Ross Bradshaw reviews a recent play at the Nottingham Playhouse about the 1984 Miners' Strike.

Wonderland, written by Beth Steel, was the first play of the new artistic director at Nottingham Playhouse, Adam Penford. It ended with a full house and an almost completely standing ovation. It was, I gather, not the first ovation during the run.

Wonderland was set during the lead up to and throughout the year of the miners' strike of 84/85. Much of the play was set underground with a terrific set by Morgan Large which gave you both the sense of grandeur in some of the big halls underground, and the claustrophobia of the lifts taking miners to the coal face.

Like many in the audience, I was around during the strike in Notts., and knew how it ended, but the play's and the strike's turning points still kept me tense. In fact knowing what would happen created more tension, such as when the police waved pickets through to Orgreave. We all know now it was an ambush. There were people in the audience last night who had been at Orgreave on the day.

The whole play was well acted. The Tory wet, Peter Walker, conflicted over doing a job he only half believed in was, perhaps, the stand out. But the group of miners, from hardened men with their pension in sight to new, nervous recruits, played so well. I had not picked up in advance they had to sing and dance, at the same time as looking like they were people who worked hard, smeared in filth. Naomi Said, the Movement Director, deserves credit for the choreography on stage.

The creepy David Hart was, perhaps, played too much for laughs and being identified as a Jew (which he was not, other than by his father's family history and his experience of anti-Semitism at Eton)
made me uncomfortable. But yes, he was creepy like that in real life and, like the incoming "butcher" NCB director Ian MacGregor - and the working Notts miners, for that matter - he was considered expendable in the end by Margaret Thatcher.

Being Notts., of course, most NUM members did not strike, and some who did were starved back before the end. The arguments on the picket line were intense, and you felt for the young lad who'd had to kill his dog because he could no longer afford to feed it. Eleven months in, people had sold everything they could sell.

The play was not all grim. Pit humour was good. The best laugh was when a car load of pickets were stopped and, knowing they would not get through anyway, and said to the police they were Morris dancers. At the end, the cast individually mentioned some of the stories - of those who had died during the strike, including the three children who'd lost their lives scavenging for coal. The three miners who had committed suicide. The taxi driver who was killed taking a scab to work. The striker David Jones, killed at Ollerton on the picket line. The devastation of the communities left behind.

The audience rose and saluted the cast, and they dropped down Welbeck NUM banner, where the writer's dad had been a miner. As I stood I was thinking of loyal NUM members I know like Eric Eaton, Keith Stanley and Brian Walker, who died a few weeks back, and others I'd met in what is now the Notts Retired and Ex-Miners group. And four women, active in the strike, all now dead - Liz Hollis (who killed herself during that year), Pat Paris, Ida Hackett and Joan Witham.

In discussion with friends, it is the absence of women that comes up. There is power play between Hart, Walker, MacGregor and the ideologue, Nicholas Ridley. Underground, and later on the picket line, there is the traditional miners' camaraderie, a brutal reminder from the experienced "Bobbo", played by Tony Bell, that every miner watches each other's back (the symbolism of that statement is not lost) and a moving, even loving scene when the miners washed each others back, in the shower after a shift. This was a play about men, and men's relationships. Yet women, in Notts and elsewhere, were visible in the strike, in the soup kitchens, on platforms and on the picket lines. At Welbeck as much as anywhere. A few lines in the play reflected this, but it would have been quite easy to include women on the picket lines without needing to change the nature of the production.

Still, a fantastic effort by the whole ensemble.

Wonderland has now finished at the Nottingham Playhouse, but may be touring elsewhere. For a short film which puts the role of women in the miners' strike centre stage, see here.

Ross Bradshaw keeps calm while reviewing Owen Hatherley's latest book of essays on nostalgia.

This set of essays starts with the well-known image, in Gill Sans type, with a crown at the top and plain lettering saying KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. This annoying slogan, Hatherley found, seemed to follow him everywhere, sometimes with varied text, even to street markets of Eastern Europe. Good job he had not come to Nottingham where you can see a poster outside the type of hairdresser I could never go into saying KEEP CALM AND GET YOUR HAIR DID. Or even Five Leaves Bookshop where we stock a similar card says KEEP CALM I’M AN ANARCHIST. Once, in Forest Fields (a local Asian area) I saw a T-shirt saying KEEP CALM I’M A MUSLIM. So far, so annoying, but Hatherley turns this into a general public desire for “austerity nostalgia” as that image became a staple in museums and gift shop harking back to better, more innocent times when “we” were “fighting the Hun and eating SPAM”. Hatherley goes to town exploring the vacuous and reactionary nature of such nostalgia.

More challenging for us on the Left is his like-minded attack on Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45 film, with its use of black and white, brass bands, the absence of the impact of Windrush and its avoidance of the downside of the Labour Government that gave us the NHS but also brought us nuclear weapons and dirty colonial wars. His objections are aesthetic as well as historical. I like a brass band as much as the next person but began to feel a little shifty when Hatherley moved on to the film on Tony Benn, Will and Testament, as, though it does not overlook colonialism, it parades “more brass bands and mournful marches”. Are we, too, guilty of what EP Thompson called the “enormous condescension of posterity”?

Moving on, Hatherley picks out the London Underground, which itself was no innocent in selling nostalgia with its there-will-always-be-an-Engerland posters advertising “Golders Green: a place of delightful prospects” or “Live in a new neighbourhood – Dollis Hill” with suburban satisfaction only a Tube ride away. Many pages are devoted to the Tube stations. Despite Verso’s dreadfully printed pictures I’ll make a point in visiting Arnos Grove, described lovingly by Hatherley. At this point I lost the thread of his main argument but cared not at all as modernism, constructivism and other such “isms” whizzed along. Hatherley mentions in passing that the foremost Tube station designer, Frank Pick (excuse my laboured pun in the first sentence of this paragraph), advised on the Moscow Metro and picked up an Order of Lenin for his troubles. Now there’s an answer for some pub quiz question sometime. Pick also worked for the now forgotten Empire Marketing Board, some of whose imagery is described but, thankfully, not shown.

In the longest chapter, “Family Portrait”, Hatherley sifts out information showing that the public did not “keep calm and carry on” in wartime, not least in occupying the Underground against the wishes of their rulers and in one choice incident, shouting down someone who tried to get some community singing going. If you are going to have to sleep in a deep underground shelter with your home being blown up above ground you might not want to celebrate by singing.

The book is on strong ground when it comes to housing, reminding us that Bevan also built houses as well as the NHS, insisting on good housing, well-built and spacious such as at Spa Green and good buildings for health such as the Finsbury Health Centre. Bevan was less keen on the more revolutionary preventative work of the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, this being mentioned here in passing. Hatherley has a lot to say about the designer Berthold Lubetkin, one of many architects and designers who either originated from mainland Europe or whose practice would draw on European modernism. Of course most of Bevan’s Council houses have been sold off on the cheap and now resell expensively as the well-heeled of London have come to appreciate that former Council housing, much of it, was well designed and well-built.

Indeed, Hatherley remarks that increasing London commercially-built housing is designed to blend in with and look like Council housing, which was often appropriate to the environment unlike the Degeneration/Regeneration of the New Labour years. Ironically, after taking a swipe at the “free Boris Johnson propaganda and property porn rag, the Evening Standard” Hatherley gives credit to the mayor’s London Design Guide for improving standards.

The London mayor of course. And this – together with Verso’s awful muddy photographic reproduction – is the book’s main weakness. Most of the book is about London, London and more London. Hatherley is also weak on solutions – housing, especially in London, is in crisis, but however much deserving of support we need bigger solutions than the Focus E15 Mums, however much they “have not shown the Blitz spirit, they have not kept calm and carried on, and their iconography and slogans reflect that”. Not that Hatherley alone has to come up with solutions. That’s a job for all of us.

The Ministry of Nostalgia does, occasionally, show the signs of a publisher approaching an author with a book idea based on a couple of magazine essays. Sometimes you can see the sellotape holding it together. But that’s a trivial complaint because Hatherley can write. His demolition job on Norman Foster’s Imperial War Museum is a treat. There you can see the tired atrium (Foster loves atriums), the steps that go nowhere, the inaccurate captions on exhibitions, wonder about the brushing aside of inconvenient narrative and end up in the gift shops where you can buy a new catalogue featuring a foreword signed by Prince William. It’s a place “to pig out on Gill Sans, muted colours, Blitz spirit, crown logos, wartime cooking, duplicate ration cards – whatever your fantasy about living in genuine privation and fear might be … in a building that evokes a Bravo Two Zero version of a PFI hospital. The Museum of Keeping Calm and Carrying On.”

The Ministry of Nostalgia is published by Verso at £18.99. This article was first published in the Morning Star.