New Dawn: Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins in uniform at Labour’s 1945 party conference.
Clement Atlee, driven by his wife Violet, was advised to jump in his car and head for Buckingham Palace to be made prime minister before plotters could put in Herbert Morrison instead.
and . John Maynard Keynes, possibly the cleverest man in Britain, died after struggling desperately to save his country from bankruptcy. But he could not do a deal with the Americans good enough to avoid the grim austerity of the post-war years, including bread rationing, the subject of the 1946 demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
British women were hectored constantly about their clothes, and would soon revolt.
Temporary pre-fab homes, often built using German and Italian prisoners of war, were one answer to the huge housing shortage. Some were still being used in the seventies.
Despite Labour’s triumph, and fearing socialism, the old order quickly reasserted itself: Cecil Beaton poses on the set of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1946.
Hero of the working classes: Joan Littlewood (. was one of the most radical voices in British theatre. But her influence in conveying the spirit and dilemmas of a new Jerusalem was far less than that of Ealing Studios, with films such as Passport to Pimlico (..
and . Bitterly disappointed by his 1945 rejection, Churchill endured his exile writing, speaking, painting – and hunting, here, four days before his seventy-fourth birthday. He would be back in 1951, proclaiming a new Elizabethan age.
and . Old Labour’s greatest prophet? Nye Bevan in full Welsh flow, presumably unaware that he’s being mimicked by a small boy.
The comprehensive vision, pushed by Tories too: a new school in Anglesey, 1954.
The Skylon at the 1951 Festival of Britain: people said that it, like the country, was suspended without visible means of support.
Simpler pleasures: a honeymoon couple at Billy Butlin’s hotel near Brighton, 1957.
and . In the Tory years, there were dreams of a super-technological British future: just along from Parliament, this is the planned London Heliport, complete with passenger helicopters, as pictured in 1952. Instead, ‘the great car economy’ was getting underway: in 1964 London’s Chiswick flyover was an early glimpse of the real future.
and . Alec Issigonis, an immigrant from Turkey, was the design genius of post-war British car-making. His first huge success, the 1948 Morris Minor, was condemned by his company boss as ‘that damned poached egg designed by that damned foreigner’.
As the mass car market developed, Issigonis worked on sketched for an even more radical car (., which would become the Mini. Late sketches (. for ‘the small car of the future’ are strikingly like the rounded city runabouts of today.
Cold war: RAF crews practise a scramble for their Vulcan nuclear bombers in Lincolnshire, 1960. The V-bombers were Britain’s first line of attack but they were quickly made obsolete by improved Russian defences.
By 1958, the anti-nuclear marches were mobilized and CND’s logo was on its way to becoming one of the most recognizable symbols of all.
The working classes begin to be heard: Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 A Taste of Honey was a breakthrough play set in Salford, and written when she was just nineteen.
Chaps dapper and chaps disgraced: the well-connected Soviet spy Kim Philby (. and the man who split Britain over Suez, Anthony Eden (., knew how to put on a good front. Stephen Ward (., the man at the centre of the greatest scandal of the early Sixties, barely bothered. Christine Keeler is to his left.
If the reality is disappointing, weave a different one: Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, at the card table, 1962.
and . The enigma and the optimist: Harold Wilson, reflective with pipe, in 1963 and Edward Heath, campaigning in exuberant mood, 1966.
and . British Cool? The actor David Hemmings in Swinging London, 1966, and the Kinks, struggling with trousers and ruffles.
The Liberal Hour: the flamboyant MP Leo Abse was one of the Labour backbenchers who led reform, in his case to legalize homosexual acts between men.
In 1971, the editors of the underground magazine Oz were prosecuted for obscenity. A libidinous cartoon Rupert Bear was at the centre of the case; the significance of the whip is unclear.
Violence becomes a theme: Catholic demonstrators (. in Londonderry/Derry after the killing of thirteen civil-rights marchers on ‘Bloody Sunday’ 1972, and (. the nearest Britain came to left-wing terrorists, the Angry Brigade, outside the Old Bailey a few months later.
and . When the country failed: a boy stands outside his school, closed because of a lack of fuel during the miners’ strike of 1972. The miners were badly paid, and went on to humiliate Heath and the Conservatives.
and . It’s the beans, stupid. In the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Common Market, both sides campaigned more about the cost of food than about the constitutional implications of surrendering sovereignty.
Two men as influential as most prime ministers, Enoch Powell (., opponent of immigration, and (. Denis Healey, chancellor during Britain’s economic storm, making a characteristic point to his opponents.
Punk gets cheeky: Vivienne Westwood (centre), Chrissie Hynde (left) and Jordan advertise Westwood’s King’s Road punk shop Sex, in 1976.
But nothing was sexy about the economy: rubbish piles up in London during the ‘winter of discontent’, 1979.
Michael Foot, the most literate and radical man to lead Labour, points in the general direction of the political wilderness. But his harshest critics, the SDP’s Gang of Four, failed to return to power, either.
Bill Rodgers, David Owen and Roy Jenkins plot over a glass of wine or two in 1982. The fourth member of the gang was not, as this photograph below suggests, surprisingly well-endowed but was Mrs Shirley Williams.
The Iron Lady on manoeuvres. Margaret Thatcher at the peak of her power, with tank and flag, 1986.
The Tories had another blonde who felt the call of destiny: Michael Heseltine, Conservative conference darling.
and . When Thatcher took on the moderate ‘wets’ in her own cabinet, she could rely on the support of much of the press. But it was the Falklands that changed everything: a soldier aboard the 1982 task force waits for the shooting to start.
and . Rebel faces: picketing miners caught and handcuffed to a lamp-post by police, 1986, and the notoriously violent poll-tax riot of 1990 in Trafalgar Square.
and . Two lost leaders: Labour’s Neil Kinnock attacking left-wing Militants at the party conference in 1985 and his successor John Smith, who would have become prime minister in 1997, but died of a heart attack.
In June 1988, 185 men died when a North Sea oil platform, Piper Alpha, blew up – yet the extraordinary story of the oil boom is little mentioned in politicians’ memoirs.
Bitter-sweet: Tory chairman Chris Patten helped John Major win a triumphant electoral victory in 1992, but lost his own seat at Bath, and was sent as the last governor to Hong Kong.
The death of Diana in 1997 produced an almost Mediterranean outpouring of grief across the country. A small field of flowers lies outside Kensington Palace.
What’s waiting in the wings? Alastair Campbell guards his master’s back (. New Labour was famously image-obsessed, but (. by 2005 neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown could be bothered to disguise their mutual enmity.
Tony Blair’s legacy? Anti-war protestors became a familiar sight on the streets of Britain (., while British troops did their utmost in the devastated and violence-plagued world of post-war Iraq. By 2007 (. they were still not welcomed by many Iraqis.
More than four-million closed-circuit television cameras now watch the British: a surveillance society that echoes the wartime world of identity cards and observation with which this history began.
The biggest social change continues to be migration, latterly from eastern Europe: Polish road signs to help drivers in Cheshire, February 2007.