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From the revival of baking, pickling and beards to the fetishisation of former public housing and terraces, austerity nostalgia has taken prominence in our cultural landscape.
But one expert believes it's also obscuring our political reality.
Twenty-first century society is, according to writer and architecture critic, Owen Hatherley, a very disorienting place.
On the one hand, it's high-tech, fast-paced, hyper modern, exhilarating and terrifying in equal part.
On the other, sentimental, nostalgic, inward-looking and marked by a profound sense of loss and a longing for an imagined past that may never have existed.
We console ourselves, he argues, with "austerity nostalgia", collectively dreaming of a post-war world in which we imagine social life bounded by traditional institutions, held together by a generous state, and brimming with stoicism, Victoria sponges, and a determination to muddle through.
The Keep Calm and Carry On con
Its emblem, Hatherley says, is the now global 'Keep Calm and Carry On' logo.
"My assumption was that the combination of message and design were inextricably tied up with a plethora of English obsessions, from the 'Blitz spirit', through to the cults of the BBC and the NHS and the 1945 post-war consensus," he says.
In a perfect irony, Hatherley says it would be hard to find another historical artefact as spectacularly false.
The 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster was, in fact, never mass-produced.
"It didn't really exist in anyone's consciousness except historians of the design of that period until about 2007. Then it becomes this thing that's always been there, which of course it hasn't," Hatherley says.
Originally produced by the Ministry of Information in the 1930s, it was very quickly deemed to be patronising and disappeared almost immediately after the war.
Almost a century later, it has been printed on nearly every tea towel in Britain.
Hatherley argues its ubiquity is, in part, symptomatic of a malaise afflicting the post-Global Financial Crisis world.
"It's the notion of Britain as a brave little island fighting against evil continental hoards (something which has an obvious purchase in Brexit), but also the idea of tightening our belts and making hard choices and having stiff upper lips'," he says.
For Hatherley, this period has become a kind of morbid fetish — an idea we all cling to in order to avoid looking at a rather more brutal political reality.
The memory induced by this particular aesthetic has become a form of what Douglas Coupland once called "legislated nostalgia" — a means by which to "force people to have memories they do not actually possess."
According to Hatherley, the contradictions inherent in this particular form of nostalgia are particularly stark and often underappreciated.
"The transformation of stuff from an era that was completely against trinkets into trinkets is a fantastic example. Modernist ornaments being a big thing: tea towels of modernist buildings, modernist ceremonial mugs," he says.
The gap between our accumulation of these artefacts and the simultaneous rejection of the social vision they once represented makes this form of nostalgia feel particularly hollow.
Austerity nostalgia is of course a cultural trend that's broader than the post-war slogan — its aesthetic effect is everywhere apparent, and Hatherley believes Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food is yet another emblem.
"One could argue that he was the latest in a long line of middle-class people lecturing the lower orders on their choice of nutrition, part of an immense construction of grotesque neo-Victorian snobbery," he says.
"He would be a one-man benevolent bureaucracy, going around to schools making people eat 'proper food.'
"He popularised English food 'like suet pudding, dumplings, faggot, spotted dick – these were standing jokes, not things you actually ate unless you had to.'"
Building the austerity city
Nostalgia serves many purposes, none of which, Hatherley argues, are particularly useful.
Whether it is the rhetoric of belt-tightening and sacrifice, used by conservative governments to justify cuts to public services, or the misty-eyed sentimentalism of the left looking longingly back at its own glorious past, Hatherley suggests both serve to reinforce our state of intellectual and political torpor.
He argues we are sentimental about the period of post-war social democracy, at the same time as its institutional remains are privatised — and nowhere is the contradiction as stark as it is the realm of architecture and housing.
"We are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same time as we're alternatively fetishising and privatising its remnants," he says.
"In terms of new buildings, in London in particular, there's been a lot of new architecture that strains quite hard to look austere.
"You get these new concrete blocks of flats that have this sort of half brick of cladding in vague Georgian proportions so that, what is usually very high-density housing produced by transnational consortiums, can be sold to look like some historic part of London."
This trend, Hatherley suggests, is an understandable response to the futuristic architecture that preceded it.
"It's a reaction against architects like Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher or Rem Koolhaas — this very ambitious, computer-engineered, non-orthogonal architecture that, after a while, people started to find rather vacuous," he says.
"What has recently become popular in architecture were all the things that were opposite — that weren't computer-aided, that were designed with obvious materials rather than the generic shiny cladding, where you could see what it was made of and see how it was produced."
He says the rejection of that aesthetic, the desire to return to the terrace, to materiality, echoes a deeper anxiety.
"In many ways there's a revulsion against a sort of futurism of the status quo — a future that we don't control and we don't know where its heading," he says.
"We can see that its doing enormous social damage and we have to slap on the brakes.
"It's nostalgia not necessarily for a better past, but for a better future."
What that future might look like remains an open question.
But Hatherley is adamant that dwelling on a mythologised past, clutching our modernist trinkets and drinking craft ale, while turning away from political reality, will not lead us there.
Topics: community-and-society, history, popular-culture, australia
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