Introduction

Abstract

The period between 1945 and 1975 was one of major social change in Britain. At the end of the Second World War, the country was bankrupt and the bomb sites that scarred the urban landscape were emblems not only of physical destruction but also of a damaged social and political fabric. However, planning for a better future had already begun during the war, partly in response to the poverty and suffering caused by the Great Depression, the cause of much of the ‘want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness’ that Beveridge identified in his 1942 report as obstacles to social progress. Building on Beveridge’s recommendations and as part of the post-war consensus, both Labour and Conservative governments passed legislation that ensured expanded educational opportunities for all, free healthcare, the provision of family allowances and social insurance. The long-term impact of the Welfare State is hard to assess but it undoubtedly lifted many out of poverty and the historian Carolyn Steedman suggests that it also had more intangible psychological benefits. In her memoir Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) she links it with a broader social narrative that recognised the rights of the marginalised and that ‘told me, in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth something’.¹