Modernity Britain

October 27, 2014
Kynaston continues his history of postwar Britain (after Austerity Britain: 1945–1951 and Family Britain: 1951–1957) in this rich tapestry of political, socioeconomic, and cultural developments. He profiles a Tory-ruled, post-Suez, largely postcolonial U.K. that was still a highly stratified society, but was attempting to become less so, partly through attempts at educational reforms that would allow more middle- and lower-class children access to better secondary schools. Kynaston shows that while Britain lagged behind the U.S. in purchasing “consumer durables,” it was beginning to catch up. He is particularly interested in urban development, and illustrates major efforts at slum clearance in the industrial cities. Occasionally, Kynaston presents a confusing tableau of unrelated events, such as a housewife’s washing routine, the popularity of a TV show called The Archers, and the debate over where Prince Charles should go to boarding school. He sometimes offers too much detail, as in quoting several reviews of a relatively minor Arnold Wesker play, and many of his Britishisms—“Teddy boys,” an “HMSO,” a “PPB,” and “Podsnappian”—will be lost on American readers. Still, Kynaston has a knack for narrative pacing and manages to hold the reader’s attention in this comprehensive, multifaceted look at a changing period. B&w photo inserts.

October 15, 2014
Covering just five years in more than 900 pages, British historian Kynaston (Family Britain, 1951-1957, 2009, etc.) continues his sprawling study of Britain from the end of World War II to the rise of Margaret Thatcher.The present volume opens in 1957, when the grimness of postwar belt-tightening had finally given way to something of a boom. The author wisely and subtly brackets that year and the closing year of his volume with music, Tommy Steele ("Britain's first rock 'n' roll star") on one side and the Beatles on the other. Attractive though this book is for anyone interested in the social history of modern Britain, Kynaston is more concerned with the concrete details of daily life-literally. In much of the narrative, the author documents Britain's efforts both to modernize and to provide adequate housing for a growing population. "[D]uring the 1950s," he writes, "well over two million new dwellings had been added to the national housing stock and almost 300,000 old houses demolished." But that wasn't nearly enough, and tied into the housing shortage were issues of race and class, with one major race riot in Notting Hill linked to the arrival in an all-white public-housing neighborhood of a Pakistani family. Strife is a constant in Kynaston's pages, but so is aspiration, with an exploding population of university students and of the social services to accommodate them, a modest but growing movement to press for gay and minority civil rights, and a general loosening of the primness of yesteryear, as exemplified by the lifting of the ban on D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover-which didn't happen until 1960. Kynaston peppers his narrative with examples of British unstiff upper lips, complaining about everything from, yes, the ethnicity of one's neighbors to the grating voices of the Windsors. From Prince Charles' boarding school to the rise of Benny Hill: The Britain we know today takes shape in these pages. Monumental and highly readable.

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