Book Notes: The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity by Owen Hatherley

The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity

by Owen Hatherley

Finished 9/20/20

A clever and pointed look at the ways in which objects, spaces, and memory of 20th century social democracy in the UK have been transformed into contemporary commodities that obscure their political origins and content.

Owen Hatherley is a wonderfully rebellious UK architectural and cultural critic. He wrote two excellent books on modern architecture (A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, and A New Kind of Bleak), as well as Militant Modernism, all of which seek to excavate the social-democratic project of post-War British architecture and politics from contemporary scorn, as well as to evaluate the architectural footprint of UK neoliberalism and New Labour.

This book builds off this previous exploration to focus attention on the recent explosion of what Hatherley calls “Austerity Nostalgia”, manifesting in various consumer goods, decorative objects, and souveneirs. He begins with an examination of the now-ubiquitous “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON"poster, which despite being associated with the Blitz and WWII, was never actually widely distributed until the 2000s. The resurgence of this image coincided with the period following the 2008 financial crash and the beginnings of continuous conservative governance in the UK, and Hatherley argues that there was a significant cultural investment in the aesthetics of the WWII and post-war rationing eras of “make do and mend.” Such nostalgia, manifested in art, music, television, and “heritage” belies a depoliticized aestheticization of socialist or social-democratic efforts during the 20th century that created comfortable and beautiful public housing, public art and cinema, and most dramatically, the National Health Services.

Hatherley moves from Keep Calm and Carry on through various cultural dimensions of the current and the historical moments of austerity. He examines the ways in which conceptualizations of the White working class in England as a source of political energy belie the connections between class and empire in the post-war period. As a source of analysis, he examines some documentary films that play on nationalist nostalgia for the social-democratic impulses of this time. He later offers a rich and pointed tour of some of the archtiectural and historical literature which has recently been written on post-war modernist architecture, and finds it lacking in its recognition of the complex politics at play in things like the expansion of the London subway system, or the Empire marketing board, which sought to inspire the English to buy commodities from their colonies.

The book is full of little details that complicate the “make do and mend” ethos. In chapter 4, Hatherley reminds us that the backyard or neighborhood bomb-shelter, that architectural icon of British survival spirit, was a function of elite concern over rebellious politics.

“while the Labour left and radical architects were advocating communal shelters, central government had a firm preference for the privatisation of bomb protection….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.”

He touches on George Orwell’s conversation from radical socialist to conservative skeptic, the Festival of Britain and its architectural ghosts, and the public housing efforts of Aneurin Bevan. He also provides a tour of the archtiecture and exhibits of the Imperial War Museum which is snarky and entertaining.

But his ultimate point, indeed perhaps his professional thesis, is reserved for the last chapter:

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 time as we’re alternately fetishising and privatising its remnants…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 the 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 line of gentrification, and the architect-designed modernist flat the new loft conversion.

In short, at the same time that the post-war, social democratic built environment of Britain is being remembered and revered in art, music, culture, and archticture, it is likewise being reshaped and repurposed by Conservatives, New Labour, speculation, and gentrification around a rampant neoliberal privatization that exascerbates the problems it was erected to solve.

All in all, fascinating, funny, and clarifying book and study of place, space, power, and material things.