It was an important event and many people wanted to watch this celebration on their own TVs. “While prices of food and other necessities were steadily rising, the prices of small cars, in relation to earning power, were falling, and many products of new technology, such as television sets and washing machines, were, despite inflation, actually costing less.”
The people in Britain represented self-sufficient and quite isolated society. The general model was based on affluence set by customers. On the other hand, economists, new prophets of the epoch, found out that the productivity had been falling. Sociologists revealed deep inequalities and class differences which stopped the modernization of the ‘stagnating society’.


Situation of Servants and Aristocracy after the War
Before the war it was quite common among the people who belonged to the upper class that they had butlers and maids who are known from novels by P.G.Wodehouse or W.S.Maugham. But after 1945, women from the middle class were taking care of their households by themselves and there was a lack of maids because the servants can hardly find a job. Some of them fought in the war and sometimes there had no place to came back. During the war, some houses became temporary hospital for injured people and there were no jobs for servants. After the war, old families had not enough money to keep their mansions and that’s why they rented or sold them to museums, galleries or to people who became rich after the war. “Old aristocracy cannot take care of their old castles and parks anymore and that’s why many of them became the property of the National Trust.”
Of course, the upper class still keep the tradition but the big number of servants was not common anymore. Welfare State
Under the press of the labour movements, the Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan (1945-51) took measures to improve the social insurance and established the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. The NHS is generally regarded as the jewel in the crown of the welfare state. “If the fifties were disappointing, the sixties gave prospect of greater advance in spending money to equip the Welfare State”. Social care was actually financed by the state.

New homes
The Britain after WWII was destroyed a lot. This was a great challenge for architects. It is understandable that primary task was to build houses for living and schools. Charles Jencks called it “the English version of socialist realism”.