Context: The Challenges of Urban Mission

Build my Church, which appeared in 1964, is one of many books and pamphlets published by Richards on matters of belief and ministry. It serves both as a history of the foundation of the church, and a summary of his views on church planting. In it, he recounted how he came to Slough in 1943 in response to ‘a call’, heard during an air-raid while ministering in London, to ‘a town I had heard about only a few times, and in which I had not the slightest interest … [and where] I did not know one single person’.Footnote ¹⁶ He had a total of £12 in his pocket. On arrival, he found:

In a book which describes Richards's success in establishing a thriving ministry in unpromising circumstances, this might seem self-serving. But there is much evidence to substantiate the challenging environment which Slough, and towns like it, presented to church leaders. Famously singled out by John Betjeman to characterize all that he disliked about mid-twentieth-century industrial life, Slough was prosperous, and had grown rapidly as new industries relocated around the periphery of London, providing thousands of jobs for workers migrating from depressed areas in the north and west of the British Isles.Footnote ¹⁸ But this had come at a cost; one local survey noted ‘the characteristic that strikes the outsider almost at once … here is a town with very little civic consciousness, with no centre to the life of the people and with no long tradition in which all have shared’. Too many arriving too quickly had resulted in a lack of cohesion: ‘the people themselves have come from all over the country … large groups of Welsh, Irish and Northcountrymen … have almost submerged the original inhabitants’.Footnote ¹⁹

Slough was not unusual in these respects. Rapid industrialization in the south-east and accompanying economic migration and urban development (particularly in and around London) posed significant challenges for all institutions.Footnote ²⁰ The churches were no exception. Speaking to the Church of England Assembly in 1935, Archbishop Lang warned:

His words could have applied to any of the major established Protestant denominations.

Table 1 shows the membership of the major non-Catholic Christian groupings in Slough in the period 1940–70, covering the period of Billy Richards's ministry at the Gospel Tabernacle, and Table 2 presents these figures relative to population.Footnote ²² The electoral rolls of all six Anglican parishes within which Slough was located suffered both an absolute and a proportional decline. The combined membership of the four major Nonconformist denominations (Baptist, Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian) remained constant, albeit at low levels relative to the population, before declining in the 1960s. The combined membership of some smaller Nonconformist congregations (two Brethren assemblies, a Quaker meeting and the Salvation Army) was smaller still, but constant relative to population. Only two groups showed strong growth both in absolute and relative terms: the Gospel Tabernacle and groups generally considered to be outside mainstream Christianity, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints and Seventh-Day Adventists.Footnote ²³

Table 1.

Membership of major Christian groupings, excluding Roman Catholic: Slough 1940–70

Sources: Anglican electoral rolls from the Oxford Diocesan Handbook; Baptist, Congregational, Methodist membership from a variety of published sources; Presbyterian and smaller Free Churches (including Brethren, Quakers and the Salvation Army) and other groups (including Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints and Seventh-Day Adventists) from SO sources: see Masom, Local Churches, 74–9.

Table 2.

Church Membership relative to Adult Population, Slough 1940–70

Table 1 shows that the Anglicans – the largest group – suffered an absolute decline of 20 per cent over the thirty-year period. However, relative to the adult population in a growing town, the decline was far more significant: a 60 per cent decrease, from 7.5 to 3 per cent. For the United Kingdom as a whole over the same period, Brierley has calculated that Anglican electoral rolls reduced from 11 to 7 per cent of the adult population.Footnote ²⁴ The significant difference in levels of adherence between the country as a whole and a new urban area such as Slough was evidence both of the challenges highlighted by Archbishop Lang and of the Church of England's failure to address them. The parish system was chronically slow to adapt to the new urban landscape, and this was compounded by increasing pressures on the Church of England's central funding, which limited the scope for building and staffing (or ‘planting’) churches in new areas. In Slough, for example, the population of one parish expanded from 1,500 to 30,000 residents in twenty years, but it was served only by two small church buildings, one incumbent and a curate.Footnote ²⁵

While the Church of England was hampered by institutional factors in its ministry to the new urban areas, mainstream Nonconformist denominations perhaps had greater freedom to respond. With varying levels of success, Baptists, Congregationalists and Methodists all sought to establish congregations in the new areas of the town after the First World War. During the Second World War, a Presbyterian church was formed, catering primarily to the growing Scottish community. These initiatives meant that, as Tables 1 and 2 show, absolute membership across the four denominations grew after the Second World War in line with population growth, before falling by over 25 per cent in the 1960s. However, for the United Kingdom over the same period, Brierley calculated that membership of these denominations declined from 10 per cent to 7 per cent of the adult population. Like the Anglicans, then, these denominations struggled to achieve the levels of adherence in newer urban areas which were seen in more established communities.Footnote ²⁶

There were various reasons for this, some of which also affected the Anglicans. Church planting was expensive and Nonconformist churches had to fund such initiatives largely with money raised locally. Moreover, to a greater or lesser extent, all Nonconformist denominations suffered increasingly from an inability to recruit new members, either from within, through transferring their children into adult membership, or from without, through attracting incomers to the town, to replace those moving away or simply lost through death.Footnote ²⁷ While this failure to recruit was partly due to a lack of church extension (now known as church planting), as Richards outlined in Build my Church, the environment seemed particularly difficult for church work.Footnote ²⁸ In the mid-1950s, one departing Methodist minister, who had previously worked in the north of England and in Wales, declared: ‘of all the places I have worked … I believe Slough is one of the worst for lack of spiritual life. I have found the further south I go people are less enthusiastic about spiritual living’.Footnote ²⁹ This, however, seems an unlikely explanation, since many Slough residents were migrants from the north and Wales. More plausibly, he felt that ‘Slough was difficult because it was such a new town’. Addressing Slough Baptist Church in 1941, the president of the Baptist Union spoke of attendances declining because new housing estates were too far away for children to walk to church, and of wireless services giving the less committed an alternative to Sunday worship.Footnote ³⁰ Such dynamics could also affect the internal vitality of congregations. Some years later, Slough's Baptist minister wrote:

Methodist leaders struggled with similar issues. As membership declined (albeit slowly) in the post war period, it became more elderly; commitment declined, reflected in lower attendances; and congregations became scattered across the town and less committed to fellowship meetings outside Sundays. This had a double effect on newcomers: existing congregation members used Sundays as their opportunity for fellowship with friends, and so were less likely to look out for, or even recognize, newcomers; and there were fewer fellowship opportunities for those newcomers in any case.Footnote ³²

The minister at the well-funded Methodist Central Hall, the Revd Francis Burns, challenged his congregation regularly about what he saw as their lack of commitment: ‘if all of us regarded our Church membership as lightly as some people do, there would be no Church left for us to go to on those few occasions when we decide to be present’.Footnote ³³ Indifference to Christianity in wider society was directly related: ‘I believe that the answer to the apathy of this generation is to be found in the missionary enterprise of all Christian people, and not simply in the zeal of ministers of religion, though that does count enormously’.Footnote ³⁴ And in this church at least, he felt it was seriously lacking:

Moreover, as noted above, all the main denominations also suffered from an increasing inability to recruit from within by educating children in the faith and transferring them into adult membership. This trend has been commented on widely, others noting the significant role played by Sunday schools and tracing their proportional decline during the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁶ Two factors can be noted here: firstly, churches needed to be attractive to families, whether all attending together or parents simply sending their children to Sunday school; secondly, Sunday schools were labour intensive, requiring a committed body of teachers and other helpers. This latter factor could be related to the commitment of church members; at least one previously healthy and growing Sunday school in Slough closed because of lack of helpers.Footnote ³⁷

Table 3 shows the total number of Sunday School scholars across the Baptist and Congregational churches in the town, with the Gospel Tabernacle for comparison. Reliable figures for the Methodists and Anglicans are not available. Baptist numbers grew in line with growth in the population of under-fifteen-year-olds, mainly due to new church plants, before falling back in the 1960s. Numbers at Congregational Sunday schools not only failed to keep pace with population growth, but fell steadily in absolute terms.

Table 3.

Major Nonconformist Sunday Schools, Slough 1940–70

Source: Masom, Local Churches, 229–37.

This, then, was the context in which Billy Richards sought to establish his new church. Immediately after the Second World War, the mainstream denominations maintained their existing memberships, but eventually these declined gradually in absolute terms through death or by people moving from the district. There was some success in establishing new congregations on the expanding housing estates, but overall church adherence lagged well behind the UK averages. The town was seen by experienced church leaders as spiritually apathetic and therefore a hard place in which to work. The congregations of existing churches became less tightly knit as members lived further from the church, and there was some perceived loss of commitment. Sunday schools began to decline relative to population, with the consequence that churches increasingly struggled to replenish their memberships ‘from below’, and congregations became more elderly.

The Gospel Tabernacle

Beginning from no established base in 1943, over the next thirty years Billy Richards would show that while church planting was certainly challenging, it was not impossible. By the time of his death in 1974, the Gospel Tabernacle had grown to over 600 members, meeting in a 450-seat building that had been extended several times over the years, with all funding raised from the congregation. Over a thousand children per week attended the twenty-eight children's and youth clubs across the town; and several thousand people subscribed to correspondence courses on evangelism, in a ministry that extended well beyond Slough.Footnote ³⁸ As Tables 1–3 show, within twenty-five years of its establishment, the Tabernacle had become the largest Free Church group in the town, with the largest children's and young people's work. The remainder of this article will explore the inspirational and institutional roots behind this growth story.

Richards was clear as to the reasons why other churches had struggled. In 1954, he wrote:

While this did have implications for the content of the church's message, as further discussed below, what this meant was that to appeal to the unchurched, or even to maintain the commitment of those currently within their congregations, churches needed to be spiritually authentic, offer a message relevant to everyday life and build a sense of community. In the same year, the church began to regularly advertise ‘12 reasons why you should attend the Gospel Tabernacle’:

1. 1 You will find real friendship

2. 2 You will find that the Services will appeal to both old and young

3. 3 You will be uplifted and strengthened to do your week's task

4. 4 You will meet hundreds of happy people whose lives and homes have been transformed

5. 5 You will find healing for body as well as soul

6. 6 You will find a Church that gives priority to your children

7. 7 You will find a Minister and Members whose chief concern is to help you

8. 8 You will find the burdens and cares of life can be lifted

9. 9 You will find Services arranged for all age groups

10. 10 You will find a Gospel that works

11. 11 You will find the Services are ‘alive’ and enjoyable

12. 12 You will find out the secret that brings over 650 adults, young people and children to the Services, Club and Schools of the Gospel Tabernacle each week.Footnote ⁴⁰

This formula certainly appealed to some members of the mainstream denominations, who ‘wanted something more’ than was being offered there, and consequently some of the Tabernacle's growth was through membership transference. For example, one eighty-four-year-old ex-Baptist and Congregationalist, who had at various times been a deacon, Sunday School teacher and lay preacher, moved to the Tabernacle in 1950 because the mainstream churches ‘lacked real life and gusto’.Footnote ⁴¹ However, for other recruits, there was no sign of any pre-existing church connection, and the appeal could be to the young as well as the old. One fourteen-year-old girl was taken to the church by a friend, and six years later was involved in several children's and youth activities and the choir. It appears that, consistent with its ‘12 reasons’, the church created the strong sense of community and commitment that other Nonconformist churches were struggling to maintain. A twenty-year-old reported being in church on four weekday evenings and both Saturday and Sunday, alongside her full-time job as a typist at a local engineering firm.Footnote ⁴² In describing the ‘Success Story of a Church’ in 1963, the local newspaper referred to it as ‘Religion with a Smile’.Footnote ⁴³

The Tabernacle sought not only to be relevant and friendly but to take advantage of contemporary means of communication. Richards broadcast regularly on Radio Caroline, and the BBC's Morning Service came from the church in May 1965.Footnote ⁴⁴ The two local newspapers were generally empathetic and gave helpful publicity. At various times, the Slough Observer printed a monthly ‘sermonette’ from Richards, and its letter pages often contained his views on contemporary culture and morals.Footnote ⁴⁵ In what now looks like a throw-forward to a later age, Richards introduced modern music into services, and was comfortable with a high media profile that made him a local ‘celebrity’.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was, as the Slough Observer was to put it later, ‘that old-fashioned religion in a new-fashioned way’.Footnote ⁴⁷

But the claim was that this was not just a matter of slick marketing and a friendly congregation, for the Tabernacle was a place where supernatural things happened. A Slough Observer reporter attended a healing service in 1952 and published five profiles of named Slough residents who claimed to have been healed of deafness, blindness, diabetes, a stiff neck and severe back pain respectively.Footnote ⁴⁸ Richards said: ‘we do believe that God can heal [people] today as he did in the past’. More widely, testimonies of personal spiritual encounter given by ordinary congregation members were a regular feature of services. After one service with testimonies by a butler, a manager, a salesman and a plumber, Richards explained: ‘the idea is to show people Christ can satisfy people whatever their occupation’.Footnote ⁴⁹

The mainstream denominations’ recruitment struggles have been noted. Two major foci for the Gospel Tabernacle from its establishment were the young and evangelism. As the general secretary of the Assemblies of God said of Richards later: ‘Early in his ministry he discovered the secret of inspiring others to win the lost for Christ. He realised the importance of children's and youth work and forged ahead with this until his work gained almost universal recognition and admiration.’Footnote ⁵⁰ By 1962, the focus on young people had resulted in seventeen Sunday Schools and youth clubs being established around Slough, with 850 children a week attending, while, as shown in Table 3, Sunday schools in other churches were declining. Many of these schools were on new estates where the traditional churches had struggled to attract unchurched incomers.Footnote ⁵¹ The groups employed a contemporary and appealing approach to attract children: as Richards said in 1969, ‘we believe in a lively and picturesque presentation of the gospel which will appeal to young people’.Footnote ⁵² This ‘lively’ approach included the use of conjurors, puppet shows and child-friendly songs, in addition to the long-standing highlights of any Sunday school, the family outings and the annual trip to the seaside.Footnote ⁵³ While some put the lack of commitment in other churches down to boredom, there was ‘no room for gloom at this Sunday School’.Footnote ⁵⁴ But the lively approach was not to devalue the message: ‘[Richards] set his face against merely entertaining youth … his object was always to challenge them with the demands of discipleship’.Footnote ⁵⁵ He led from the front (‘gospel salesman packs in the kiddies’), but also mustered a large team of teachers and helpers: ‘the church relies for its momentum on the fervour of its members’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In 1962, there were sixty teachers in the seventeen Sunday Schools; and the helpers included young people themselves; the worship services were supported by a twenty-two piece ‘swing band’, and the puppeteers were two sixteen-year-olds.Footnote ⁵⁷

The focus on the need for personal evangelism was equally explicit; the subtitle of Build my Church was A Fascinating Story about the Pioneering & Establishing of a Church through Personal Evangelism.Footnote ⁵⁸ Despite the Tabernacle's growth, this focus continued to the end. In the last edition of Dedication to which he contributed before his death, Richards devoted two pages to ‘The Importance of Door-to-Door Work’, declaring ‘it is the most productive kind of evangelism and more important by far than any form of mass evangelism’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Elsewhere he quoted C. H. Spurgeon, D. L. Moody and Billy Graham (amongst others) in support of this approach.Footnote ⁶⁰ While ‘personal evangelism’ involved inviting friends to church, as with the twenty-year-old typist mentioned above, it could also involve ‘door-bell evangelism’. In one early visitation project, the door of every home in Slough was knocked on over a seven-year period by a group of thirty church members, mostly young people.Footnote ⁶¹ The normally ebullient Richards conceded that its impact in ‘getting people to church’ might have been limited, as ‘not everyone is interested, but everyone knows we are here’. Later, the only other churches that seemed able to marshal the resources for such work were the so-called sects (Jehovah's Witnesses, Latter-Day Saints and Seventh-Day Adventists), whose enthusiasm relative to his own congregation had so concerned the Methodist Francis Burns.Footnote ⁶² It is noticeable from Tables 1 and 2 that alongside from the Tabernacle it was these groups that saw absolute and relative growth in the post-war period.

The Gospel Tabernacle demonstrated that strong leadership, a contemporary message, a focus on families and the young and an activist gospel directly relevant to everyday life could stimulate a high level of commitment. But this was based on a traditional theological understanding of the Christian message. As some ministerial colleagues sought to ‘modernize’ the content of the Christian message to make it more appealing to modern sensibilities, for Richards the ‘old fashioned messages’ were as valid as ever, it was simply that they had not been delivered effectively. In his Slough Observer ‘sermonettes’, he expounded an unapologetically evangelical message, defending traditional Christian positions on theology, behaviour and morals.Footnote ⁶³ During the 1960s, through the letters pages of the Slough Observer, Richards debated regularly with the liberal vicar of Colnbrook, on the east side of Slough, issues such as miracles, divorce and remarriage, evangelism, contraception and the virgin birth.Footnote ⁶⁴

Richards's methods were not to everyone's taste, and he did not always defend them in language that endeared him to clerical colleagues, as seen in his condemnation of the mainstream churches quoted above.Footnote ⁶⁵ The debates with the vicar of Colnbrook revealed deep-seated differences, and when another Anglican priest described some clergymen as ‘theatre-managers’, one of his targets was clear: ‘with an anxious eye on the empty seats, may God forgive us [if] we have often found ourselves ordering not public worship but public entertainment’.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1963, Richards conceded: ‘some people may find our methods unorthodox but I think they are justified because we get the message over’, and in 1969 he pointed to the results:

Locally, then, within thirty years Richards had established through his inspirational leadership a substantial institution, the largest Nonconformist church in the town, with premises to match a committed congregation of all ages, and a high local profile. But the institution had influence well beyond Slough.

From early on in his Slough ministry, Richards had looked beyond the UK for his own inspiration, while at the same time his own ministry provided inspiration for others. In 1953, he spent three months in the United States, combining a preaching tour with studying the methods of Christian youth movements.Footnote ⁶⁸ Later, he set up ‘Christian Witness’, a training and publishing venture based in Slough, with the declared purpose ‘to help build the Church of Christ by endeavouring to promote evangelism in the local church by seeking to train Christians in personal work at home and abroad’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Dedication was a monthly (later bi-monthly) magazine for church leaders and ministers, with a circulation of up to six thousand.Footnote ⁷⁰ Other materials included a correspondence course in evangelism, and a regular flow of written publications and cassette tapes of instructional material. One issue of Dedication listed around one hundred individual items that could be ordered.Footnote ⁷¹ From the early 1960s, an annual week-long Christian Witness convention was arranged, usually at a holiday camp. The 1970 convention in Paignton attracted over seven hundred residential delegates, including over one hundred ministers and their wives.Footnote ⁷² The twelfth convention took place shortly after Richards's death and attracted ‘the largest company ever to attend’.Footnote ⁷³ Early camps included young people, but as the work grew separate youth camps were organized. For example, in 1974, whilst the main convention took place in late September, a separate youth camp was held in North Wales with ‘several hundred’ attending.Footnote ⁷⁴ It was claimed that over ten thousand students had been enrolled in the ten-lesson correspondence course, which was supported through ten international centres across Europe, Africa, Australia and North America.Footnote ⁷⁵

There had been inspirational preachers in Slough before; for example, a young Methodist minister had drawn large congregations to the Central Hall in the years before the Second World War.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, that inspiration did not translate into widespread institutional renewal. Central Hall congregations fell following this minister's departure and, as noted above, the following years saw the church's leaders struggling with decline and perceived apathy. The Tabernacle's ‘12 reasons’ perhaps read like a ‘to do’ list for many a church but were hardly revelatory. The question is: why did Richards succeed locally where other able and experienced ministers struggled, and why did ministers both nationally and internationally look to his organization for support, guidance and inspiration?

Inspiration and institution

During his lifetime, the Gospel Tabernacle and Christian Witness ministries had been driven by the force of Richards's personality and, he would have claimed, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, growing and scaling the work required many people to be inspired to support the work practically and financially. The first step in institutionalization was therefore to mobilize a growing team of volunteer workers. Significantly, the principal of London Bible College, Gilbert Kirby, described Richards as ‘a man with a vision who inspired others to follow where the Lord was leading him’ with ‘a wonderful capacity for enthusing others’.Footnote ⁷⁸ David Powell, principal of the Assemblies of God Bible College, said:

Children and young people's work, as well as door-to-door visitation, required armies of volunteers, which many churches and secular youth groups struggled to attract during this period. The periodic expansion of the church building cost at least £26,000; in addition, funds were raised for the regular work of the church. All these are marks of a committed church congregation. Moreover, this army of workers was not just in support of a programme; they were key agents of the work itself, as the Methodist Burns had realized. Richards sought to inspire others to be in themselves inspirational. In 1970, he wrote of the greatest need of the local church being ‘Attractive Members’:

Those thereby recruited would add to the base of support and growth of the local institution. But inspiring others in this way went beyond Slough. Dedication magazine regularly included contributions from other ministers, many from Richards's own denomination, but also including Lloyd-Jones, Kirby and the chairman of the Keswick Convention.Footnote ⁸¹ The Christian Witness camps were similarly addressed by speakers from the wider church. The 1974 conference advertised six main speakers, of whom Richards was one, the other five being from churches other than the Gospel Tabernacle.Footnote ⁸²

Further steps in securing the growing institution were in building a facility for Sunday worship and the addition of various meeting rooms, offices for the full-time staff and, later, the Christian Witness ministry, which represented at least four phases of expansion in thirty years.Footnote ⁸³ Leadership began to be shared, with the establishment of a team of elders and deacons and another team of leaders for the children and young people's work. In January 1974, Richards took a further significant step in strengthening the core of the ministry by appointing three new assistant ministers.Footnote ⁸⁴

As noted above, Richards was a member of the Assemblies of God denomination, and was playing an active part in denominational matters at the time of his death.Footnote ⁸⁵ More widely, he sought to set the Tabernacle and its ministries within the institutional context of the evangelical movement. Kirby described him as ‘a convinced Pentecostal and a thoroughgoing evangelical [who] opened his pulpit to men who shared his basic beliefs and yet were not necessarily of his own denomination’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Contemporary influences included Westminster Chapel, London Bible College, the Keswick Convention and Billy Graham, of whose various ‘crusades’ Richards was the most committed local supporter from as early as 1954.Footnote ⁸⁷ Issues of Dedication regularly reprinted works by evangelical ‘greats’ such as Spurgeon, Moody, A. W. Tozer and Bishop J. C. Ryle.Footnote ⁸⁸

Perhaps one of the most significant tests of whether this work had taken an institutional form greater than the personality of one man, however inspirational, would come after his death, especially since that death came so suddenly. That the 1974 Christian Witness conference could be a success, only two weeks after Richards's death, was a first sign that his work was underpinned by a wider institutional base. Another was the way his local church responded to his loss. Under the leadership that Richards had appointed early in 1974, within three years the Gospel Tabernacle had outgrown its premises and began meeting in a local theatre with an expanded congregation.Footnote ⁸⁹ In following years, the church spawned new congregations in Langley and Windsor, and through partnerships created a network of churches along the Thames Valley. Over forty years on, the church, now known as Kings Church International, continues. The church's website proclaims its historical roots and provides six podcasts of sermons preached by Richards in 1973.Footnote ⁹⁰

In conclusion, without the story of the Gospel Tabernacle, the experience of organized religion in Slough after the Second World War, or at least that of mainstream Protestantism, could be characterized within Morris's framework of institutional marginalization and attenuation.Footnote ⁹¹ However, the ministry of Billy Richards offers both a case study in how inspiration and institution can work together and a formula for successful urban mission in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Again using Morris's words, as one example of ‘the adaptive strategies of churches’ employed to counteract apathy, marginalization and secularization, it may contribute to ‘a different reading of British religious history’.Footnote ⁹² Inspirational leadership was needed, focusing on the relevance of Christianity to everyday life and concerns and building a community of mutually supportive like-minded people. This became both the institutional core and an inspiration to others to investigate, and perhaps join, that community. Appealing to the young and families was crucial, both in building a congregation for all ages and in securing the future. While the Tabernacle's focus on ‘miraculous’ divine intervention might have appealed to a minority, the ‘12 reasons why you should attend the Gospel Tabernacle’ could have been a manifesto for any church. The Tabernacle presented an unapologetically traditional understanding of Christian doctrine and morals, but sought to adapt the presentation to modern expectations and means of communication while retaining its core values.Footnote ⁹³ Through this, Billy Richards demonstrated to evangelical ministers one example of (as Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it) ‘what we all should be doing’ in the changing urban landscape of late twentieth century Britain.Footnote ⁹⁴