ABSTRACT
George Orwell is part of the heritage now, his reputation safely pinned by a plaque to the wall of a house in Islington. His grimmest prophecies have been duly celebrated for not coming to pass in 1984; his politics have been consigned to ‘before the war’. For Britain the period 1939–45 caused a break with the past more thorough than 1914–18. The post-war period began with an emphasis – within the limits of necessary austerity measures – on reconstruction, and since some 700,000 homes had been destroyed during the war, on the building of new houses. The redevelopment of London began a fresh phase with the return of a Conservative government in 1970. In Britain until the late 1960s material change was generally regarded as the price of progress that brought full employment after the depression of the 1930s.
