| Chapter : | Introduction |
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adequate transport and infrastructure, being housed by the state soon came to be seen as a sentence from which it was hard to escape. There were exceptions of course, but the prevailing vision of postwar state-sponsored building in the UK is of looming tower blocks and empty communal spaces lifted from the drawing board and imposed upon a populace wholly unprepared for them.
Feelings of dissatisfaction with the material fabric of postwar Britain were also linked to a growing sense that the nation was failing to live up to its potential. In the eyes of some observers these impersonal housing estates were themselves emblematic of a culture that had lost the sense of common resolve and purpose that had held the country together in wartime. It seems that the British people, once so heroic, found that when it came time to build the postwar world their energies had already been spent. As welcome as the state’s benevolent intervention in their lives was, there was also an innate if seldom openly voiced desire to return to normal as soon as possible, to revert to the domestic insularity that some of the more radical wartime observers had often celebrated as a thing of the past. This was arguably not a lack of enthusiasm for change so much as a genuine desire for a degree of calm and stability after years of turmoil, but in the eyes of people like J. B. Priestley it soon became apparent that the reforming zeal of 1940, which had found its expression in the election of 1945, was already ebbing as Labour’s reforms came into effect. By 1951 a Conservative government was back in power, and the vision of a state-centred future was being modulated into one of a more individual consumer society, with the state a last resort but by no means the fully engaged organising principle. As the consumer boom of the 1950s gathered momentum, it seemed that the social reform agenda of the war years had been itself supplanted by a more traditional belief in individual and familial well-being, briefly made possible by an illusory level of economic growth.
The 1951 Festival of Britain was planned and coordinated by a Labour government, and in its efforts to simultaneously celebrate the nation’s past