Retro Britain - nostalgia for bygone days

Visiting the UK recently, I was struck by a mood of nostalgia that seemed to be present everywhere. Strings of bunting were to be found everywhere — from people's back gardens to community allotments as well as decorating the 'Big Lunch' street-parties that took place all over the UK on July 18th.





Traditional British beach holidays have made an incredible comeback — complete with stripy deckchairs and Punch and Judy shows for the kids. People are paying whopping sums to own a beach hut such as the one in the photo for sale in Whitstable from £12,000 and many families are going the full hog and shifting out of the bigger cities to take up permanent residence in the once-deserted but now highly-priced and highly-prized coastal towns.



With all the major retailers having moved into shopping malls on the edge of towns, most high streets are now occupied only by charity shops stuffed full of barely-used bric-a-brac and once-worn outfits in sadly poignant evidence of our Western society that consumes thoughtlessly and to excess.

Occasionally — as in the case of 'Transition Town' Lewes — there are rustic-chic shops offering expensive 'retro' food and goods that hark back to times when household wares were functional and solidly-made to last a lifetime and no-one had even dreamt of produce that wasn't organic. In terms of price, these establishments are as far away from their peasant origins as they can possibly be and, as such, really only affordable for a privileged few.





All this consumption of nostalgia left me with the sensation of a people filled with longing for something they can only dimly remember or have never experienced — and which, thankfully, in many places in Spain is still taken for granted — a sense of community and society rooted in solid values. This 'añoranza', as it is called here, is driving people to try and reconnect with a sense of themselves as part of a nation and a locality.






I only hope that this latest lifestyle-change fixation will turn out to be something more than simply an empty media hype that leads people on a merry real-estate dance in search of an impossible dream life (in the same way that that so many guileless souls were lead to buy over-priced 'dream homes' here on Spain's sometimes sunny shores, only to find themselves returning a very short time later, tail-between-legs and sometimes penniless, to home soil) and produce the desired result of a genuinely more cohesive and responsive society.

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