Austerity Britain 1945-51
Have just finished this massive volume, 633 pages excluding the notes. And I was fascinated by every page. It’s an immensely readable, incredibly wide ranging, social history of Britain immediately after the Second World War. The period in which I was conceived and born and so many features of which I remember from my early childhood – I was 4 by the end of 1951. Kynaston draws on lots of diaries of individuals plus a lot of the vox pop records of Mass Observation. Accounts of the era of the first post war Labour government are interspersed with the people’s view of their earnest socialist leaders. I suppose the book could be characterised as a populist skate across the period, but the breadth doesn’t get in the way of the understanding and analysis of what was going on. Quite brilliant.