If Brexit taught us anything, it’s that a sentimental yearning for the past underpins Global Britain’s sense of its own adorable character. And the brilliant thing about Great British Nostalgia is that it belongs to all of us — not just to Tories, expats and those flag-draped weirdos clutching teddy bears at Last Night of the Proms.
Yet somehow the perception is that nostalgia is the sole province of xenophobes. Well “newsflash”, as we used to say. Those of us on the Left also become more nostalgic as we get older. We too mourn the past. So, at a time of mounting scepticism about the public finance model for our denationalised industries, I commend this bible of calm rationalism: the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual.
The Manual, like the actual Bible, doesn’t need to be read linearly. It’s best experienced immersively, as a trove of browsable scripture. Oh, spoiler alert: both British Rail and the Bible end badly. One in terrifying madness, with everything destroyed by rapacious monsters, the other in a poorly-written Book of Revelation.
The Manual is a beautiful, heartbreaking anthology of design guides issued by BR between 1965 and 1970, the coolest and most swinging period in our modern social history. We had a proper Old Labour government, for a start. We had the Pill and the Mini and rising wages thanks to strong unions headed by people who sounded like us. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was groovy heaven. The Beatles were turning us on, reinventing the future, in those long summery five years from Rubber Soul to Let It Be. The Open University was launched, decades before the internet made remote learning universally dull. Brutalist masterpieces redefined civic space and, along with atheism and cohabitation and drugs and whatnot, it really irritated older people, which made everything so much funnier.
We were a railway household in those days. My dad started as a fitter with British Railways after the war, and ended up working at British Rail’s new-look Euston during its modernisation. He revered The Euston Concourse as others revere St Peter’s Square; VIPs using the same space as the proles. I remember with affection Euston’s pristine egalitarian public space, yet to be slathered in shrieking adverts, yet to succumb to the inevitable rash of franchise buboes. God, I can even remember when the toilets were free.
We were passengers then, not customers. Passenger traffic, not just technical modernisation, drove the new-look BR. For the first time in the history of British railways, passengers had replaced freight as the main source of business; the company had to present itself as a legible, people-centred organisation. How refreshing it all seems today, when a privatised industry treats passengers as freight.
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