In late 1993, a Victorian terraced house at 193 Grove Road, Bow, East London became the center of a debate over memory and contemporary art. As many of this journal's readers will know, the artist Rachel Whiteread did a concrete cast of the home's interior, then, on 25 October 1993, peeled back the skin of wall and ceiling to reveal “House.” Like much of her work, such as “Ghost” (1990) and the 2000 “Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust” in Vienna, Whiteread's “House” used the “empty” space of the inside of a home to present a monument to the history of ordinary lives. The stark white cast of “House,” sitting alone on an empty green with modern tower blocks in the distance, literally made concrete what had been invisible before: the interior of working-class lives in East London. But the sculpture proved as transient as the memory it sought to represent. Though (or perhaps because) Whiteread won the Turner Prize in 1993, Tower Hamlets council allowed the demolition of “House” on 11 January 1994, amid much argument and recrimination. By March, grass covered the site, and 193 Grove Road existed only in the video, film, and print devoted to Whiteread's “House” and, of course, in memory.Footnote 1

The controversy over Whiteread's “House” was partly about something familiar and predictable: the limits to the public acceptability of some contemporary art. But, as other recent exhibitions have also demonstrated, it was also about the tensions among history, memory, and their representation in the public sphere. The unusual subject and challenging form of Whiteread's monument to working-class domesticity meant its legitimacy as a memorial could be called into question. It was not about the dead or victims of war. It was not carried off in a recognized monumental style. But even if “House” ultimately fell beneath the bulldozer, the controversy illustrated the sharp and ragged edges of historical self-consciousness in contemporary Britain. Whiteread's desire to explore memory and the past revealed both the limits of representation and the borders of “legitimate” public history. Even with “House” removed from the landscape of East London, Whiteread had succeeded in questioning the nature of memory, memorials, and history in late twentieth-century Britain.

Island Stories and Moments of Modernity are also explorations of historical self-consciousness. Both put Britain before the mirror of modernity, affording a reflection haunted by the constant need to mark the differences and continuities with the past. Both works challenge what has been considered the legitimate history of twentieth-century Britain. The play between the solidity and transience of memory and the past and the questioning of the boundaries of historical representation found in Whiteread's “House” also infuses both works, if in a less controversial manner.

Island Stories reminds us yet again of the enormous loss to criticism and historical scholarship represented by Raphael Samuel's untimely death in 1996 at the age of sixty-two. As a historian of the city, the working classes, and national identity, a leading light of History Workshop Journal, and a commentator on a wide variety of contemporary issues in publications such as the New Left Review and the London Review of Books, Samuel made a rarely matched contribution to both the history of modern Britain and the understanding of contemporary British society. A theme that often runs through his work is the conversation between past and present, abrasive and halting by turns. The books he published in the last ten years of his life—The Myths We Live By (1987) edited with Paul Thompson, the three-volume Patriotisms (1988), and the first volume of the projected trilogy titled Theatres of Memory (1994)—pursued this strand of modern British consciousness and experience. Theatres of Memory did so from an angular and often personal perspective, whether discussing the demand for Victorian bricks in the gentrification of late twentieth-century London or setting out his criticism of 1980s adaptations of Dickens for the big and small screen. Against those like Patrick Wright, Samuel offered a defense of heritage and the past as an animating, constructive, and often subversive force in British society.Footnote 2

Island Stories is the second volume of Samuel's trilogy. It was assembled posthumously by Alison Light (with the help of Sally Alexander and Gareth Stedman Jones) from unpublished essays, talks, and fragments. In “A Biographical Note on the Text,” Light remarks that Samuel took his note-keeping method from Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with references on single pieces of cards and paper that could be put together in multiple ways. The essays that emerge from this bricollage are sometimes incomplete, sometimes fragmentary and uneven in tone and form, from the cool and assured overviews on the history of the four nations to provisional and hesitant thoughts on the built environment. They are organized in four sections, all addressing aspects of historical consciousness in modern Britain: “Nations, States and Empires”; “English Journeys”; “History, the Nation and the Schools”; and “The War of the Ghosts.” Describing these essays as “uneven” is not meant to be a criticism. Rather, their fragmentary and uneven character makes Island Stories compelling reading and affords a powerful testament to the strengths of its author.

There are many delights in the collection. Samuel's sharp wit as a political commentator is shown in a relentless, unforgiving, and entirely justified dissection of the narcissism and vacuity of the Social Democratic Party (1981–90). Samuel did not live to experience the chilling punch line to this, the election of New Labour in 1997, a “modernized” Labour Party that arguably owes as much or more to the legacies of the SDP and Thatcherite conservatism as to democratic socialism. New Labour's progress to date simply vindicates Samuel's criticisms of its forebear. His command of a wide literature on British history anchors essays on Puritanism, imperialism, and nationalism within Britain. Finally, Samuel's love of history and his fervent belief in it as a force in contemporary society shines through his contributions to the important debate on the place of history in primary and secondary schools that took place before and after the introduction of the 1988 Education Act.

A particular high point is the most personal essay in Island Stories, “Country Visiting: A Memoir.” In this, Samuel offers a seamless weave of memoir, biography (of Samuel's mother, Minna Keal), the social history of rural leisure, and a meditation on “aesthetic geography,” in which he traces the fragile and changing understanding of natural beauty in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Even in its unfinished state, the essay exemplifies the virtues of Island Stories: pellucid writing, deep and eclectic erudition, and, not least, a restive but always focused desire to understand the place and nature of the historical, whether in the history of Britain, the countryside, or the author himself. The history and memory it offers has a harsh clarity; like the preferred landscape of Samuel and his mother, it is glitteringly unsentimental: “gorse and heather … rocky heights” rather than “quiet meadows.” Representing the “unruly open space” of the past interests Samuel more than providing it with the tidy borders of a village green (p. 132). Part of this unruliness is the recognition that history is always in motion, whether in private memory or in public events. By melding subjective memoir with social and cultural history, Samuel offers us his own version of “House,” bringing to life an interior memory within an exterior history, then reversing their positions.

Moments of Modernity begins with the evocation of the 1953 coronation, a “Janus-faced event … orchestrated against a background of elaborate tradition,” which simultaneously strove “to project a vision of the future” (p. 1). If Samuel's vision of Britain rested on the constructive tension between past and present, the history of Britain between the Second World War and the Beatles traced by the editors and contributors is similarly about a temporal threshold, with the modern age “a hybrid affair, assembled out of tales about the past as well as narratives of the future” (p. 3). The critical angle adopted by the editors is that of “modernity.” Anthony Giddens is the main influence in the editors' conception of this in the postwar period, which they see “marked by an intensification of many of the basic traits of modernity as these are increasingly inserted into the global mechanisms of culture, communications and systems of production … [and] characterized by accelerated processes of self-reflexivity, both in relation to the project of modernity itself and in relation to one of its key ingredients—the ways in which the self is ordered and experienced” (p. 10).Footnote 3 Other recent works have also attempted to map the historical development of the modern and modernity in twentieth-century Britain. As one has remarked, this examination is “in its infancy when compared with the prominence of this field in other national historiographies.”Footnote 4 While these works have largely looked at the first half of the twentieth century, Moments of Modernity locates the flowering of British modernity after the Second World War. The factors that support this argument include the rise of welfarism and state education that encouraged “new social settlements” (p. 15) and the deployment of expert knowledge to shape ideas of community, state, and individual, as well as the emergence of a new political culture after the war and the complication of British identity by imperial decline, globalization, and the beginnings of multiracial society at home. Within this domestic and international framework, the editors argue, a peculiarly British form of modernity appeared.

The editors are also consciously revisionist and critical of the state of twentieth-century British history. They make it clear that they (though, as is suggested, not all of their contributors) write from positions of “discontent” (p. 4) and “dissatisfaction” (p. 3) with the current literature. Comparing this body of work with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, they suggest that the historiography of the mid- to late twentieth-century has been a thin affair, dominated by narrow political narratives and unadventurous methodologies. With some qualification, this is fair criticism. Though the two main journals devoted to twentieth-century Britain have increasingly turned to areas outside of economic and political history, as has the Institute for Contemporary British History, our understanding of post-1945 Britain has yet to be entirely loosed from its moorings in Whitehall and Kew.Footnote 5 Its narrative remains a political one, about political consensus and economic decline. It has not yet fully incorporated insights from cultural, gender, or social history. Recent contributions, mostly in cultural, gender, and imperial history, have shown possible avenues forward, but it is hardly controversial to say that more needs to be done to give twentieth-century British history the depth and vision of work on previous centuries.Footnote 6Moments of Modernity is a conscious intervention in this debate, using modernity to shift our focus toward new horizons.

The editors take two risks, the first a particular vision and version of modernity, the second a consciously dissenting stance on post-1945 history. A problem with both gambles is ensuring the commitment of all their essayists. In Moments of Modernity, some of the contributors remain stubbornly on the quayside while the ship moves off. Noel Whiteside, Nick Tiratsoo, and Harriet Jones provide solid but very conventional explorations of “modernization” in the post-1945 period rather than “modernity” (an understanding that primly ignores Giddens, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, or any other theoretical troublemakers). Each brings out the limitations of and resistance to modernization in, respectively, the labor market, productivity, and Conservative policy. All three essays are strong, but none would be out of place in a more conventional narrative of postwar Britain.

When the connection is consciously made between the chosen meaning of modernity and the postwar period, the collection succeeds brilliantly. One genuinely gets a sense of something new being written. This comes through to a degree by Pat Thane on population policies, Peter Mandler on land planning, Becky Conekin on the Festival of Britain, and Frank Mort on consumerism. It is most fully realized in the contributions of Peter Bailey, Carolyn Steedman, Chris Waters, and Martin Francis. Steedman writes of the intersection between developments in postwar education and curriculum (particularly in English) and the writing of working-class lives. This “State-Sponsored Autobiography” was an exercise in the kind of modernity the editors propose for postwar Britain: taking the “‘I,’ the self, the named individual, as the focus for writing for educational purposes” (p. 53) changed notions of class, community, and nation. Martin Francis's essay on the place of emotional restraint in postwar Labour and Conservative parties and the reflection on Peter Wildeblood and postwar homosexuality by Chris Waters show the complex latticework of discourses on the self that enframed the individual's relationship to politics, the law, and society. Both essays deconstruct the traditional narratives of postwar elites.

Peter Bailey's essay is the gem of this collection. “Jazz at the Spirella” is Bailey's memoir of growing up with (and through) jazz in Coventry in the 1950s and a compelling account of the private and public forces at work in the shaping of the postwar self, through the spheres of sex, masculinity, education, and culture. Bailey's alter ego, “Porridge Foot Pete,” the piano-playing grammar school boy dreaming of America and excitement, tells us much of the nature of British modernity after the war: “Jazz at the Spirella was an exercise in modernity of a distinctively conservative and English kind. It was fuelled by fantasies from the hyper-modern other world of America, yet contained by the claims and dependencies of welfarism and its own strongly self-regarding national culture. The reach for ‘vital experience’ found expression in a cautious adventurism that was characteristic of the period” (p. 40). Bailey's work has always shown an enviable combination of impeccable scholarship, theoretical sophistication, brilliant writing, and, of course, keen wit; this essay is no exception.Footnote 7 It is a regrettably rare thing to laugh with a historical essay. How often, for example, can one say that the author's graceful transition between a reflection on teenage masturbation and the views of the Frankfurt School on popular culture will have readers rolling in the aisles? But as with the best wit, Bailey's work also poses a serious challenge. Like Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman (1987) and Annette Kuhn's Family Secrets (1995), Bailey shows how, in the right hands, departures into subjectivity can avoid the pitfalls of mere self-indulgence and instead incisively map the borderlands between personal and public history and between theory and experience.Footnote 8 Such subjective history is a particular contribution that contemporary history can make to broader historical consciousness and writing.

There are criticisms to be made of the volume. The emphasis on selfhood and subjectivity in the best essays submerges to some degree an examination of collective identity. Though Bill Schwarz and Becky Conekin offer interesting, if uneven, contributions on race and national identity in the forties and fifties, the collection might have been strengthened by more discussion of the permutations of class and racial identity on which Chris Waters has written very evocatively in other spheres.Footnote 9 More broadly, committing oneself to a particular understanding of modernity dims the radiant ambivalence of the term: are there other understandings of modern and modernity that might also have been usefully mobilized for the postwar period? The editors make an excellent case for the temporal anchoring of this in the postwar period, but is there not an argument to be made that the ordering of the self and the processes of modernity to which the editors refer happened not only in the post-1945 period but also in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the sphere of gender and sexuality?Footnote 10 This can also be said for the particular character of modernity in Britain compared with other European experiences, its dialogue rather than disruption among past, present, and future. Using the emergence of the welfare state, political consensus, and decolonization as the reasons for focusing on postwar modernity, the collection paradoxically makes reference to a traditional narrative it also seeks to subvert. In part, of course, this is the point: to show other ways of telling that story, but it might still have been useful (and more subversive) to trace the continuities between earlier and later modernities, with the Second World War as a fulcrum, rather than starting point.

But even with these critical notes, Moments of Modernity makes a crucial contribution to the historiography of mid- and late twentieth-century Britain. It brings theoretical perspectives common in other historiographies to bear on twentieth-century history. As in the work of Samuel, the best essays in the collection slip between cultural, social, and political history, without sacrificing or distorting rigorous archival research and textual analysis. As with Samuel, this is a rich bricolage, not a facile eclecticism. Moments of Modernity also helps change the narrative and analytical focus of the field.

The importance of both Island Stories and Moments of Modernity lies in how they make visible the hidden corners of mid- and late twentieth-century Britain. Like Rachel Whiteread's “House,” they help bring the shaded interior of memory and the recent past into the light and force us to confront that history in new and challenging ways.