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1 " If a social and democratic city is going to be built again, it will most probably be built by those who have no investment in the past, no fond memory of it. That isn’t to say they’ll be building on nothing. There is something to conserve, Tony Judt was right about that much – the very fact a publicly owned Carpenters Estate existed at all was the reason why it sat empty, and the reason why the slogan of the young mothers who occupied it could be so clear and so practical: ‘These people need homes, these homes need people.’ Such words are unlikely to find their way into white letters on a red poster, with an emblem of the crown above them. If we’re ever going to escape from austerity, this clear statement of collective utility is the most likely way out. "
― Owen Hatherley , The Ministry of Nostalgia
2 " It is important to record that the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was never mass-produced until 2008. It is a historical object of a very peculiar sort. By 2009, when it had first become hugely popular, it seemed to respond to a particularly English malaise, one connected directly with the way Britain reacted to the credit crunch and the banking crash. From this moment of crisis, it tapped into an already established narrative about Britain’s ‘finest hour’ – the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940–41 – when it was the only country left fighting the Third Reich. This was a moment of entirely indisputable – and apparently uncomplicated – national heroism, one which Britain has clung to through thick and thin. Even during the height of the boom, as the critical theorist Paul Gilroy spotted in his 2004 book After Empire, the Blitz and the Victory were frequently invoked, made necessary by ‘the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings’. ‘1940’ and ‘1945’ were ‘obsessive repetitions’, ‘anxious and melancholic’, morbid fetishes, clung to as a means of not thinking about other aspects of recent British history – most obviously, its Empire. This has only intensified since the financial crisis began. The ‘Blitz spirit’ has been exploited by politicians largely since 1979. When Thatcherites and Blairites spoke of ‘hard choices’ and ‘muddling through’, they often evoked the memories of 1941. It served to legitimate regimes which constantly argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, resources were scarce and there wasn’t enough money to go around; the most persuasive way of explaining why someone (else) was inevitably going to suffer. Ironically, however, this rhetoric of sacrifice was often combined with a demand that the consumers enrich themselves – buy their house, get a new car, make something of themselves, ‘aspire’. "
3 " Living through the Blitz, edited by MO’s Tom Harrisson, makes clear just how much the ‘1945’ we now consume is a construct, a convenient fairy tale built up piece by piece several generations later. Most interesting for our purposes is its plentiful evidence that the imperative (in rhetoric, if not in the specific form of the unprinted poster) to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ actually had much the opposite effect. The patronising message infuriated most of the scores of mostly working-class diarists and interviewees whose materials make up the book. And rather than an alliance between the ‘decent’ people and their ‘decent’, benevolent public servants, Living through the Blitz finds a total divorce between the interests of each, with the civil service and local government desperately scared of the workers they were supposed to be sheltering from bombs. For example, while the Labour left and radical architects were advocating communal shelters, central government had a firm preference for the privatisation of bomb protection. ‘Whitehall’, Harrisson writes, ‘had long declared that there must be no “shelter mentality”. If big, safe, deep shelters were established, people would simply lie in them and do no work. Worse, such concentrations of proletarians could be breeding grounds for mass hysteria, even subversion. The answer was the Anderson shelter.’2 That is, private shelters in back gardens, not necessarily safer, but less likely to encourage sedition. "
4 " Lancastrian workers, the dumb and dignified beasts of burden that line the Road to Wigan Pier, thronged tours by Soviet leaders, workers, soldiers and trade unionists in the UK after the Soviets entered the war in 1941. One delegation leader, Nikolai Shvernik, was mobbed by Mancunian women; after his speech at a munitions plant a woman climbed on the stage, ‘clung to his neck, kissed his forehead and then shouted “Come on girls, let’s all kiss him.”’ Moments later, ‘scores of elderly gray-haired women jumped onto the platform and struggled to kiss’ Shvernik. Management convinced the women to go back to their seats, and ‘in what may have been an attempt to cool their ardor, they all sang the Internationale’. "
