In the United Kingdom, rarely a week goes by without media stories concerning the burden imposed on health and social care by the increasing numbers of elderly people hoovering up scarce resources. In this narrative, older people are positioned as a problem. Edited by Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor, and Philip Tew, Growing Old with the Welfare State seeks, in part, to challenge this perception and to act as a corrective to the notion that the final “fourth ages” are marked by decline and decrepitude aiming to illustrate instead “a new type of fourth-age selfhood under construction” (3).

The book is an anthology resulting from the Economic and Social Research Council–funded follow-on project, New Narratives of Everyday Ageing in Contemporary Britain, and consists of six extracts from participants in the Mass Observation Project that began in 1981, and two from the Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing conducted at Brunel University (2009–2012), which was carried out in collaboration with the University of the Third Age reflective diary reading groups; all participants were born between 1921 and 1943. For readers already familiar with Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing, some of the issues and debate may be familiar as that project culminated in a report, Coming of Age (2011). In addition, two of the eight people here also appear in James Hinton's Seven Lives from Mass Observation (2016), albeit with different pseudonyms. A continuity of themes emerge across the chapters as participants were asked to respond to a range of prompts, including “growing older,” “age,” “books and you,” and, variously, “death and bereavement,” “staying well and enjoying life,” “ageing and care,” “pace of life,” “gays and the family.”

Hubble, Taylor, and Tew state, the material produced by both the Mass Observation and University of the Third Age offer rich insight into the thoughts and reflections of those who have lived through significant social changes; the participants discuss their attitudes to aging (their own and others) and their responses to the cultural changes that mark the shifting landscapes experienced across time. As such, Growing Older with the Welfare State gives voice to those ordinarily rendered voiceless, invisible, and whose life experiences and contributions to society are often eclipsed in both governmental rhetoric (about the “problem” of the growing and increasingly elderly population) and in media representation. This collection therefore makes an important intervention in a youth-centered culture that endlessly promotes the desire for “successful aging” visualized as physically energetic and of youthful appearance. The narratives of aging included in this book refuse the notion that we can (and should) refute that we grow older with all the implications of decay that this implies. They also demonstrate that, despite the increasing physical limitations that aging brings, mental agility along with the ability to offer rich reflections on self and others remain—obviously a defining characteristic of those able and willing to continue with the writing exercises.

Throughout, I was reminded of Robert Butler's concept of the life review in the elderly, which, he argues, is a process through which unresolved conflicts and past experiences return to reflective consciousness, thus enabling resolution and recalibration of relationships and past events (“The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged,” in Middle Age and Aging: A Reader in Social Psychology, ed. Bernice Levin Neugarten, 1975, 486–96). It is this that makes the Mass Observation contributions the most affecting: because we read entries written across decades we access contemporaneous accounts of how physical, mental, and emotional life is changing; these are then reflected on as each new diary entry is written. So we track the thoughts on being newly retired (age early 60s) with the attendant sense of liberation, the freedom to develop new hobbies, careers, or voluntary work, through to the gradual erosion of physical health and fitness along with the limitations these bring. Now we see how an individual's world often shrinks as they become increasingly less able to participate socially or in employment. Nonetheless, the inner worlds that the diaries also articulate often remind us that older people have lively intellects that transcend physical limitations. For me, the most poignant contributors are the Mass Observation entries: reading them powerfully forces us to confront the inevitability of our own aging and to reflect on our own projected futures.

The multilayered accounts illustrate the wider cultural shifts in attitudes towards difference and social mores that mark the generation born before the wars and those born after coming of age during the 1960s, the decade marked by transformations in attitudes to ways of being. As “Dick Turpin” (Mass Observation participant born 1930; “Len” in Seven Lives) reflects in his 2009 entry: “It seems to me the thoughts and feelings of my age group become ever less important . . . I'm afraid I see younger people as the ‘me’ or ‘I want’ generations . . . There is a distinct difference in the ideas of my age group and those who have grown up since the end of the second world war. The welfare state has influenced ideas and thoughts more than is generally thought” (64).

Notably what unites many of the contributors is the apparently self-evident truth that adequate health and social care provision needs higher taxation. Policy making, of course, both reflects and shapes wider cultural perceptions of older people, and at present there is little indication among politicians that the voices contained in Growing Older with the Welfare State will be heard. But as the aim of the Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing researchers is that the insights revealed through the project are made available to policy makers, we can only hope that this work influences the ways in which older people are understood and valued for the insights they can offer rather than seen as a problematic Other.