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This chapter explores how the policy of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation transformed the nature and intended functions of employment for people with mental health problems in post-war Britain. It focuses on industrial therapy, which hospitals implemented as part of rehabilitation programmes designed to prepare long-stay patients for discharge. This involved patients undertaking industrial sub-contract work in spaces designed to resemble a factory environment. The chapter considers two earlier developments which informed the ethos of industrial therapy; the system of rehabilitation designed to meet the needs of disabled soldiers during the Second World War, and occupation and employment schemes developed for people with learning disabilities. It explores the operation of industrial therapy units, which had been established in most British psychiatric hospitals by the 1960s, and the creation of complementary extramural facilities. Finally, the chapter evaluates the tensions between individual therapeutic needs and labour market requirements which came to the fore in industrial therapy, before examining how the industrial therapy model came under pressure due to changing social and economic circumstances in the late twentieth century.

This chapter delineates the process by which equal pay was achieved in the Civil Service and throughout the LCC, demonstrating the shifts and momentum changes after the Second World War. It therefore offers a comprehensive account of the union and association campaigns, the involvement of successive governments and the growing pressure placed on the public service hierarchy and governments from elsewhere. The chapter also explores for the first time the interconnections between the granting of equal pay in the LCC in 1952 and the Civil Service in 1954.

Dan Weinbren provides an authoritative historical account of the development of prisoner education at The Open University. Drawing on internal archives and wider historical contexts, Weinbren presents the complex narratives that shape our understandings of higher education and The OU’s efforts to fulfil its mission statement to be ‘open to people, ideas, methods and places’.

In 1951 the filmmaker and poet James Broughton moved to London from San Francisco. At that time he was beginning to garner a reputation for his short, whimsical, films, which often made use of outmoded costumes and decaying public spaces. One important reason he gave for moving was the idea that Britain had a more open-minded society for queer artists like himself to work within, in contrast to the McCarthy-era USA. With the help of a number of figures from the British film establishment he managed to make a half-hour-long film The Pleasure Garden in London. The film is for the most part set among the ruins of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the surrounding park. Broughton’s film is an allegory of Britain as he found it in the summer of 1951, asserting its own vision of a post-war national identity in the Festival of Britain. This chapter examines the way in which the Festival of Britain revived certain ideas of national identity from the past, yet neglected others – and the way in which these ideas were doubled and questioned in Broughton’s film.

The conclusion will draw together the strands developed during the rest of the book. It will assert that historians of post-war Britain should pay closer attention to developments within the workplace and try to see events there as reflective of their own particular social and cultural logics rather than simply mirrors to wider changes in political culture. It will call for more acknowledgement of how what workers did within factories changed British life both at work and beyond. Rather than pathologising industrial relations in this period, we should instead look to understand workplace activism as something that represented a real attempt to assert agency within British life and, consequently, as something that shaped attitudes and behaviours.