For a few years following the Festival of Britain, life seems to have been a bit tame. After the strong foreign flavour of the war and immediate postwar years, the accent was again firmly on Britain. The AR faithfully recorded the earnest efforts of architects and builders to speed up construction methods in a time of scarcity, but the results were often drab and utilitarian (at least to our eyes); perhaps the frivolity of the Festival had become cloying. The immediate postwar euphoria of victory and achievement wore off: for instance as early as 1953, Richards was decrying the 'failure' of the New Town programme, one of the key postwar environmental policies intended to make Britain a decent country for everyone to live in.
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