ABSTRACT
At first glance the “swinging meritocracy” of the 1960s, to use Robert Hewison’s evocative phrase, seems an unlikely usher for a turn to history.1 Yet the period’s determination to break with the past served to deepen the distancing of even the most immediate of yesterdays, a distancing that drove the past into the realms of history and out of the sphere of memory. The country turned its face resolutely to the future, which now included a youth culture and high-rise flats, as well as a “sexual revolution” and full employment. But at the same time, a sense of a heritage in danger was gathering force: the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition, which toured the country in the early 1960s, warned of the rapid disappearance of the material residue of the past, namely old buildings. It was called “Vanishing History.”2
