Turner dutifully records many other worthy manifestations of the festival across the nation, from the staging of now long-forgotten plays to exhibitions of rural crafts. But, as his title suggests, his real concern is to show how the festival provided Britain with its first glimpse of the modern age that was to come — and here perhaps he rather obscures the full picture.

He is right to point out that some of Barry's team, including Ralph Tubbs, designer of the Dome of Discovery, and Wells Coates, whose Telekinema gave thousands their first sight of television, had been among the young architects who set up the MARS group in the 1930s, to evangelise for the revolutionary ideas of Gropius and Le Corbusier. And he is right that several of those South Bank architects would play a significant part in the transformation of Britain's cities as the visions of modern architecture swept all before them in the 1960s. 

Like others before him, however, Turner is keener to mention some of the more lauded contributions made by those festival architects to our later townscapes than the part they played in the dehumanised mass architecture which was to come. Basil Spence was not just to design Coventry Cathedral but also some notoriously brutalist blocks of council flats in Glasgow's Gorbals. The Festival Hall, not strictly part of the festival but adopted by it, was designed by an LCC architect, Robert Matthew, who was also to build soulless tower blocks in Glasgow. Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, creators of the Skylon, were already building a modernistic council estate in Pimlico. One of the real legacies of the dreams which inspired the MARS group and the "People's Architecture" of the festival was that deluded utopianism which in years to come was to wreak such social and aesthetic havoc in our cities.

Despite his claim that the festival was "one of the great cultural events of the past century", the author cannot hide the fact that it was a rather forlorn affair; certainly not a patch on the 1851 Great Exhibition which inspired it and which, apart from the Crystal Palace, left such a splendid legacy in Prince Albert's South Kensington museums and the Albert Hall itself. The only surviving relics of 1951 are the Festival Hall, never planned as part of the festival, and the National Theatre, for which a foundation stone was laid in 1951 although Denys Lasdun's neo-brutalist building would not arise, on a different site, for nearly three decades. Apart from three river piers, the only other feature to outlive the festival was Battersea funfair, finally closed in 1974 after a fatal accident on its most popular attraction, the Big Dipper.

In terms of popular involvement, the Coronation two years later was a much more genuinely national celebration and, ironically, despite the archaic ceremony at its centre, the fact that it was watched by well over half the nation on little black-and-white television screens, most seeing TV for the first time in their lives, made it as much a "beacon of change" as anything symbolised by the Skylon and the Dome of Discovery. (The only legacy of Tubbs's creation was the much vaster Millennium Dome it inspired in 2000, which gave visitors a feeling of bemused let-down similar to that aroused by its original half a century before.) 

 The real change in British life was that which began half a decade after the festival: that explosion around 1956 of rock ‘n' roll, "angry young men" and youth culture in general which heralded the arrival of the ‘affluent society' in the late 1950s. By the time Britain was seriously to enter the modern age in which we have lived ever since, the Festival of Britain had come to look like no more than a faint, false dawn of the revolution that was to come.