The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity

By Owen Hatherley

Why should we have to “Keep Calm and Carry On”?

In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a “make do and mend” aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition.

The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth.

In coruscating prose—with subjects ranging from Ken Loach’s documentaries, Turner Prize–shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver’s cooking—Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784780784

Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley is an architecture and culture critic whose writings have spanned Soviet Constructivism, to the merits of Coventry train station. His acerbic wit and sense for 'place' can be found in the pages of Guardian and Architects Journal. He is the author of numerous books on architecture and culture, including The Chaplin Machine (Pluto Press, 2016), Trans-Europe Express (Penguin, 2017), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010) and Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009).

Reviews for The Ministry of Nostalgia

[davidwineberg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Manufactured Nostalgia just ain’t like it used to beThe Ministry of Nostalgia is a delightfully clever name for a very old problem: nostalgia is gloss. It was never like the way “they” portray it. It was clearly never the good old days. Owen Hatherly believes the Cameron government is purposely making 1945, a time of terrible privation and scarcity, into a longed-for era when everyone pulled together.Because they had no choice.Today’s austerity is manufactured by the government. The 99% get deeper and deeper austerity as benefits like healthcare are reduced to the point of being useless. This gives government the ammunition to cancel them outright, since they provide no value at supposedly huge expense. After all the promise and buildup of a caring state after WWII, this dismantling and artificial austerity is galling.Hatherly’s main whipping boy is the Keep Calm And Carry On poster, which is copied, twisted, caricatured, perverted and imitated all over the world. Meaningless today (aside from manufactured nostalgia), he says it infuriated passersby when it first appeared, precisely because they had no choice but to carry on, calm or not. It was the symbolic center of an entire propaganda effort promoting empire and superiority, using, or misusing, London Transport and the Post Office, which had a remarkably professional propaganda film unit.There are three strands in this woven rope of a book. The absurd austerity nostalgia of the Conservative government is the main strand, but then Hatherly goes off into his own nostalgia for the great and not so great Labour Party luminaries of the 20th century, Tony Blair notwithstanding. The alleviators of austerity are his heroes. The third strand is architecture. Hatherly keeps veering off to describe construction, environment, context, style and materials of various public buildings, from housing developments to Festival Hall and Underground stations. There is lots of name dropping of firms and architects. So the book is a bit of a rollercoaster.To me it was a fascinating read, weaving these three seemingly disparate strands into a thicker, if not stronger rope. But I can also imagine throwing the book across the room in disgust at this bizarre, forced interlace.David Wineberg