Lavishly illustrated, the book is an indispensable guide to the 1951 Festival of Britain, its objects and their meanings in the twenty-first century.

The Festival of Britain in 1951 transformed the way people saw their war-ravaged nation. Giving Britons an intimate experience of contemporary design and modern building, it helped them accept a landscape under reconstruction, and brought hope of a better world to come. Drawing on previously unseen sketches and plans, photographs and interviews, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People travels beyond the Festival's spectacular centrepiece at London's South Bank, to show how the Festival made the whole country an exhibition ground with events to which hundreds of the country's greatest architects, artists and designers contributed. It explores exhibitions in Poplar, Battersea and South Kensington in London; Belfast, Glasgow and Wales; a touring show carried on four lorries and another aboard an ex-aircraft carrier. It reveals how all these exhibitions and also plays, poetry, art and films commissioned for the Festival had a single focus: to unite 'the land and people of Britain'.

Family Britain continues David Kynaston's groundbreaking series Tales of a New Jerusalem, telling as never before the story of Britain from VE Day in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. 'The book is a marvel ... the level of detail is precise and fascinating' Sunday Telegraph 'A wonderfully illuminating picture of the way we were' The Times As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive the narrative. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.

As the 2012 Olympics sets about re-making a whole swathe of east London, Barry Turner's book marks the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, which did the same for London's South Bank after the war.

Vic Keegan's Lost London (2) is the second of two books that together have taken over six years of research and are still yielding surprises Vic had no idea that the mundane Highbury and Islington station used to look like an Italian Palazzo before being shamefully pull down, nor that there was an extraordinary cricket match in Walworth between a team from Greenwich with only one leg and the other from Chelsea with only one arm, nor that in 1810, a black bare knuckle fighter was swindled out of being world champion by white subterfuge. There are dozens of similar tales which he hopes you will enjoy. The author spent most of his working life at the Guardian writing among other things a fortnightly economics column for nearly 25 years before finishing off with a weekly column on consumer technology ranging from mobile phones to virtual worlds. He has written six poetry books including London My London with over 80 poems about the capital and the Thames. He is married to Rosie with two children Dan and Chris. David Aaronovitch's review of the first book is here: https: //www.onlondon.co.uk/book-review-vic-keegans-lost-london/

This exhibition explores the intriguing creations of the Festival Pattern Group - a unique project at the 1951 Festival of Britain involving X-ray crystallographers, designers and manufacturers. At the instigation of Dr Helen Megaw, a leading Cambridge scientist, diagrams of atomic structures inspired an eclectic array of patterns on curtains, wallpapers, carpets, lace, dress fabrics, ties, plates and ashtrays.X-ray crystallography was one of the most exciting branches of post-war science, with far-reaching applications in chemistry, physics, biology and mineralogy. By studying X-ray diffraction photographs of crystals, scientists could calculate the arrangement of atoms within molecules. The resulting diagrams provided the inspiration for the Festival Pattern Group. 'From Atoms to Patterns' shows the diagrams next to the designs.