his children, The Saracen's Head, and the other a further satirical book about architecture and planning, Drayneflete Revealed. In 1947–48 he was the Sydney Jones Lecturer in Art at Liverpool University, following earlier appointees including Sir Herbert Read, W. G. Constable, Frank Lambert and H. S. Goodhart-Rendel. The 1951 Festival of Britain gave Lancaster new opportunities to expand his artistic scope. Despite the hostility to the festival shown by his main employer, Beaverbrook, Lancaster was a major contributor. He and his friend John Piper were commissioned to design the centrepiece of the Festival Gardens on the south bank of the Thames. Boston describes it as "a 250-yard succession of pavilions, arcades, towers, pagodas, terraces, gardens, lakes and fountains, in styles that included Brighton Regency, Gothic and Chinese". The main site of the festival, around the new Royal Festival Hall, was intended to convey the spirit of modernist architecture; the gardens were designed to evoke the atmosphere of Georgian pleasure gardens, such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh. The gardens attracted about eight million visitors during the 1951 festival. The Manchester Guardian called them "a masterpiece... fantasy on fantasy, red and gold and blue and green, a labyrinth of light-hearted absurdity". Lancaster's association with Piper led to a second departure in his professional career: stage design. In connexion with the Festival of Britain, Sadler's Wells Ballet mounted a new work, Pineapple Poll by John Cranko, and approached Piper to design it. He could not take the commission and recommended his colleague. This was an opportunity Lancaster had keenly awaited since he was eleven, when his mother took him to see Diaghilev's production of The Sleeping Beauty. He recalled "the dazzling beauty of the Bakst sets and the intensity of my own response... There and then I formed an ambition that was not destined to be fulfilled for more than thirty years". Cranko's exuberant ballet was an immediate success – "the hit of the season", in Knox's phrase – and turned Lancaster into one of the country's most sought-after theatre designers. During the rest of the 1950s and the 1960s his costumes and scenery were seen in new productions at Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, the Old Vic, Aldeburgh and in the West End. Although he had provided drawings for a few books by other authors in the 1930s it was not until after the war that Lancaster was continually in demand as an illustrator. He