AI-generated clips of an idealised, sepia-toned Britain – all quiet streets, simple pleasures and “better times” – have sparked a lively reader debate about nostalgia, and what life in the UK was actually like in the past.
While Liam Murphy-Robledo’s piece focused on how emotionally charged, selectively edited visions of the past can be monetised and potentially weaponised online, much of the reaction centred less on the AI content and more on the idea of “better times” and how accurately they reflect lived experience.
Readers drew heavily on their own memories to push back against romanticised portrayals of the past, describing smog, poor housing, lack of central heating, lower life expectancy and the everyday hardships of earlier decades. For them, nostalgia often obscures material realities rather than reflecting them.
Others, however, acknowledged those difficulties while still recalling a strong sense of community, more freedom for children to play outdoors, and a slower pace of life – suggesting that even if conditions were harder, social bonds and everyday experiences felt different.
Here’s what you had to say:
Nothing nostalgic about that
We lived in terraced housing with an outside toilet, a tin bath and no central heating. Nothing nostalgic about that!
And no, it’s not a competition to see who had it worse, just the reality of living in a Derbyshire mining village up until the mid-1970s.
Reader100
Remembering yellow smog
I remember yellow smog, how, as you approached London by train, you could notice grass getting sooty and grey, the yellow colour of the insides of the upper decks of buses, tinned fruit and corned beef.
Mmmmmmmmmm
Expectations are much higher now
Mid-1970s, we bought our first house in Dewsbury. No central heating, bare floors, just a basic sink unit in the “kitchen”, a mud patch for a garden. We had saved for the deposit and we furnished it, gratefully, with things friends and family gave us while we saved for carpets and furnishings. And we were two young graduates.
As you say, that was just the reality. Expectations are so much higher now.
nocomment
A rose-tinted view of the past
A rose-tinted view of the past is illusory. So is such a view of the present and of the future.
Embracing the new and discarding the old must be done with care. Is the proposed replacement actually better? Not always. This applies to devices, language and social processes.
Algol60
The past was grimmer than people remember
Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1970s and does remember what life was like in an analogue era, I can testify that it was a lot grimmer than it is these days. The economy was tanking, the country was in a fractious mood, and organised violence, courtesy of skinheads, the far right and football hooliganism, was not uncommon. The country was more monocultural, but that didn’t mean harmony, it meant widespread racism, sexism and homophobia. The basics of everyday life were far more difficult – keeping in touch in an era when even landlines weren’t universal was hard, houses with unheated bedrooms and bathrooms were not uncommon, and transport was unreliable, plus there was little to do.
Most nostalgia is a longing not for a lost past, but for a non-existent one – a fantasy world in which all the bits of society people dislike didn’t exist. That’s dangerous stuff, because it is peddling something not just undesirable but unattainable, and inviting people to be sad and angry that they can’t have it.
Tanaquil2
Growing up in the 70s was fun
Unless you were some kind of weirdo, then “growing up” in the 70s was fun. The economy was of no concern to kids who played out together all day until dark. That is a fact, not AI-generated propaganda.
I “kept in touch” every single day with people who were my friends, real friends, not online followers I had no idea about. We lived in and for the moment – no one else mattered to us and certainly not people we had never met. We were surrounded by a community looking out for us, and we had rules we understood and abided by – or were prepared to pay the consequences for breaking.
DanHardy
How much cities have changed
Before the regeneration money came into London, huge areas were run down and pretty bleak. Suburban friends were more often too scared to go out here for fear of a beating for going into the wrong pub or onto the wrong estate. Now you can drink and go out pretty much where you like, and middle-class girls ride bikes with bells on them, drinking wine in what were old gangland pubs and haunts.
Back then, bad as things were here, the term “grim up north” showed things were even worse there. Now those same places attract the middle classes and wealthy people from across the world, while Reformers insist the UK’s cities are Sharia law no-go zones.
BrotherChe
The dangers of idealising the past
People who are persuaded by nostalgic yearning for an England that never existed must be leading very empty lives devoid of critical reasoning.
The sepia photograph of three children sat around an open fire accompanying the article is a case in point. It looks to have been taken around the late 1940s or early 1950s, or it’s AI-generated.
The children depicted in no sense represent typical children of the period. They’re well dressed and well fed. The fire is burning merrily. The reality was that immediately post-war there was food rationing and acute shortages of pretty much everything.
There’s a disturbing echo of Nazi-period propaganda in which the “Fatherland” was presented as an Aryan idyll peopled by young peasant women surrounded by flaxen-haired children in these images. Turbo-powered emotional drivel is the standard playbook of fascists.
They’ve always had a talent for convincing a population unsure of itself and fearing for the future that only they have a silver bullet which will return everyone to an idealised past that few actually enjoyed.
Throughout history, it’s never ended well. The far right eventually destroys, first the population, and later itself.
PinkoRadical
Jumpers for goalposts nostalgia
When it comes to the evocative “jumpers for goalposts, playing footie in the street” style of nostalgia, Farage et al would be screaming from the rooftops about the unjustified restriction of personal freedom if we halved the number of cars on the roads in order to go back to my happy childhood days of kicking a football up and down the road for 10 minutes at a time before having to pick it up and let a car through.
RichWoods
Some of the comments have been edited for this article for brevity and clarity.
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