ABSTRACT
After the Second World War and into the 1950s the United States demonstrated to the rest of the world all that was desirable for a mid-20th-century lifestyle. Its happy families lived in suburban idylls and owned three-quarters of the cars in the world. Britain had hung on through the 1940s, cold, hungry and drab. There had been little evidence of post-war economic recovery and low national morale prompted the government to adopt a proposal made in 1943 by the Royal Society of Arts, with defiant wartime optimism, for an event to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Second World War and its aftermath were being forgotten; prosperity was allowing households to find their identity. The United States had been a reluctant combatant but having done so and given the post-war confrontation of capitalist and communist ideologies.
