In 1979 Margaret Thatcher entered government with a huge mandate for change. Under her leadership, the Conservative Party began dismantling the post-war vision of a powerful welfare state - with its belief in state-ownership, public service and centralized committees - replacing it with a different set of values based on the primacy of the individual, free enterprise and financial deregulation. These ideological changes had a specific effect upon the design of the public realm, which became subject to market forces and was consequently stripped of its assets. The commercial sale of the British telephone network, for instance, meant that in streets across the country Giles Gilbert Scott’s iconic red telephone kiosk was replaced with an alternative British Telecom model bearing advertising on its metal back. The ensuing public protests saved some of the kiosks, but the act was considered by many as a direct assault on nationalization and even on the very fabric of British identity.

However, at the same time as Britain’s red boxes were under threat, simulations of the past were becoming more commonplace. Unlike post-war efforts to modernize street furniture - advocates of which wholeheartedly rejected ‘bogus “olde world” treatment’ in their vision of the future - the political climate of the 1980s was more than willing to commodify the past. Many municipal authorities consequently reintroduced cobblestones, Victorian-style street lamps (complete with make-believe gas flicker), fake cast-iron bollards and ‘heritage’ litterbins with the lettering and municipal coat of arms picked out in gold paint. These aestheticized versions of the past found widespread application in civic spaces once dominated by modernism. They were believed to complement every townscape and represented a means of reinstating the past – as well as Victorian values – within the public realm. In Theatres of Memory the Marxist historian Raphael Samuel described this phenomenon as ‘retrofitting’. For Samuel, these objects were ‘a kind of talisman of historicity’, but that underneath their ‘period dress’ was actually modernization in disguise. New ‘old’ street furniture signalled a change in ideological occupancy, just as municipal authorities tried to signal a change in occupancy with modernism during the 1950s.

But heritage street furniture raises certain questions: why choose a simulation of the past over the ‘real’ past? How can the past inform the present without resulting in unintended pastiche? And does nostalgia continue to shape the design of the street today? This paper will examine how heritage-style street furniture design incorporates the past into the public realm. It will specifically analyse these objects in the context of the Conservative policies of Thatcher in 1980s Britain, where pitched roofs, neo-Victorian decoration, and other changes in the built environment reflected a change in ideology. By looking closely at the role of government, conservationists, members of the public, civic societies and manufacturers, this paper will examine changing attitudes towards heritage, and explore the extent to which the roots of heritage-style street furniture are ultimately connected to post-war modernism.