In these edited extracts Hugh Casson (1910-1999) remembers the South Bank site before work on the Festival began:

"[The Festival of Britain was] a device, really, for getting the South Bank done. Herbert Morrison, a tremendously keen South Londoner, had said 'Nobody goes to the South Bank, they try not to go to the South Bank, it's because it's nothing but mud and rotting wharves, and rubble, and industry, and warehouses, misery and poverty, and railway lines. And we must clear it up.' This was about October, and we were rather excited about this. And we went down, and it was, in fact, a very romantic place. There was no embankment wall. There was one tree, which is still there, near the Festival Hall now. It was bisected by a railway line, and, under the arches, were people bashing out mudguards and selling disused motor bikes and that sort of thing. And the railway divided the site almost exactly in half. "

"Downstream from the railway, was the Shot Tower, which had been there for about 150 years, I suppose. And that was working. It was one of the few things on the site which actually was operating. And the Shot Tower is an extraordinary device. It's a factory chimney, with a staircase inside it, and you take hot lead up to the top, and you drop it down, in drops, and the drops don't make tears as you'd expect, to get thicker as they go, they're absolutely perfect globes, and they're tiny, they're absolutely wee, like the shot you get inside a cartridge. And there were two old men, one at the bottom and one at the top. The one at the top was the one with the hot lead, and he dropped it down into a cold bucket at the bottom, and it cooled it off at once, and then it was taken away and sold. And these two old boys were rather like two old fishermen in a boat, they'd been there for years. And they didn't speak, most of the time they were separated by 150 feet of shaft. Later on, I remember, a girl came to us and said she was a poet, and could she come and sit at the foot of the Shot Tower, she thought it might be inspiring. I remember I gave her an admission card to do this, but she never sent me any poem, and I never heard what had happened."

"I took over [design of] the Shot Tower, which was my favourite building on the whole site. And we put [on] the Shot Tower, we put an anti-aircraft gun mounting, and a great dish to send messages to the moon, which was regarded as frightfully advanced in those days. And the Army provided the anti--aircraft gun, and hauled it up the chimney and the rope broke and it dropped to the bottom of the shaft, which was about 150 feet I suppose. And the whole Shot Tower jumped off the foundations. It dropped again, just about half an inch out of where it had been - one solid cigarette. Thank God!"