My family home was near Glasgow. In 1956 my mother and I had a wonderful week in London, staying at the Russell Hotel. I had my mother to myself for six whole days, and she rushed me round all the places she remembered from the 1920s when she worked as a doctor's secretary. We walked around the University of London which she could remember being built in the '20s.  We went to a concert at the Festival Hall, still new at the time. It was to me a glorious open space, with boxes which looked like half opened in a drawer in a chest. The Royal Festival Hall is of the fifties but it has a continuing modernity.  Its openness makes it seem somehow democratic, a place for everyone.