A good book, covers not just political but economic, social and cultural history too. The regular excerpts from Mass Observation contributors is welcome and brings the book alive. ( )

Bought 22 Dec 2008 - Amazon

A good use of my last batch of Amazon vouchers. First in a four part series that will take us up to 1979 and the election of Thatcher, this is a wonderful, detailed, infinitely readable conglomeration of political and social history, crammed with excepts from diaries, letters, biographies and autobiographies, surveys and reports. There's a lot from the Mass Observation archive in here (prompting me to fill in my MO Winter Directive and send it in!) and the mixture of sources makes for an excellent and interesting read.

I can't wait for the other volumes to come out and will probably pick them up in hardback, as this is an important and eminently re-readable work. ( )

Absolutely brilliant. It explains my parents' behaviour and their influence on me.

Redistributionism in Postwar Britain

In this ambitious narrative, British Historian David Kynaston attempts to reconstruct the lives of Britons after the end of WWII. In many ways, life after the war was just as hard maybe harder than it was during the war. There were some celebrations, but mostly a somber realization of what lay ahead.

Much of Kynaston's book is focused on the newly elected Labour government under Clement Atlee and their attempts to introduce and implement the welfare state, the beginnings of democratic socialism and the debates over nationalization of public services. The largest and most significant of course being the creation of the National Health Service. Kynaston also describes the many high-modernist urban projects to modernize the cities and suburbanize.

Kynaston weaves through a variety of personal narratives documenting the major social, economic and political changes underway. I especially appreciated Kynaston's observations of the changing roles of women in postwar Britain. The debate over whether they should give up their jobs and return to their traditional domestic roles or whether they belonged permanently alongside men. How veterans coped and struggled to re-integrated into civil society. All throughout, Kynaston paints a picture of austerity, where the electricity went off and on, and how long the daily lineups for food were, the cleavages created by increasing immigration, and the coincidental timing of the harshest winter conditions in decades.

The book is written in the traditional historical narrative and at over 600 pages, the book is a rather long read. I think that some of detail could have been paired down for the casual reader, but considering this is part of an anthology series, it is perfectly suitable for that purpose. Overall, I recommend the book for anyone who wants a detailed social history of England in the immediate postwar period. ( )