Dome of Discovery

The Dome of Discovery was a temporary exhibition building designed by architect Ralph Tubbs for the Festival of Britain celebrations which took place on London's South Bank in 1951, alongside the River Thames. The consulting engineers were Freeman Fox & Partners, in particular Oleg Kerensky (later Dr. Oleg) and Gilbert Roberts (later Sir Gilbert).

Like the adjacent Skylon, the dome became an iconic structure for the public and helped popularise modern design and architectural style in a Britain still suffering through post-war austerity. As twin icons, the forms of the Skylon and Dome of Discovery were related to those of the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Controversially, after the Festival closed, the dome was demolished and its materials sold as scrap. The site was cleared for reuse, and is now the location of the Jubilee Gardens, near the London Eye.

The dome had a diameter of 365 feet and stood 93 feet tall, making it at the time the largest dome in the world. It had a long escalator as its dramatic entrance, with the dome itself made out of aluminum. Construction was contracted to Horseley Ironworks of Tipton, with fabrication partly sub-contracted to Structural and Mechanical Development Engineers Ltd of Slough. It was erected by Horseley on a site designed and prepared by Costain Group from concrete and aluminium in a modernist style and housed many of the festival attractions. Internally the dome included a number of galleries on various levels housing exhibitions on the theme of discovery—the Living World, Polar, the Sea, the Earth, the Physical World, the Land, Sky and Outer Space.

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