The Ministry of Nostalgia

by Owen Hatherley

Why should we have to “Keep Calm and Carry On”?

In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a “make do and mend” aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition.

The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth.

In coruscating prose—with subjects ranging from Ken Loach’s documentaries, Turner Prize–shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver’s cooking—Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Sociology, Architecture, Cultural, London

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 19, 2016

About the author

Writer and editor

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, good. I cannot begin to explain how much I hate the 'keep calm and carry on' revival and its rather transparent ideological purpose.

The book 'The Ministry of Nostalgia' (2016) explores in appropriate detail and with an appropriate amount of contempt how the ongoing 'austerity nostalgia' and its various aesthetic manifestations (eg the ubiquitous 'keep calm and carry on' design) is trying to normalize the brutality of neoliberalism. Conveniently enough, this imaginary 'austerity' erases even the slightest hint of social democracy despite the fact that the original 'austerity' design (think public transport posters) and architecture (think the subway or public housing) makes no sense outside the period's specific, public sector dominated political economy.

The 'keep calm and carry on' poster which was created by the Ministry of Information in 1939 intended to stiffen resolve in the event of a nazi invasion has become a 'middlebrow staple' when recession hit in 2008.

The message is clear: tighten your belts and muddle through, nothing that could be done. The grotesque apolitical and butally, ignorantly Victorian essence of neoliberalism.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Owen Hatherley has written so much about Britain's housing problems that, after Paul Dacre, he's probably got the most to lose if they were solved. This latest instalment takes issue with "austerity nostalgia" which apparently pervades the age of the Lib/Con coalition (RIP) and exhibits itself in the popularity of such artefacts as "Downton Abbey" and "Call The Midwife", which are quite easy to avoid as I've never watched them.

Now of course Hatherley is a jolly good sort, and no sensible person wants to see welfare taken over by profiteers or useless dabblers like that absolute crasher Toby Young. We all want to see the children of the proletarian classes growing up in a carousel of vast crystalline communal dormitories revolving above the skyline, decorated within with murals depicting the details of their future alienation. That's just mainstream common sense. However there are a few details of his presentation that I find displeasing.

First of all, he is quite slack in defining the "austerity" age harked back to. There was a post-WW1 phase of austerity under the Tories in the early 20s, which imposed the huge cuts of the Geddes Axe (and caused the consequent slump as well), but he never alludes to that. He does however fold in much of the 1930s to the age of austerity, which is simply unhistorical. Beyond the crisis budget-balancing of the 1931 emergency, the 30s saw an expansion of spending, due to the rearmament programmes (pushed forward due to the misconception that Hitler was already far ahead of us). That's how the country would have gone bust without Lend-Lease in 1941, if the spending trajectory had continued. It was also, as A.J.P.Taylor stressed in "English History 1914-45", a time when quite a lot of the country was doing well, with new industries growing. Incidentally, the use of "England" to mean "Britain" was quite normal in that period, though modern commenters like Hatherley give it an anachronistic specificity.

Including the Depression years enables him to include a lot of interesting detail about developments in London, and the failed attempt of the Empire Marketing Board. He connects that up with the later (also failed) project of "social imperialism" under the Attlee government, but curiously misses the wider context. "Imperial Preference vs. Free Trade" was a battle raging in British politics long before Labour was a Westminster party, the great advocate of the former was Joseph Chamberlain, who only gets a mention in an extract from Robert Skidelsky on pg.155. Yet that was the issue that split both Liberal and Conservative parties at different times, it was the cause of Stanley Baldwin calling another election in 1924 and getting the first ever Labour government as a result. Read John Buchan's 1930 time-travel fantasy "The Gap In The Curtain" for the flavour of that economic debate, and the advocacy of settling unemployed Englishmen in the colonies as a solution for domestic problems. Buchan's story also features a satire on young Oswald Mosley, a figure curiously absent from Hatherley's unsentimental corrective to present day nostalgia. Another absent voice is Rex Warner and his 1941 novel "The Aerodrome", which did have a huge impact on a generation of intellectuals, including both Anthony Burgess and E.P.Thompson, cited here but not connected. Warner's fable was of disillusion with the technocratic future of the fascist Air Marshal, and calls for a return to a simpler model. That kind of ground has now been ceded to John Gray, Roger Scruton and various other shades on the conservative spectrum, yet it was a reaction plenty of the 30s left took as seriously as Orwell's satires.

Hatherley sometimes seems to talk as if the austerity age has only just been discovered through those 2 series he mentioned. It might look that way to the generation raised on the internet, for whom Thatcher is as remote as Churchill and who have never known a time when there were only 3 channels on the TV. But the British have never stopped talking about the War and its aftermath, and they've always been arguing disrespectfully about who got on and who ducked out. "Room At The Top" had a thread of anger at the posh boys getting favoured whilst the working class boys were passed over, in war and peace. We had endless dramas about the battle front and the home front, we had "Shine On Harvey Moon", "How We Used To Live", Dennis Potter plays (including "Stand Up Nigel Barton", with a clip of Nye Bevan in it). David Hare's key 80s works such as "Plenty" and "Wetherby", and Ian McEwan's "The Ploughman's Lunch", are fascinating documents for the unfolding debate about what the post-War world could and should have been. We had the Penguin anthology "The Age Of Austerity", which contains the Michael Frayn essay he alludes to. Plenty of Thatcherite theorists such as Ferdinand Mount were happy to stick in with their own interpretations. You can find their opinions in old copies of the Telegraph and Spectator, if you're really interested. And then there's the declinist school of Correlli Barnett, also unmentioned. It would be hard to accommodate it anyway, given its anti-Imperial outlook. No mention of the British Space Programme, which was doing so well in "Quatermass And The Pit", but was killed off by... Tony Benn.

In conclusion: yes, it's terrible some people get their entire idea of 20th century social history from bad costume drama and novelty tea-towels. It's not much of an improvement to rely on Guardian comment articles either. I get a sense that, at least in the later stages of this book, Hatherley is marking out the battle-lines to defend the new Corbynite direction for Labour, taking on the Tory myth-mongers with their own-brand myths. And so the cycle of life continues. Yeah, the 2012 Olympic ceremony featured a lot of questionable things, but it did upset at least 1 Tory MP, so that's a point in its favour.

[Alex Sarll]

Owen Hatherley is by no means the first person driven to muted, teeth-grinding rage by ubiquitous 'Keep Calm and Carry On' tat, but he may be the first to think about it in quite this depth. He notes - quite correctly - the degree to which it's complicit with the lies we're fed about the current, ideologically-motivated era of austerity and being "all in this together"; there is no equivalence between the thrift obliged by wartime and the current regime's choice to run down the nation's greatest assets, and the middle classes should know better than to play along as if there were. It's not just that poster, of course, but a whole complex of "Gill sans, muted colours, Blitz spirit, crown logos, wartime cooking, duplicate ration cards". The apparatus of scarcity re-enactment, in other words - a distasteful spot of cosplay for the reasonably well-heeled while the poorest once again freeze and starve. Particular ire is reserved for the way in which classic council houses, having been rehabilitated as part of this modernist nostalgia (in which Hatherley admits himself at least a little to blame), become lucrative enough to be flogged off to investors and developers - "an architecture voided of its original content - at the very moment when it is most needed".

Hatherley has dug out all manner of interesting material here. Some of it was totally new to me - such as the GPO Film Unit's less fondly-remembered predecessor, the Empire Marketing Board. And while I knew the story about the original 'Keep Calm' poster not being used, I wasn't aware that its sister posters which did appear at the time were widely considered to be annoying failures. He's especially good on architecture, which was after all his initial field - lots of people might note the "pagan uplighters" found in a certain generation of Tube station, but who else could hit on the apt description of the Imperial War Museum's current internal styling as "a Bravo Two Zero version of a PFI hospital"?

There are, alas, certain serious flaws - peculiar misinterpretations and occasional outright errors. Hatherley refers at one point to the Tesco Value brand as though it were current, rather than retired nearly four years ago; far more than not knowing the price of milk, this suggests to me (perhaps unfairly) that an author no longer shops where the little people shop. He is perceptive in noting the differences in style between urban regeneration projects initiated under New Labour and under the Tories, but then says that London is no longer being remodelled as Dubai-on-Thames, which seems to ignore (heavens know how) the increasing profusion of increasingly tall, silly and vulgar skyscrapers. He says that in our nostalgia for a presumed British golden age, we tend to brush the inconvenient truth of Empire under the rug - really? So what's with all those pith helmets and general explorer chic the steampunks sport? Indeed, there's no mention of the steampunk scene here at all, perhaps because its reference points generally run a little earlier than the period on which Hatherley's fixed. This may seem an odd objection, but he's happy to include the hauntology movement as a sort of shadow of mainstream modernist nostalgia. He observes that, just like the Keep Calm plague, this very much consists in a carefully selected and curated understanding of history, which is true as far as it goes - but surely you could say the same of every culture defined by an eye on particular aspects of its past, which is to say, every culture?

These quibbles notwithstanding, and even if there are times when this feels less like a book and more like a series of magazine articles, this is mostly very good stuff. True, within my own urban/left-leaning echo chamber it's largely good stuff we all know, and I'm not sure Hatherley is necessarily the man to win around the rest of our misled nation - but you can hardly fault him for trying.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars!

“What Orwell hadn’t realised was that surveillance society would be accompanied by ironic jokes, not shrill exhortations."

Hatherley is just such a damn good writer. Whether destroying the myth of the classless Blitz spirit in a refreshing way, just like Selina Todd. Or getting torn into “Legislated Nostalgia” in its many forms, he is a delight to read from start to finish.

His eloquent rant on the KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON gimmick was great to read. Which contrary to perceived wisdom, the poster was never actually mass-produced until 2008. Where it has since been adopted, abused and manipulated to tout all sorts of commercial crap and lies. Jamie “Essex Multi-millionaire chef” Oliver also comes in for a bit of a hard time, with his well-meaning, but ultimately doomed, Ministry of Food franchise. Elsewhere he makes some good points about ridiculous shows like “Call The Midwife” and “Downton Abbey” “where we are asked to admire a strong, struggling but basically deferent working class that knows its place.” One which would never dream of speaking up or against their betters.

He goes into the histories of the Empire Marketing Board and Mass Observation and propaganda videos like “Industrial Britain”, “Sons of Ceylon”, the latter which apparently contains the quote, “the Sinhalese have a saying to work for hire is a great shame, and there are very few here that will work so.” as the British Empire tries desperately to justify slavery and colonisation. Elsewhere he talks at length about Ken Loach’s 2013 documentary “The Spirit of 45” as well as many other takes on the genre.

“When it comes to treating the past as a weapon, the Conservative Party are, and always have been, the experts.”

Hatherley focuses strongly on the likes of George Orwell, Tony Benn and Aneurin Bevan, collectively these men and others like them came out with some truly incredibly far-sighted observations and insights into what was going on and what would happen decades off in the future.

We also get some many more fascinating forays into architecture, politics and social history. The research is great and I learned a lot and this really is “a brilliant polemical rampage” as it says in the description. A cracking read from one of the most interesting social commentators in the UK today.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A polemic to define the genre. However, sometimes I like polemics. Not so much this one. There are far more adverbs and adjectives than verbs and nouns combined - on and on with florid phrasing, as those there were a cleverness contest. Admittedly, I know little about British political history in the last half of the 20th Century - but I am interested. The author provides little of substance to enlighten the reader, except as to the author's unsurpassable insight. With heavy emphasis on architecture, the author throws about tag lines referencing particular buildings and developments without context. In other words, the book should have been much shorter, or much longer. Either way would have satisfied me. If you reach the end, however, you will be rewarded - the material on the Imperial War Museum and Festival Hall was quite good. Too little, too late.

[Rob M · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit of a hot mess. Absolutely bursting with information, it has a tendency to crowd out its own central narrative.

The basic premise is that "austerity nostalgia" has appropriated the tropes of post-war British social democracy to legitimise a much more sinister, creeping social decay. The patrician language of keeping calm and carrying on, already deemed insufferably patronising during its original outing in the London Blitz, has been revived to try and reconcile us an entirely avoidable and self inflicted crisis.

However, this thesis soon bursts its banks as Hatherley rushes the reader through an eclectic tour British modernism and its distorted afterlives. Some sections, like his exploration of Herbert Morrison's under appreciated role as the ideologue of post-war Britain, find fuller expression in later books like Red Metropolis. There are many other elements of this text which would work better given their own proper narrative space ,and this long form piece may well have worked better as a collection of more narrowly delineated essays.

There are, however, plenty of highlights to pick from within this crowded text. Hatherley's insightful critique of Ken Loach-esque left nostalgia is a useful reminder that it is not only the political right who have their mythologies and comfortable illusions. His critical appraisal of George Orwell's contribution to "progressive patriotism" is almost underplayed, and it feels like Hatherley has plenty of serious words still to write on this. The set piece on the Imperial War Museum and the nearby constellation of war memorials is absolutely fantastic and again leaves much left to be explored.

The Ministry of Nostalgia therefore leaves us with a sense of being offered too much, but also too little. This is not such a bad thing as I have made out, as the curious mind will doubtless find in the book many doors begging to be opened, and no will doubt be spurred on to keep reading.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I forget why I put this on my amazon wishlist, I must have read an article version of one of the chapters by the author somewhere or something like that. my mother bought it for me. it's basically a "brief polemic" against the "austerity nostalgia" in contemporary, particularly conservative, british politics. so using things like "keep calm and carry on" to try to sell the public on present day austerity by calling up the austerity of wwII and after. of course, after wwII was actually the period when the welfare state made its best headway, the NHS was created, etc. so it's being co-opted by the neoliberal elite money grab.

reading this was an interesting experience. it went pretty quickly, for political nonfiction. I felt like a lot of it was a little above my paygrade - I'm not very versed on postwar british politics and politicians, I'm not very versed on architecture (the author comes from an architectural criticism background), and yet I understood the bulk of it quite easily. it was an interesting analysis, and I'll definitely never look at the "keep calm and carry on" signs again, particularly considering how often they're used in the US, at a further remove from their actual meaning and purpose.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Hatherley’s Angry Walks In British Cities books, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain. In ‘The Ministry of Nostalgia’ he takes on a somewhat less concrete theme (pun intended). Although architecture and the built environment are frequently mentioned, Hatherley is examining the peculiar faux-nostalgia associated with the right wing austerity agenda, neatly exemplified by that ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’ poster. He examines the roots of this supposed nostalgia and argues that it is based on a complete misreading of the period it means to celebrate. Moreover, it valorises an aesthetic while ignoring all its historical associations, not least the British Empire - something that Britain seems all too eager to forget about these days.

Although the structure of the book is a little arbitrary, Hatherley’s articulate and refreshingly angry writing style keeps the whole thing together admirably. His thesis is neatly summarised as follows:

'Austerity Britain', the period roughly from the 1940s until around 1955, when rationing was finally lifted by a Conservative government, is the direct opposite of ‘Austerity Britain’ Mark Two, the period from 2009/10 until the present when a financial crisis caused by property speculation and ‘derivatives’ culminated in massive state bailouts of the largest banks, followed by an assault on what remained of the public sphere after thirty years of neoliberalism. But this most recent austerity has nonetheless been overlaid with the imagery of that earlier era. At times this has been so pervasive that it felt as if parts of the country began to resemble a strange, dreamlike reconstruction of the 1940s and 1950s, reassembled in the wrong order.

In short, it was no golden age and everything that is being celebrated about the period was public sector-led and therefore antithetical to neoliberal doctrine. To support this thesis, Hatherley ranges through tube station design, hauntological music, patriotic documentaries, the Empire Marketing Board, George Orwell’s political beliefs, London housing policy, and Bevan’s nuclear aspirations, amongst other intriguing topics. From this cornucopia emerges a trenchant critique of the misleading, asinine nostalgic mask applied to the vicious cruelty of austerity. There is a good deal of irony to be found in all this, which Hatherley is very much aware of. I was especially struck by his comparison of London flats designed and planned in the New Labour years with those of the austerity era. Today’s high density vernacular is described thus:

So what emerges particularly clearly from all of this is that austerity - in terms here of developers and investors wanting safety and predictability - has pushed much of the very fabric of London towards an austerity-nostalgic aesthetic. Whereas in very recent memory London seemed to want to look like Dubai-on-Thames, it now increasingly resembles a cross between Islington in the 1820s and Poplar in the 1950s, two moments of austerity and rectitude. [...] Boris Johnson hasn’t the power and certainly hasn’t the will to build thousands of new council flats in London, but what he and his administration have managed to do is help developers build thousands of luxury flats which look like council flats, and can appear to be ‘in keeping’ with them.

I’ve also noticed such staid brick façades springing up anew in Cambridge and mentally labelled them ‘Minecraft Houses’. The absolutely maddening conclusion is of course:

In Britain today we are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same as we’re alternately fetishising and privatising its remnants. From substandard speculative housing development to runaway inflation of mortgages and rents, from resurrected Rachmanism to houses in garden sheds and garages, from empty flats in the north to neo-Victorian overcrowding in the south, from a forced exodus due to to unemployment in one city to a forced exodus due to house prices and rents in another, we face a massive problem for which, once, the solution was the building of well-designed, well-considered, well-planned modernist buildings, often erected on the ashes of shoddily-designed, unplanned, badly made, profit driven housing of the past. Instead, what is actually happening is that we’re transforming the surviving fragments of that solution into one of the main contributors to the problem, as social housing becomes the new front of gentrification, and the architect-designed modernist flat the new loft conversion.

Hatherley’s summary of the madness behind the housing crisis is both succinct and forceful; I approve. His analysis of how nostalgic design elements play into that crisis and the wider politics of austerity is original, eclectic, and fascinating. Inevitably there is little said about solutions, both because it isn’t that sort of book and because the most obvious one is a total political revolution. Perhaps we could become nostalgic for the 1840s instead, a time when strikes and riots swept the country and the government sent in the army out of fear of revolution. Not that I’m eager for a return to the urban architecture of Victorian times, but frankly I do not feel in a position to be picky about what my accommodation looks like.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Refreshingly for a book published in 2016, almost not a single argument in this has dated, which is both a testament to the strength of the arguments enclosed and just how fucking dismal, miserable & shitty this country still is. Britain, culturally, is like an alheizmers victim, obssesibly stuck in the past, lingering on a few choice images and notions divorced of context, repetitive in its fixations and intolerant to any argument outside of this fantasy world. Still the endless fucking Churchill haigiographies. Still the endless Dads Army esque bathing in war time films. Still the pathetic mastubatory frenzy over statues and their preservation. Still, a defeated and demoralised left desperately trying to piece together the fragments of a national identity by whatever pieces they find lying around (the decayed and rotting cirpses of Gerrard Winstanley and the reverend John Ball hopelessly paraded around as if they were our substitute for Robespierre or Toussaint Loutreque, Tolpuddle, Chartism, Tom Paine, the 'blitz spirit', Blake's Jerusalem - anything to avoid confronting actual class organisation, all hideously wrapped up in intellectually castrating Christian socialost ethic vegeterian Kantian prattle, all enmixed with an aristocratic, Wordsworthian pastoral fantasy of a largely rural, pre or near industrial britain). Britain, the only country in Europe not to have a proper bourgeois revolution yet the most obssesed with pretending it did (from either political isle).

Perhaps as a counter I would argue that nostalgia for a post war, social democrat(ish) establishment is, at least for me, less a desire for tinned spam and flap cap wearing but more hauntology in a Mark Fisher sense, a longing for a crushed modernity, a mourning for a futurism which has now become perversely retro. Certainly, the breathtaking brilliance of these chapters is the depressing realisation that the working class back then was probably infinitely less deferential and far more radical than today, contemptuous of the elites during the Blitz, fucked off by how ill treated they were, nauseated by parading the king as a substitute for proper housing, deeply internationalist and worldly in their outlook, capable of both appreciating and absorbing at a cultural level the modernist or near-modernist pioneering artistic achievements all around them, from housing to television. Britain should have had a revolution in 1940. It should, and couldve based on some of the attitudes of the time, overthrown everything. Instead it got Atlee, and the muddled compromise of '45. But indeed, one of the best bits of the book, an extraordinary tour de force of social design archaeology, is pointing out that the weird nostalgia bathed in post war architecture and housing came from some of the most avant garde and radical of Britain's artistic elite, heavily influenced by foreign immigrants, and at times frequently exploring the cutting edge of modernist, socialist planning.

Of course, mixed with this is the uncomfortable and mixed legacy of how much of this was mixed up with the empire, but weirdly Hatherly almost seems on the fence at this point. Its difficult to discerne *what* his point is at some times, simultaneously gushing over the architectural achievements of the largely empire based inter war departments and their programmes, then, almost as an afterthought, going 'oh but yes they werent very nice to brown people though lets not forget'. Pethaps the takeaway is while pointing out the oppressive and exploitative nature of the imperial institutes many of the designers and architects were working in, the odd fact is that many of these benevolent 'social imperalist' Modernists unintentionally created something far more radical and far more indetted to continental leftist avart garde movements (the man resonsible for the beautiful London Underground pop art aesetics went to Moscow to help with the Underpass, and many in the early British documentary movement overtly took inspiration from Soviet constructivist experimental cinema) that ever Britain's fusty, romantic obssesed Conservative 'heritage' industry that our current cousin fucking blood blood poisioned twat with a crown (aka our new King) is fond of. Highgrove fascism is the vogue, ignoring our actual cultural heritage, one which now ironically means becoming quite backwards looking.

And at this point the argument is abit muddled, and indeed the whole book feels abit like a huge, brilliant detailed essay that had some flimsy chapters bolted onto it to justify turning it into a book. Hatherlys strength is v.obviously architecture, which he knows *shit tons* of, to a level can be abit overwhelmingly tedious at times. Nevertheless, his chapter on Orwell and Nye Bevin are brilliant, chp.3 alone justifies the book.

Nostalgia to me is a fascinating phenomena, considered an ailment in Elizabethean times.
It would be utterly remiss of me not to admit that I'm not immune to this tendency, I think all British people do feel some longing for *something* left or right. Its like a national disease, to an extent I can't imagine being replicated exactly in the continously violent, class struggle ridden and deeply politically contentious counties like Italy or France (quite obviously, some countries like Germany and Spain can't afford to be nostalgic for the past for, well, obvious reasons). Certainly I struggle to watch old miner's banners and tuba bands marching in an old northern industrial tone without seriously tearing up at a type of way of life now obliterated, and the sense of aching nostalgia that ostensibly lefty people like Dennis Potter or Terrance Davies managed to communicate in their films and programmes shows how widespread this culture of almost delayed grief is. Potter certainly, a hard and fast Labourite who christened the tumour that was killing him 'Rupie' after Rupert Murdoch, managed to weaponise pre and war time songs in The Singing Detective to a truly lethal affect, injecting doses of pure, melancholy longing for a kind of sweeter past into an experimental, non linear, metatextual, dazzlingly original and breathtakingly bold narrative structure and in the process managed to create something quite astonishingly singular in the history of cultural nostalgia; a piece of art both radical and traditional.

That kind of nostalgia seems near impossible to replicate, or indeed to translate politically. As much as we like, the left will have to let go of '45 eventually. We cling to it because its the only real, tangible, practice example of our politics working. We cling to it because its effects were so obviously *fucking* beneficial, and recieved such relentless evisceration from the right, that it would seem almost obscene not to defend, even idolise it. But ultimately its a dead end. It aims to consecrate a moment jn history that was, at best, a half victory, ignoring its horrific compromises and the erasure of its abominations in the realm of foreign policy. It presumes that history is somehow cyclical, that the phase of pseduo-Keynesian, social democratic(ish) politics can return just as easily as Thatcher returned to pre-45 capitalism, that these are phases that can be built back by argument and policy. It is not. History is the violent spurt of change through the revolutions of people and classes. The reason labour could found a welfare state in 45 was due to the actions of worksers in 29, or even earlier. It was able to happen because of the unique historical situation of a society already geared in the economics of command and control, deeply politicised by the nature of the threat it was facing, and building on tendencies already there in the Labour movement, which suddenly found itself uniquely valuable due to the necessity of war production. Presuming this set of circumstances are not going to be recreated, one has to work out what the equivalent of total war is in peacetime.

And yhe reality is that total war is simply existing under capitalism. The reality is that the politics of total war need to be built in internally to the structure of the left itself. For we are in total war. We are fucking dying. Our planet is dying. There is a full scale genocide being committed on the other side of the world with blithe indifference over here. There are fascist demagouge monsters lurking everywhere. Our economies are being choked to death. Our citiies are impoverished filth holes. Our communities are demolished scavenger settlements picking over whatever bones are thrown at us. We have no where to live, we have no way to provide for our future. Our hospitals have been destroyed. They have taken away our rights of freedom of speech, assembly and protest. They have robbed us of meaningful choice. They try to brainwash and scream at us daily in their shit sheets and their TV programmes, one sided state propaganda from the worthless hoardes of the ideological robot journalists streaming out of Oxbridge. They want to kill us in our burning tower block homes. They will have us get and infected and leave us to die on trolleys because they did not provide appropiate amounts of PPI. They will then party while our relatives die. They want to starve us. Bleed us dry. Beat us with police batons. This is a society begging for apocalypse.

Capitalism has proven itself incapable of reform. The reality is that even the most vulgar and fatalistic of Marxist predictions of the inevitable exploitative, oppressive nature of capitalism seem tame by comparison with the daily, living reality of the modern hellscape created by capitalism. Compromise is impossible with capitalism, elections do nothing, change within the system is impossible, and every time the left has given the bourgeoisie a chance to redeem themselves in the course of human civillisation it has, continually, constantly, repeatedly, without fail and with relish, smashed the door onto our fingers. So that is a dead end.

The left can only built up its future by presuming nothing but a total and complete radical rupturing with every last shred of Britain's history, it can only do so by imaging a way to dismantle the concept of 'Britain' itself, to presume if and when we take power that we are in the last days of a war of attrition, where every second counts, where the enemy could be at our doors any moment, and every single day must doing nothing more than relentlessly paving the ground for our victory. Every day in power must be built under the presumption that we are adding years of security, peace, wealth and freedom in the future to the working classes in our policies, programmes and actions. The NHS was not built in a day, but (as Hatherley documents) thanks to Bevin's determination, his ferocity of vision and his acute sense of history, managed to make it last for decades. Absolute total brutality to our enemies and swiftness in our movements will have to become the watchwords of any new left, not muddled baptist Church grandmother's ramblings about the chartists, singing Jerusalem, trying to wrap ourselves in the fucking flag, bleating about treating NATO as the equivalent of the fucking third International, and bloviating ourselves to bursting in support of the genocide of the Palestians under some warped, collosally fucking stupid amd cretinous appeal to a working class that exists only in the brains of Blairite and Starmerroid think tank turds. It will have to be built under a new, rock solid, disciplined unity of a revolutionary party and the mass of the organised, unionised working class, with outreaches to a radical front in the social movements and in the extremist fringes. It will have to be capable of looking towards the future by constantly stressing the need for change *now*, this instant.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though Hatherley at times gets too bogged down in architectural history (his specialism), this remains a fiercely incisive critique of Britain's craze for 'austerity nostalgia', and does a wonderful job of separating historical fact from national myth-making. Timely and righteously indignant.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is nothing inevitable about the politics and economics of ‘austerity’ in contemporary Europe; where it has been imposed, it has been the choice of those with the power to shape government policy. This means that living the UK at a time when the political and economic élites have made a decision to impose ‘austerity’ makes it all the more difficult to tolerate what Owen Hatherley, in this entertaining and engaging polemic, calls ‘austerity nostalgia’. Iconic of this idea of heritage nostalgia is the seemingly ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters that began to appear in the UK some time during the Tory-Lib Dem coalition years. This poster, developed during the Second World War but never distributed always seemed to me to be a marker of the Bobby McFerrinisation of contemporary politics, as if we’re being implored to ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’.

Whereas in Generation X , Douglas Coupland introduced us to the idea that as things speed up nostalgia becomes more short term (of the ‘things were so much better last week’ approach), ‘austerity nostalgia’ seems to be an invocation of the ‘good times’ of WW2 and the post-war era of rationing. Although Hatherley invokes Coupland’s notion, not of instant nostalgia but of, legislated nostalgia, defined ‘force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess’, in this case of the 1950s and 1960s as a blissful time of goodness so we're encouraged to both yearn for a time most of us never experienced and we're encouraged to compare our responses to 'the present difficulties' to this mythologised Blitz spirit.

Rather than launch a frontal assault on this notion that the 1940s given us a time and a spirit to emulate, Hatherley sets out to explore some of the ideas and practices as well as practitioners. While there is close attention paid to some of the political figures of the era, not surprisingly Hatherley highlights people and trends in cultural history with a focus on the built environment, and in particular the ‘public modernism’, in the UK quite a soft modernism, of the 1930s through to the early 1970s.

He sees this nostalgia not only in the ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm’ poster, but in a much wider set of texts, including Ken Loach’s Spirit of 45 as well as other films such as Will and Testament, a documentary about Tony Benn, and to a much lesser extent a much more abstract, avant-garde, film, Luke Fowler’s The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the deluded Follower of Joanna Southcott exploring the Workers Educational Association. He is equally critical of Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns as a softening, a depoliticisation of modernism, enhancing the opportunity for nostalgia by defanging the critique that modernism made. This is a broad target, but the book is also a polemic: we can allow this rather scatter gun approach, which is not to imply that the book lacks form – for the most part the argument is tight and coherent.

One of the things Hatherley does well (leaving aside the architectural focus – his ‘day job’) is putting figures of the 1930s/40s into their intellectual/cultural context. In doing so he avoids the trap of suggesting/implying that this public modernism appeared from nowhere, but in doing so he does slip at times into the problem of suggesting the era and forms of public modernism might be more extensive than they are.

All in all, I enjoyed this polemic-come-catharsis enormously: Hatherley doesn’t give us answers to the ‘what do we do’ question, but in a setting where ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ appears as if it is just a bit of a laugh, where politics is restructured as a form of governance or even more management, and austerity Britain is the Cameron-Osborne clique’s TINA he reminds us that is OK to be angry, to reject the backward looking conservatism of the current cultural order and to maybe, just maybe, imagine that we might not rely on a romanticised era to shape our responses to the Great Financial Crisis and all that is going along with it.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I read this book because I was interested in the relationship between post-war British architecture and politics. Hatherley's discussion on the various designs, implementations, and politics surrounding the various architectural plans built immediately before and after WWII is fascinated and nuanced. I particularly like how he connects the current trend of "austerity nostalgia" with late Modernism and what that means both aesthetically and historically.

However, I do agree with other readers that the opening chapters read like a polemic rather than a nuanced cultural critique. If I hadn't needed to read this book for my own research, I probably would have stopped after the first chapter. However, if you push on, it's an excellent critique of the current state of the fetishization of certain mid-century designs and what the political implications then are for British society.

[Ollie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found it a challenging read to stay engaged with at times as it heavily delves into architecture in London and the UK, framed within the context of history and nostalgia. Having said that Hatherley knows his subject and history and subject well and it is still worth a read to see how the British past has been romanticised and capitalised upon by politicians to create much of the situation that we see ourselves in today including the housing crisis and austerity. I'd be interested to have his thoughts on Grenfell Tower, sadly to recent to have his take on it.

[Steven Pilling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's be honest 4.9 but that's splitting hairs .

I as I've said before love a polemic and hatherley does a polemic

It's controversuial in parts , taught me some stuff ( it helps to have access to the internet as you read as you will end up researching .

The last chapter is incredible just one man showing his taste beliefs and opinions with style and research .

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book wasn't very accessible, and the cover and introduction are pretty misleading. I didn't expect a book that would go through the minutiae of architecture associated with political ideals- probably a good book for those interested in modernist architecture and brutalism but not for me!

[El · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a well-marketed book- great swathes were about mostly architecture (in the wider context of austerity nostalgia) which wasn’t greatly accessible. Parts were great but I did skim through quite a bit of “Family Portrait”. 2.5 stars.

[Jen Callaghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book mis-sells itself: from the blurb and the info you think it’s going to be about politics and nostalgia and the history of political aesthetics and discourse, instead it is about architecture in London. That’s fine, but I was a bit disappointed as that wasn’t what I thought I had bought.

[WM Hall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps 2/5 is harsh, but I have a number of (quite large) problems with this book...
1. The writing is not clear. That isn't to say that it's complex in content (in fact, quite the opposite). Rather, the writing feels quite clumsy. Ideas that should otherwise be straightforward and central to the argument are, frustratingly, introduced with little introduction only to depart seemingly unconcluded.
2. "Austerity-nostalgia", a term upon which the entire book is built, is never clearly defined; it is as loosely and presumptively utilised as 'hauntology', a term that Hatherley borrows from Fisher (who in turn adapted from Derrida).
3. The central thesis (that we are inundated by "austerity-nostalgia"), is poorly argued (or under-argued). The list of slogans that grace the book's cover suggest a comprehensive cultural study (that is, one that may span music, television, literature and so on). Instead, the case studies - almost entirely architectural - feel mostly tangential. Ghost Box Records is introduced briefly, with seemingly little pertinence (other than to give nod to the ambiguous and otherwise un-explained term 'hauntology'), but then abandoned, bar a few gestural references. Television shows are referenced by name only, before being left unstudied.
4. There is a great disconnect between the cover/blurb and the actual content. The book is, more or less, an architectural history of 20th and 21st city Britain - and a fine one, at that. But the book's body (i.e. architectural history) and argument seem to be running on adjacent - only occasionally overlapping - tracks. In short, I am still unsure as to what 'austerity-nostalgia' is, and why architecture is given such weight in the argument. The book's very last two paragraphs go some way to providing clarity but are, sadly, preceded by 200 pages of frustrating, often seemingly irrelevant argument presented in clumsy prose.

[Fhsanders54 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Austerity nostalgia is the main theme of this book. How the Conservative Party are manipulating the population in to a belief that we are all in it together when the top 1% are clearly milking the system. Wartime slogans such as Keep Calm and Carry On are being reinvented for the post-financial crisis in order to subjugate the public. In a way similar to Klein's Shock Doctrine under "emergency" measures radical right wing policies take the opportunity to further privatisation and inequality. He dissects the post-war consensus to show that the only truly socialist experiment has been the NHS and certain housing measures, both now being overturned and reversed by "faux-austerity" luxury blocks which actually continue the virtual eviction of the working class and poor from London. A bit too much architectural detail for me, but that is his specialism I guess.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've thoroughly enjoyed a number of Owen Hatherley's books, probably at least in part because I share his view of modernist buildings in Britain and the social democratic impulse that led to many of them being created. This is another in the same vein, this time coupled with a takedown of the austerity nostalgia centred around the phrase "Keep Calm And Carry On" - a poster which dates to the second world war but was in fact never used at the time, having been intended for use following a successful German invasion of Britain. Hatherley takes apart this mythology of nostalgia, which while harking back to a past that never really existed has continued to dismantle the future that was being built in the 1930s and 1940s. It's a great read.

[David Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hatherly is always best on architecture - it's his field so it makes sense that it would be where his attempts to reclaim a use for modernism and for the society it gave birth to find their most detailed and tangible expression - but if you've ever grimaced at a "Keep Calm and Carry On" tea towel or winced your way through another invocation of "the Spirit of '45" you'll find much of use here.

I got a lot out of the section on Orwell, whose complicated legacy is so often obscured by journalists so keen to borrow his authority that they end up looking loke fifth rate impersonators doing the rounds at a particularly dull family wedding.

[Jamie Rawlings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great argumentation on how contemporary usages of austerity-era aesthetics are at best pathetically ironic and at worse conspiratorially deceptive. Really helped me put my finger on why these all make me feel somewhat uncomfortable.

This is largely less of a history and more of a study of memory: why and what is remembered of today from the past. Its historical constructions are less about seeking an exhaustive and truthful reconstruction of history, and more about analysing the way history is constructed today. What's selected? What's overlooked? His focus on austerity aesthetics is then: what (collective) cultural memories do these invoke?

[Sølvi Goard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the verso cover missells this, it's a lot more about left and labour nostalgia than about Poppy-ultras. That said, it's great, Owen knows so much about architecture, can weave it in with political history in a meaningful,social way. It was a powerful antidote to ideas I held, but had kind of lain dormant, being a teenager in the Blair years and hoovering up all the Tony Judt in the library and thinking that was socialism. And the Lewisham a and e campaign too, which for all it's nostalgic imagery in many ways felt really new.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Speaking as an American (I know, I know) -- I would say that this book requires that you have a reasonably deep understanding of English (most specifically London) history, historic politicians, architecture, and neighborhoods. The writing will not help you, as Hatherely jumps from reference to reference on his way to making a point that's never quite clear. If the middle chapters had been cut and only had the Intro and the final chapter about the Imperial War Museum, the book could have been a terrific essay.

[Kieran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ever been driven mad by the unquestioning use of the slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry on?’ Then this is almost the book for you...

I agreed with the central argument of the book, that half-baked memories of the 1940s have been misused by both those imposing austerity and those resisting it in the 2010s. However, the book was the wrong length. Too long to be simply making that point without getting lost, and too short to do justice to Hatherley’s clear love and knowledge of how culture and architecture are used in pursuit of political ends.

[Ferre Wyckmans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Een rollercaster waarbij de architectonische verwijzingen (een vakgebied waar de auteur een patent op heeft) me vaak wat te complex waren. Maar het boek dendert door film-, boek, tv-programma-analyses op een bijzondere manier, waarbij de (neo)liberale bijsturingen (of erger) van de welvaartstaat een erg speciale beoordeling krijgen.
De opstap om de 'keep calm and carry on' (affiche en politieke) oorlogsboodschap nazinderde in
het Britse beleid en de samenleving is interessant.

Wegens te weinig vertrouwd met de specifieke Britse context, soms net iets te lastig om volgen.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preceding from the ubiquity of the “keep calm and carry on” poster, ‘The Ministry of Nostalgia’ rigorously examines the cult of austerity nostalgia, how it’s spun by both the left and the right, and why it’s not just meretricious but a potentially dangerous mindset. Hatherley takes in art, architecture, the avant-garde and social history. His writing is lucid, intelligent and distilled; this is a short book with a lot of content.

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very relatable polemic on modern crap, kitsch, and the whole abysmal Keep Calm And Carry On tea towel industry that commemorates a Britain where everyone knew their place. With lots of architecture and social history thrown in.

A real patchwork quilt of sarcasm and fury, and I very much approve. Most hilarious joke was a description of mockney celebrity chef Jamie fucking Oliver as "as decent and sincere a person as you'll find on the Sunday Times Rich List..."

[Laura Linsi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m very impressed by the way Hatherley builds up his argument, and I have very very many moments of recognition having worked on regen projects in London, sensing the uncomfortable relationship between the arguably pretty good and considerate architecture vs. the purpose it is serving (Im serving). What a grasp!!!!

[Gabby_LM · Rating 4 out of 5]

V. accessible bit of cultural criticism, even though I didn't know most of the works cited. The central thesis is developed in several interesting ways over the course of the book, so it doesn't feel like an overlong magazine feature.