Two Cities, One Culture
From Swansea to the Southbank in one weekend, Part 2. (First published in Byline Times May 2026 edition)
We began the journey back to London bleary-eyed. No sooner than Ffair Cymru had wrapped we’d piled over the road to the Elysium Bar for a banging night of anti-fascist South Wales punk.
It proved a perfect (if tiring) segue, for we were heading back for You Are Here, Danny Boyle’s blink-and-you-miss-it takeover of The Southbank Centre.
75 years to the day since King George VI officially opened the Festival of Britain, the Royal Festival Hall and environs were handed over to a motley crew, the kind of which strike terror in the hearts of certain high-cultured folk. And just as Danny’s opening of the 2012 Olympics provided our country its last real opportunity to collectively realise we’re not utterly shit (at all), this beautiful May bank holiday Sunday gave us a glimpse of a better story of Britain — one built on both rage and rave.
The distance between now and 1951 was writ large during the opening performance: smog-filled and grey; monochrome inhabitants mournfully dancing. Britain might have won a war but after six years, Jesus, did we need cheering up. A reminder of the Royal Festival Hall’s founding purpose: to be a People’s Palace – a joyful landing in a bombed corner of an utterly changed Britain.
But this was no chronological walk-through. Flyposted tabloid front pages on the corrugated iron maze that led us on, simultaneously featured 80s RIOT! outrage mixed with triumphal Farages from the morning after Brexit.
When we turned a corner to see a stage made from detritus and bin bags, had we walked into 1974, or a near future? The answer of course was both, as a dizzying cavalcade of choreography took us from Windrush to Queer London, via punks, rockers, strikers and new romantics facing-off the police. It was a concertina-d mash-up of cultural resistance and advancement so breathtaking one almost felt sorry for the tentative rat-faced Thatchers when they arrived with MUM-like wreaths for UNIONS and SOCIETY. An outdated generation, simultaneously in power yet irrelevant, their twin-set desperation for The Way It Was, a perfect blend of manners and menace.
A stunning set piece of lifetimes in resistance, and a clarion call for revolutionary continuation. And we hadn’t even entered the Festival Hall.
Inside, all bets were off. A building so familiar from a lifetime of Sunday South Bank strolls and school shows had been transformed. The Clore Ballroom, a club: Northern, House, Garage, Grime – professional dancers mingling with paying public: the lines between performer and punter beautifully blurred. Up a floor Sid Vicious: a reminder of the seismic power of situationism, his My Way mannerisms as jarring some half-century on – while also recalling HOW FAST Britain’s culture changed. From ’51 to ’76, in seconds it seemed.
And the main hall itself. Via back-stage stairs and dressing rooms we emerge, disorientated. Where we are in the hall is unclear. Below us a joyous, pastel-lit dionysian scene: dozens dancing to Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy. Only one-by-one they begin to fall. It’s a punch-in-the-guts, one of the most moving things I’ve seen on a stage. From silent desperate darkness the hall is slowly illuminated by a thousand lights as if we’ve traveled to the heavens. We can see that actually it’s us on stage at the RFH – looking out at 2,700 empty seats. David Bowie and Freddie Mercury start singing, a capella, Under Pressure. People cry.
Can't we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can't we give love that one more chance?
You Are Here was a love letter to collective joy, recognition of how much our modern world has been shaped by outcasts, minorities and resistors. It waded to the very heart of the culture war, choosing not to win an argument, but to simply surrender to the thrill of it all.
For one day only, this most august of institutions was a world turned upside-down. The lunatics claimed and won asylum. All power to Southbank artistic director Mark Ball and team, to Danny Boyle and collaborators, for this was a palace of the people, celebrating creativity as the very lifeblood of generations.
To these Fête of Britain eyes, a ringing endorsement, proof-positive of the vital importance of the arts in enabling us to know ourselves. And peek at how we could all live, if we decided to do it.
From Swansea to the Southbank it’s a story being told in every town: we can, we will and we are making a better way to live, through culture. The teenage band members in Newport’s brilliant Hairdye know it as much as those who kick-off Olympic Games, so too the establishment and fascists to whom we collectively flick the Vs.
For 75 years. For ever and a day.
You can read the original version of this article in print in our regular column in the brilliant Byline Times.
Elsewhere in Absurdity...
Alanna returned to Wales last week to meet with Climate Cymru to hatch some future plans for more fairs in Wales, while many of the team have already departed for Great Yarmouth and the Out There International Arts Festival taking place this weekend, as Tracey, Alex and Miles hang the banners in the Drill House for Good Neighbours on Friday night. Come along if you can make it!
