorium to sample, it was not unre-alistic to have been given a list of a limited number of surfaces to investigate. However having examined each of the required elements there were a lot of unknowns – for example, why was one end of a wall red while the other end was green? How far did the red extend – was it only on the one floor and how did it meet the green? Fortunately the client was as keen to follow up the findings and had allowed sufficient time and funds to do so.

Space does not permit a detailed account of the technical analysis and the more interesting story is perhaps that behind the original use of colour in the Royal Festival Hall.5 The six colours that were found on Level 2 – the main entrance and foyer – can be seen in Figure 1 (cross-sections showing the four predominant colours can be seen in Figs 2–5 below).

A total of nine different colours was found on the vari-ous surfaces examined on the six floors. These were soon identified as colours that appeared in a paint range that was produced in 1955, but this was four years after the hall was built. Why had these colours been selected and where had they come from? The next phase of the research focused on this aspect.

The influence of Le Corbusier on the design of the Royal Fes-tival Hall has been referred to elsewhere (Frampton 2002: 2)6 and it is also known that he visited the site (McKean 2001:6).7 Earlier work that I had carried out on a number of 20th-century buildings had introduced me to the two collections of colour scales designed by Le Corbusier and published in Switzerland in 1931 and 1959 (Rüegg 1997). I wondered if these had been employed in the selection of colours for the interior. Using a spectrophotometer, however, a comparison was carried out between those colours and the ones encoun-tered in the Royal Festival Hall and only two were found to be vaguely similar.8 There seemed to be no evidence to suggest that Leslie Martin and Peter Moro were consciously using these as a source, but in spite of this, further investigation did seem to suggest an indirect link with Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant

After the First World War, there had been a similar desire for a ‘return to order’ that was mirrored in architecture. In 1918, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who had not yet adopted the pseudonym ‘Le Corbusier’, had published a joint manifesto Après le Cubisme with a French painter called Amédée Ozen-fant. They termed their new aesthetic approach ‘Purism’, as they sought to eliminate the picturesque, decorative aspects of Cubism in favour of an art that stressed mathematical order, purity and logic. ‘The war is over, everything is orga-nized, everything is clarified and purified; factories rise, nothing is what it was before the war.’9 Their collaborative ideas appeared in print, in L’Esprit Nouveau, between 1920 and 1925, and many of these were to feature in Le Corbusier’s first four books, of which Vers une architecture remains the best known.

Feeling himself increasingly overshadowed by Le Corbus-ier, Ozenfant terminated the collaboration and began teach-ing with the painter Fernand Léger. He later founded his own

246 ARCHITeCTuRAL FInISHeS In THe BuILT envIROnMenT

atelier, L’ Académie Ozenfant, in the residence and studio that Le Corbusier had designed for him. He moved to London in 1936, where he set up the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in May of that year, before moving to New York some two years later (Braham 2002: 2).

In the early Purist manifestos, colour was deemed secondary to form, and this could be seen in the careful placing of colour to reinforce discrete architectural elements by Le Corbusier in his work of the mid-1920s. However, by the time that he was in England, Ozenfant had refined his ideas about colour and outlined many of these in the six articles on the subject that he wrote for the Architectural Review. Colour was now regarded as an essential element of architecture, rather than something considered by the architect while his work was being erected. He felt that colour always modifies the form of the building and that it should receive more careful attention:

We must endeavour to introduce a little order into this business, or at least sense into a great deal of it. But what is sense without order? We must try to find some method of arriving at some sort of order – one that will at least enable us to escape from this vagueness in the design of colour (Ozenfant 1937a).

Ozenfant’s revised thoughts on the importance of colour were partly due to the influence of the artist Paul Signac and his theories on Divisionism. Signac maintained that the neo-Impressionist technique of applying brushstrokes obtained the maximum brightness, colour, and harmony (Ratcliff 1992: 207). Unlike the techniques used by the earlier Impressionists, patches of colours remained distinct, blending when viewed at a distance. In this instance, when no fusion of the colours

takes place, the interaction is called ‘simultaneous contrast’ , a condition in which colours merely influence one another by proximity. This technique prevents the muddiness or darken-ing that result when patches of colour actually run into each other. It was an extension of this technique that was recom-mended by Ozenfant for achieving ‘colour solidity’ in architec-ture, altering colours visually by contrast to create the illusion of solidity (Braham 2002: 17). This notion of ‘solidity’ increas-ingly became an issue as the nature of modern construction changed, especially when dealing with such things as the light-weight partition and the glass curtain wall.

In 1937 Ozenfant had said: ‘I believe that an immense ser-vice would be done to architects, decorators, house-painters etc., if a chart especially adapted to their particular require-ments were established. This chart might contain about a hundred hues’ (Ozenfant 1937b). Ozenfant’s articles on colour were read with interest, particularly by:

… the students at the Architectural Association (AA), for example, but even for David Medd, a student at the AA who later authored the color standards for British schools, Ozenfant had already gone to the United States by the time he inquired about the course at the Academy (Braham 2002: 51).

The effect of his words can be seen in a number of articles on colour published in England shortly after the war. Indeed, we are told in 1956 that they had a direct influence on some of our post-war schools (Gloag and Medd 1956), which were to prove so influential.

The name of David Medd10 appears throughout these post-war years in relation to the use of colour in modern build-

Figure 1 Disposition of colours on Level 2.


ings. In an address given on ‘The application of colour in buildings, with special reference to primary schools in Hert-fordshire’ , he raises several points that had been covered by Ozenfant a decade earlier (Medd 1949). Among them:

• The need for the establishment of a set of national colour standards that would ‘make standard symbolical colour referencing possible, and would end the confusing and overlapping terminology which now exists’.

• He stressed that colour and form were literally insepa-rable. ‘Therefore, the architect must achieve the organic relationship between the two. All surfaces to be painted are subject to certain natural and functional conditions, such as the degree of daylight falling upon these surfaces, their orientation, and most important, the functions for which these surfaces are forming a background.’

• The resulting colour scheme should be able to stand up to rational analysis.

In a talk given by Medd to a joint meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Illuminat-ing Engineering Society on 10 February 1953, he stressed the need to provide visual interest in modern architecture. He indicated that colour was only one of the tools at the architect’s disposal. The device of contrast could also be used to enhance interest:

The contrast of painted surfaces against surfaces of natural materials such as wood, brick and stone. The contrast of smooth textures against rough textures. The contrast of bright colours and dull colours. The contrast of pale colours and dark colours. The contrast of colours and neutrals. The contrast of small-scale pattern against large-scale pattern … There is also the contrast in levels of illumination and qualities of light (Medd 1953).

Needless to say, contrast was also something that Ozenfant had stressed when he said: ‘Contrast is a fundamental law in all art’ (Ozenfant 1937c).11

To modern eyes the juxtaposition of certain of the colours found in the Royal Festival Hall may come as some surprise. The dark red on the east and west walls of the foyer on Level 2 may have been a reflection of the colour traditionally asso-ciated with earlier theatres (Fig. 2). Certainly the employ-ment of red on the padded leather panels and the hangings behind the boxes in the auditorium has strong echoes of the traditional theatre. Another dark red, but of a browner hue, was also found on the timber-clad columns (Fig. 3). However, in the immediate vicinity and level with the base of the stairs, the northern transverse walls were painted in a contrasting pale dull green colour, which at first makes no sense (Fig. 4).

Figure 2 early sequence of coatings on the side walls at the south end (Level 2).


In fact, according to one of the leading colour theorists of the 20th century, these two colours side-by-side illustrate a number of colour contrasts:12

Contrast of hueLight–dark contrastCold–warm contrastComplementary contrastSimultaneous contrast

Contrast of saturation

and their use in the Royal Festival Hall was quite deliber-ate. Furthermore, as well as adding visual interest, the effect of simultaneous contrast was known to enhance ‘colour solidity’ in architecture – something that was considered essential in a building where so much glass was employed (Braham 2002: 17).

Figure 3 Dark red found between the timber cladding of the columns (Level 2).

Figure 4 Pale dull green found on the side walls at the north end and north transverse walls (Level 2).


It is less easy to make a case for the use of dark brown (Fig. 5). It clearly answers the theoretical light–dark contrast when juxtaposed with the pale ceiling of the foyer, but then as now it is not a colour that saw a great deal of use.13 Once again, however, it would have contributed to the effect of solidity and would have balanced the red/green at the front of the foyer. This would have ensured that each of the four corners of the foyer was supported by solid blocks of colour. The use of dark brown on the side walls of the ballroom would have contributed to a feeling of intimacy that would otherwise be impossible with so much open space and glass around it. At the same time, the dark brown on the southern transverse walls would supply a visual stop when looking into the build-ing from the river front.

Derek Patmore, a contemporary writer on design, was another author who stressed the importance of contrast: ‘The architect and interior decorator has a limited number of colours and colour contrasts at his command, and the success of his work depends largely on how he combines and uses these colours. ’ Successful interior decoration depends on how these primary colours are blended together or contrasted. It has been said that ‘the art of contrast is one of the secrets of good decorating … Modern decoration is all in favour of sharp contrasts in colour’ (Patmore 1945: 15).

It might be said that the deep dull blue on the ceiling of the auditorium echoes the sky at night, although perhaps more relevantly it is broadly complementary to the yellow red of the leather panels and the tapestry hangings.

The Archrome range

In 1947, work at the Burleigh Primary School in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire was the first in the county’s post-war school building programme and the first to require colour specifica-tion. The most relevant experience that Oliver Cox and David Medd (Hertfordshire County Council Architects Depart-ment) had then acquired was the series of articles published by Amédée Ozenfant in the Architectural Review. Here, they felt, was an approach to colour design which was related to modern architecture, its form and its lighting. They set about establishing a range of colours for the school building pro-gramme in collaboration initially with R. Gay & Co. and later with Docker Brothers of Birmingham.14

Medd left Hertfordshire County Council for the Ministry of Education in 1949 and Cox joined the London County Council (LCC) in 1950. It was at the LCC that Leslie Martin was shown the range and it was subsequently used by the Architect’s Department on a number of their projects.15 The Royal Festival Hall is believed to be one of these projects that benefited from the work of Oliver Cox and David Medd.

This range of 49 colours, including black and white, came to be known as the Archrome (Munsell) range and the details were published in the Ministry of Education’s Building Bul-letin No. 9 of 1953. Paints based on the range became com-mercially available and it was open to any manufacturer to produce them.

The colours of the Archrome range were arranged in a grid with the hues placed horizontally so that colours of equal value appeared in the same vertical column. Munsell nota-tions were included in order for the reflectance values to be

Figure 5 Dark brown found on the ballroom and south transverse walls (Level 2).


calculated, and for a precise comparison of the relative quali-ties of different colours to be made.16

The ability to adopt a systematic approach to the use of colour was emphasised in Part I of the bulletin, which stated that a successful colour scheme would be designed with three main objectives in mind:

1 It should be a means of expressing the appropriate char-acter of the building, its inhabitants and their activities;

2 It should, together with the lighting, be a means of achieving an environment that will ensure comfortable and efficient vision;

3 It should follow naturally from, and be an expression of, the constructional elements and surfaces in the build-ing.17

The 1955 British Standard range

In 1952 the paint industry, represented by the Paint Industry Colour Range Committee, approached RIBA pointing out the problems that were being created by the increasing tendency for users to order special colours or to specify from the con-tinually widening number of available colour ranges. With advice from the British Colour Council,18 a set of approxi-mately 100 colours was proposed from which it was intended that a range of 50–60 colours should be selected. Studies at the government’s Building Research Station (Garston, Eng-land) had suggested that if colours were laid out in a logical order it would be possible to reduce the number of alterna-tives without leaving too many gaps (Keyte 1956). Previously, existing ranges had not been designed for a particular use, and often presented an arbitrary collection of colours that had been added to for various reasons.19 At this time it was unusual to find colours on existing shade cards arranged in a systematic order, except perhaps for a general grouping in terms of hue. To describe colours accurately, however, further information was required. During the next couple of years the various bodies continued discussing the composition of such a range.

In March 1955 an interim range, based heavily on the Archrome colours, was released for use by all government departments. This Colour Range of Building Paints for Gov-ernment Departments was produced in booklet form on the basis that it would be superseded by a new British Standard colour chart when that was issued. Later in the same year, the Paint Industry Colour Ranges Committee in conjunc-tion with RIBA and various government departments finally agreed on a standard range of 101 colours,20 which incor-porated most of the Archrome range. This was adopted by the British Standards Institute as BS 2660: 1955 Colours for Building and Decorative Paints (Hurst 1963: 411).

The new British Standard was, as described by one of those who worked on it, ‘an architect designed range’ (Keyte 1956: 212). It found immediate favour with a great many architects and designers, and gradually, in an unpremeditated manner, as a colour coordinator of manufactured goods. The poten-tial for rational use of colour was examined in many articles in professional and trade publications at the time, several of which were illustrated with images of the compositions

of the Dutch artist, Piet Mondrian (Gloag and Keyte 1957). Such influence can be seen clearly in the elevations of the Golden Lane Housing Estate, in London, which was built in two phases between 1957 and 1962.21

Conclusions

In summary, the direct influence of Le Corbusier on the use of colour in the Royal Festival Hall cannot be demonstrated. However, it appears that there is an indirect link via his erst-while collaborator, Amédée Ozenfant, and through the work of David Medd and Oliver Cox on the Hertfordshire schools. The use of strong colours plainly served to emphasise the surfaces on which they were applied, as outlined in the very influential Ministry of Education Bulletin No. 9 of 1953:

If all the surfaces in a room are the same colour, the proportions of individual surfaces become insignifi-cant in relation to one another, being distinguished only by the play of light and shade on projections. The effect of introducing a second colour, particularly if it is a strong one, is to emphasise the element or surface to which it is applied and to arrest attention there. The stronger the colour therefore the more important it is to ensure that the element or surface to which it is applied will bear special attention of this kind.22

For at least the first three occasions that redecoration was carried out there seems to have been a conscious decision to maintain the original colour scheme in most areas of the building. However, with the obliteration of the dark brown, green and red in the foyer, and the introduction of a universal green at a later stage, the original concept had been lost. It is difficult to say how much this would have been due to chang-ing fashions or a failure to understand some of the theories that lay behind the earlier use of colour. There seems little doubt that the later use of a brilliant white paint contributed little and certainly maintained the lie that modern buildings were always white.

If anything, our understanding and appreciation of colour theory is less developed than it was in the 1950s and it was initially feared that the reintroduction of the original colours into the Royal Festival Hall would be met by resistance. How-ever, so far the responses have been very positive and it is good to see the building much as it was originally intended.

Notes

1. Patrick Baty, Royal Festival Hall: An Analysis of the Paint in the Auditorium and Foyers, 31 July 2003; Patrick Baty, Royal Festival Hall: A Supplementary Report on the Original Paint Colours used in Different Areas, 20 January 2005.

2. The Architect’s Journal of 10 May 1951 focused entirely on the Royal Festival Hall (see p. 606).

3. Patrick Baty, ‘Golden Lane Estate, London EC1. Original Colours to Hatfield House, Crescent House and Cullum Welch’ , 12 April 2003.

4. Before the introduction of synthetic resins and highly opaque pigments the word ‘enamel’ had a distinct meaning. In the


post-war period, the term generally implied good quality hard-wearing solvent-based paints of varying levels of sheen. Nowa-days, the term is generally taken to imply a superior quality of full gloss finishing paint; see Goodier 1987: 129.

5. The foyer appears to have been decorated eight or nine times. 6. See also the obituary of Edward Hollamby in the Guardian, 24

January 2000. 7. His visit is remembered from his comment on the boxes in the

auditorium: ‘These boxes of yours are a joke, but a good joke.’ 8. Dark brown: Le Corbusier colour 4320J – colour difference

∆E 3.66. Pale grey-green: Le Corbusier colour 32024 – colour difference ∆E 3.32. Colour difference is recorded in terms of the combined difference of lightness and chromaticity and is expressed in ∆E units. This records the degree of colour dif-ference, but not the direction. A difference of less than ∆E .70 usually constitutes a match.

9. Opening lines of Après le Cubisme, Ozenfant and Jeanneret’s manifesto published in December 1918.

10. His papers are held by the Institute of Education. 11. Other articles written by Ozenfant include: ‘Colour and

method’, Architectural Review 81 (February 1937): 89–92; ‘Colour solidity’, Architectural Review 81 (May 1937): 243–6; and ‘Colour pro domo’, Architectural Review 81 (August 1937): 77–80.

12. This list of colour contrast is from six of the seven forms out-lined by Johannes Itten in his The Elements of Color (London: Chapman & Hall, 1970). The only one absent was the ‘con-trast of extension’ (i.e. the relative area of two patches of colour which, with red and green should be approximately 1/2:1/2). Itten had been dead for three years when this work was published – it was a simplification of his major book, The Art of Color, of 1961, and was edited by Faber Birren.

13. ‘Brown as a colour in decoration is probably at its lowest point in esteem … Perhaps it is time that more attention was given to brown, a composite colour and therefore one of great variation’ (Carrington 1954: 111–12).

14. David Medd, ‘1947 – Before Archrome to after 93/101556 – 2002’, MS (August 2002), 1.

15. David Medd, pers. comm., 11 August 2003. 16. The Munsell System of Colour Notation was developed by

Albert H. Munsell in the early 20th century and is generally considered to be the most useful in describing colours. Until the publication of the Ministry of Education’s Building Bul-letin No. 9 of 1953, the system was little known in Britain. The Munsell system arranges the three attributes of colour – hue, value and chroma – into calibrated scales of equal visual steps; see Munsell 1913.

17. Ministry of Education, Building Bulletin No 9. (1953): 4–5. 18. The British Colour Council had issued their Dictionary of

Colours for Interior Decoration in 1949. 19. By the 1948 revision, the earlier British Standard colour range

(BS 381C) had become a miscellaneous selection of colours showing, among others, a number of colours used for traffic signs, London buses, vitreous enamels, the GPO, the Minis-try of Works, the South African Railways Administration, the War Department and the Admiralty; BS 381C: 1948 Colours for Ready Mixed Paints.

20. See comment in Ozenfant 1937b. 21. The original red of Cullum Welch House, the blue of Hat-

field House, and the yellow of Great Arthur House, are very similar to those used in Mondrian’s compositions in red, blue and yellow of the 1920s and 1930s (Patrick Baty, Golden Lane Estate, London EC1. Original Colours to Hatfield House, Cres-cent House and Cullum Welch, 12 April 2003, p. 33).

22. Patrick Baty 2003, cited in note 21, p. 7. As mentioned above, the picking out of certain surfaces with a darker colour was felt

to owe much to examples of Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant (Gloag and Keyte 1957).

References

Braham, W.W. (2002) Modern Color / Modern Architecture. Alder-shot: Ashgate.

Carrington, N. (1954) Colour and Pattern in the Home. London: Batsford.

Chatfield, H.W. (1955) Paint and Varnish Manufacture. London: Charles Griffin.

Forshaw, J.H. and Abercrombie, P. (1943) County of London Plan prepared for the LCC. London: Macmillan.

Frampton, K. (2002) Le Corbusier: Architect of the Twentieth Cen-tury. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Gloag, H.L. and Keyte, M. (1957) ‘Rational aspects of colour- ing in building interiors’, Architects’ Journal (14 March): 399–400.

Gloag, H.L. and Medd, D.L. (1956) ‘Colour in buildings’, RIBA Jour-nal (June): 334.

Goodier, J.H. (1987) Dictionary of Painting and Decorating, 3rd edn. London: Charles Griffin & Company Ltd.

Hurst, A.E. (1963) Painting and Decorating, 8th edn. London: Charles Griffin.

Keyte, M. (1956) ‘The new British Standard colour range of build-ing and decorative paints’, Architects’ Journal (16 February): 212–13.

McKean, J. (2001) Royal Festival Hall. London County Council, Leslie Martin and Peter Moro, 2nd edn. Oxford: Phaidon Press.

Medd, D. (1949) ‘Colour in buildings: a scale for use in schools’, Builder (25 February): 251–2.

Medd, D. (1953) ‘Colour in schools: factors which heighten the effects of visual interest’, Builder (27 February): 349.

Munsell, A.H. (1913) A Color Notation, 3rd edn. Boston, MA: Geo. H. Ellis Co.

Myers, S.P. (1949) ‘London south of the river’, in C. and A. Williams-Ellis (eds), Vision of England. London: Paul Elek.

Ozenfant, A. (1937a) ‘Colour: the English tradition’, Architectural Review 81 (January): 44.

Ozenfant, A. (1937b) ‘Colour: experiments, rules, facts’, Architec-tural Review 81 (April): 196.

Ozenfant, A. (1937c) ‘Colour in the town’, Architectural Review 81 (July): 44.

Patmore, D. (1945) Colour Schemes and Modern Furnishing. London: The Studio.

Ratcliff, F. (1992) Paul Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism, including the first English edition of From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism. New York: Rockefeller University Press.

Rüegg, A. (ed.) (1997) Polychromie architecturale: Le Corbusiers Far-benklaviaturen von 1931 und 1959. Basel: Birkhäuser.

Saunders, A. (1984) The Art and Architecture of London. Oxford: Phaidon Press.

Stamp, G. (2001) ‘The South Bank site’, in E. Harwood and A. Powers (eds), Festival of Britain. Journal of the Twentieth Cen-tury Society, vol. 5.

Walters, P.T. (ed.) (1953) Laxton’s Builders’ Price Book, 126th edn. London: Kelly’s Directories Ltd.

Author’s address

Patrick Baty, Papers and Paints Ltd., 4 Park Walk, London SW10 0AD, UK ([email protected]).

the colourful past of the royal festival hall

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