YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE ROARING TWENTIES
These are interesting times to be a historian of 1920s Britain. As we move through a decade of centenaries, the instinct to look back, rather than forward, has been striking. Last year's launch of the 1921 Census online prompted a flurry of exhibitions and newspaper stories to mark the occasion, while in early 2020, headline writers were heralding the start of a new ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was inviting us to “party like it's 1929”. As of 2023, the ‘jazzing flapper’ and peakcapped ‘Peaky Blinder’ remain the fancy dress costumes du jour. More than a century after the decade began, the 1920s are back in fashion.
The 1920s might be everywhere, but so too are the myths that govern how we think about the decade. Lazy cliches of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ make it impossible for us to see how this period was a far-reaching moment in the making of modern Britain. A century on, the vagaries of popular memory mean we have lost sight of the postwar decade's character and significance.
A BRIEF PAUSE?
The 1920s is usually treated as part of the longer period ‘between the wars’, famously described as “The Long Week-End” by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge inin 1940, but their way of dividing up 20th-century British history has endured - and ultimately limits our ability to understand the period.
