If this essay were a documentary, we would begin with a shot of the green-brown water of the river Thames lapping against the alginated stone embankment outside the House of Parliament. We would zoom out while fading to spliced footage of two boats on the river. One, a grainy video, would feature a punk band, the other, more professionally produced, an heir to the throne. The editing would make you feel that these two boats, though distant in time, were somehow occurring in concert. That these two Thames trips were speaking to each other. That the Sex Pistols Jubilee year jaunt and Prince Charles’ Vision of Britain were part of a continuous flotilla that began in 1977 and ended in 1988. Or rather, a period bookended by these voyages that continues to shape us.
The 80’s revival continues into its 3rd decade, with no sign of its wheel spinning any slower. With every rotation, dizziness blurs any real relationship to fact. Instead, its very repetition becomes the thing that is repeated. Its signs and symbols continue to spin on an ahistorical Catharine Wheel, spewing coloured sparks into the night as if endless . That the 80’s above all decades should remain in this perpetual state of re-performace is no accident. It is the moment where culturally and politically, the idea of the past-as-future emerged. Between John Lydon’s searing scream of ‘No Future’ in the Sex Pistols God Save The Queen, through Prince Charles’ Vision of Britain and Francis Fukuyama essay, ‘The End of History’ published in 1989 something very strange happened to history, perhaps to time itself.
In the late 1970’s and early 80’s a new form of radical Conservatism emerged. Part of its radicality was the sheen of nostalgic ideas about England. Thatcherite Conservatism promised two things: That everything would change but that everything would also stay the same. Britain would be entirely remade according to free market principles, deregulation and privatisation, and in doing so, Britain would reenact itself as a Great-again nation.
The political landscape was defined by the dream of a frictionless, efficient private sector future, freed from the post war social settlement. But this futuristic dream was simultaneously festooned with the imagery of the past. The future, under Thatcher, became a complex and contradictory idea. No longer the futurist white hot heat of Harold Wilson but a supercharged dream of the past. The defining moments of the era – the Falklands War, Big Bang and the Miners’ Strike were all washed with the flickering glow from the perfect screen nostalgia’s of Merchant Ivory and Brideshead Revisited.
This obsession with history, greatness and nation is in part explained by Thatchers own obsession with Churchill. History, Churchill tells us (and her), is written by the victors. But he would say that wouldn’t he as both victor and historian. Churchill’s obsession with history was a primal force in the way he manufactured his own present, drawing on the past as a guide, as a source of intelligence, comfort and warning.
But Churchill’s historiographic view of the world began, after his death, to consume the world. Once Churchill had became history himself, the image of him as wartime leader assumed a new significance. Churchill – the Churchill of bulldog spirit, of fight-them-on-the-beaches, of a Britain that was both victorious and, still, imperial was raised as the ghostly muse and protector of British Conservatism.
This ghost of Churchill was raised most clearly in the Falklands War. Thatcher, many argued, manufactured the conflict just so she could appear Churchillian. A real battle acting as a reenactment, am occult sacrifice to raise the spirit of history within her.
Nowhere more was this contradiction at the heart of Conservatism between history and the future played out that in the establishment of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission in 1983 (soon more snappily renamed as English Heritage).
The National Heritage Act did two things. It first consolidated the various heritage functions of government into a single, smaller, more ‘efficient’ entity. Secondly, by establishing it as a semi-autonomous quango, it also became commercial entity, producing its own revenue streams. Instead of primarily being concerned with preservation, as it had been, English Heritage the commercial exploitation of state-owned historic properties. In broad terms, this was the privatisation of history.
In other words ‘history’ in the 1980’s was subject to the same ideological transformations as other economic sectors. As the heavy industries that had defined Britain since the Industrial Revolution closed, history became one of the new post-industrial products.
In place of industry and manufacturing, Britain became a pioneer in post industrial products of finance and history. We didn’t sell things anymore but ideas, concepts that took the form of financial services and historical experience. History was reimagined as a commodity that could be mined, refined and traded. Heritage became a resource, a function of financialisation.
And just as the transformation of financial services through privatisation, deregulation and Big Bang created strange immaterial financial products: derivatives, futures and other instruments that liberated capital from their bounds. Meaning and value became increasingly dislocated.
Financialisation equally transformed history. This newly imagined idea of history began to do more than simply narrate. Instead, the fantasies of historical England began to merge with its real artefacts. Real castles became historical theme parks where fictions merged with history. Be-jerkined out of work actors dressed up as knights and friars at abbeys and palaces. Visitors could participate, churning butter in the kitchen, holding out an arm for a hawk to sit on, firing an arrow or churn butter in ways that made them feel that history was coming alive even as it became theatre. History shifted from fact to experience, entertainment and engagement. Across the country, historical sites became scenographic where the big screen fantasies of historic England could be collectively performed.
As these remakes and reenactments played out across the country, nostalgic fantasy became rooted in too in the heart of Government. Performing rituals of nostalgic Englishness became far more than play, much more than fantasy. Re-enacting myths of nationhood acted as a very real mechanism of radical ideology.
In this new idea of what history was and how it could be used, architecture found itself centre stage. Architecture became factory where new historical product could be manufactured. Its fantastical theatre of history a way to cement and solidify the new myths of old England – its performance simultaneously a way of making real the its fiction.
Architecture was even deployed to reshape the centre of power as Margaret Thatcher appointed neo-classicist Quinlan Terry to remodel the interiors of 10 Downing Street. The project transformed what was essentially a pretty average Georgian terraced house into something that appeared much more like the interior of an 18th century palace. This was nothing less than a manufacturing of historical, a remaking of the present in the image of the past, erecting a scenographic synecdoche at the very centre of power.
Across Britain versions of this history nouveaux played out. In developer housing with appliqué Georgiana, in giant supermarkets with fiberglass clocktowers, in cul de sacs of developer built executive homes with names like ‘Henley’. And, fueled by blue blood and a personal horror of modernity, Prince Charles played out his own Vision of Britain in a Dorset Village.
If this essay were a documentary, right now the following sequence of mages would play to suggest how seemingly dislocated events were actually part of continuum: The cold war and new urbanism, death in the South Atlantic and neo-Regency, unemployment and nostalgia, civil unrest and faux-vernacularism. Doric columns made from the kind of expanded foam that means you could pick them up with one hand. These are the real call signs of the 1980‘s. The plasterwork curlicues in Terry’s new Downing Street ceilings might as well be the arcing turn of the General Belgrano heading out of the exclusion zone while frothy tracery marks the vectors of the torpedoes headed toward it.
On the eve of all of this, on the day of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, with the county covered in Union Jack bunting and with Thatcher was still Leader of the Opposition, the Sex Pistols took to the Thames. The (aptly named) Queen Elizabeth set sail from Charing Cross pier, steamed up and down the Thames, until outside the Houses of Parliament, the Pistols finally let rip with Anarchy in the UK. They keep playing: No Feelings, Pretty Vacant, I Wanna Be Me, then No Fun as the police boats circle (“one of the best rock’n’roll moments EVER. I mean EVER” wrote Jon Savage). And that was it. The boat pulled over, the crowed cleared, Malcolm McLaren and Richard Branson were arrested. Like most Pistol moments, its hard to know how much of it was sincere and how much of it was a stunt.
11 years later, we find the Queen’s own son and heir on the river too, also armed with a camera and an eye on publicity. He’s filming for his BBC TV special, ‘A Vision of Britain’. As he sails upstream he tells us: “All around me is what used to be one of the wonders of the architectural world, London” before arguing how terrible its all become despite “so many Londoners who felt powerless to resist”. What’s strange here is that the Prince casts himself as powerless. That conspiracies of money and power have wreaked havoc on the landscape (and society), that ‘modernity’ in the form of planners has destroyed the organic fabric of the city and instead erected an alternative.
1977-1989 is a period that provides us with three future-free alternatives. The first is Rotten’s: “Aint no future / in England’s dreaming” where he suggests either that England’s dreams of the past mean it is unable to imagine a future. Or that in England’s dream there is no future. Instead we retain a figurehead monarchy that performs her role “’cause tourists are money” and that history itself had become a “mad parade”.
The second is the neo-conservative End of History, whose Thatcherite manifestation was historical reenactment as shock doctrine.
The third is Prince Charles’ Vision of Britain, a re-enacted history whose vernacular from promised to heal the scars in land and time left by the twin talons of the Luftwaffe and Modern Architects.
Punk sold out (if there even was anything to sell out of in the first place). Thatcherism became so entrenched in British culture that decades later, long after she left ours, we are still living in her world. For Fukuyama history as a living breathing battle of ideologies became fully resurrected, driven by fundamentalism, nationalism and neo-primitivism erupting violently out of the apparently placid lagoon of post-history (even if this historical return was a zombie-historical). Prince Charles’ Poundbury produced no prelapsarian restoration but an even more synthetic hybrid.
“We’re the future, your future” said Rotten. But the future after the 1980’s had become a complex proposition. Any idea of the future could now only a radical composite construction made of pasts. The End of History had become the End of Future.
First published in the Real Review