Festival Inn, Poplar

The first pub to be built in Britain after WWII and a prototype for many which followed as post-war reconstruction gathered pace; the 1950s interior of The Festival Inn remains significantly intact, making this an important and rare example of pub design in this period.

The Festival Inn was built between 1950 and 1951 as part of Chrisp Street Market, designed in 1949 by the architect and town planner Frederick Gibberd as a new commercial centre for the Lansbury Estate following extensive wartime damage. The shopping precinct and market formed the centrepiece of the ‘Live Architecture Exhibition’, showcasing a real part of London under renewal to demonstrate modern approaches to architecture and planning as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Gibberd handled the design of the pub's exterior as part of the wider precinct design, but the interior was left to R W Stoddart, who had become Truman’s in-house architect following the death of A E Sewell in 1946. Pub construction following WWII was severely limited by national building restrictions, only lifted in 1954. The Festival Inn was the first permanent pub built after the war and it is instantly distinguishable from its 1930s predecessors. Shorn of the historicist styles of inter-war pub design, it represents the economical and informal manner of the Festival of Britain, characteristically built with stock brick, quartzite tiles, metal-framed windows and a projecting flat-roofed saloon bar.

Internally, much of Stoddart’s original scheme remains. His aim was to create a convivial and contemporary pub interior in the spirit of the Festival, belonging to no particular ‘period’ in style. The saloon bar, public bar and off-sales arrangement would have been familiar enough to pre-war pubgoers, though the irregular footprint required a back-to-back servery to be sandwiched between a narrow saloon bar and a wedge-shaped public bar. The eastern public bar has a long servery set beneath a section of lowered ceiling with integrated downlights and a domed roof light towards the end of the bar counter. At the far north end of the room are the toilets with their original banded panel doors, and - set between them - a panelled recess for darts (an original feature of the pub as planned). The fielded panelling fitted to dado height is original throughout, as is the counter here, which retains its grooved timber front and bar-back shelving. The decorative radiator grilles are also original, this principal source of heating is supplemented by a brick fireplace to the east wall (since boarded over). Above the fireplace is a 1951 Festival of Britain mirror, this having been transferred over from an original fireplace in the saloon bar. The central servery has a small off-sales department to its south end, remarkably this retains its counter, bar-back and glazed display case to one side of the door (though this is covered over externally).

The western saloon bar occupies the single-storey block. This originally comprised two separate areas (both named ‘saloon bar’ on Stoddart’s plans), which were divided by the central chimneystack that has been partially removed. The saloon is now a single large room, but part of the stack structure remains to mark the former division. Decoratively, the saloon bar is only slightly smarter than the public bar, a subtle distinction which presages the growing consistency of pub fittings and the narrowing of social divides in the post-war era. The oak panelling in the saloon is carried up to frieze (rather than dado) height and the panelling has vertical channels, matching that used only for the counter-front of the public bar. A section of this panelling which originally marked the divide between the two saloon rooms has been reworked to form part of the continuous bar in the amalgamated room. To either side, the two saloon bar counters have fronts oak panels of contrasting shades, set to create a chequer pattern. Along the west wall is a row of structural columns, enclosed by fixed bench seating beneath the continuous band of metal-framed windows to Kerbey Street.