Photograph of the Dome of Discovery, Festival of Britain, 1951

SRO D5115
©Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Archive Service

The Dome of Discovery was built for the 1951 Festival of Britain on London's South Bank. It was designed, manufactured and erected by the Staffordshire engineering firm of Horseley Bridge & Thomas Piggott of Tipton, now in the West Midlands. At its base was a giant steel ring girder made from 24 pieces welded together, with a diameter of 342 feet, supported on steel tubular struts, total diameter 365 feet. The structure was built up in smaller and smaller intersecting circles supported on triangles of aluminium ribs. The final height was nearly 100 feet.
In the days before computers, all the calculations had to be worked out using 7-figure logarithms, using the theory of spherical trigonometry, to the utmost accuracy.
Staffordshire Record Office holds the original blue-prints of the design, and a number of photographs showing the progress of the building work, as well as other constructions by the company including bridges and power stations, both in Britain and abroad.