With the opening of Conran’s Skylon restaurant at the Royal Festival Hall in 2007, a taster for this year’s sixtieth anniversary of the Festival of Britain, Terence Conran’s career came full circle.
Skylon, the iconic metal sculpture designed by Powell and Moya symbolised the futuristic, sky-high thinking behind the festival, while the event itself gave Conran his first job as a designer. Writing in the recently published celebration of the Festival of Britain, Beacon For Change, Barry Turner notes: ‘Habitat and Heal’s were pure Festival, so too were Ercol and G-Plan’. It’s been said that 1951 was the year that the British home began to leave behind brown paint and porridge wallpaper. Terence Conran would take a leading role within the modernist vanguard that brought about this change. It was a slow train coming. Conran himself has said that Britain has taken more than half a century to embrace modernity. In that time he has amassed the kind of fortune that would enable him to buy the South Bank, maybe London itself.