The vintage ads in this section encompass everything from domestic appliances to work-place machinery, industrial processes, tech-nical advances (particularly during the war years), in short the rapid mechanisation of a post-agricultural world. Global trade was in its infancy - held back by the war - but burst forth again with the Festival of Britain in 1951, a ‘shop-front’ for British industry struggling to recover from the devastation of the 1940s. We never really made it: we were late replacing our railway stock, the industrial north slowly died with ship-building and steel lost to overseas competition, and the car industry was beaten by cheaper imports and industrial strife. In the absence of a strike, the men settled for work as an alternative, but it was too late: the global economy was leaving Britain behind.
