Nostalgia-tinged ephemera has been returning to the streets of Britain in recent weeks, whether it is a late 1980s Pepsi can revealed by recent flooding in Grantham or a Teeside Twix wrapper with a best before date during the miners’ strike. Even EastEnders’ Angie is back in Albert Square.
Those streets themselves are ripe for time-travelling too. It’s a funny thing that if you’re 21 or under and you want to revisit the streets of your own childhood, you’ve got Google Street View. You can happily zoom around any British road and see as far back as 2009, when the tech giant first started sending its camera cars out, and remind yourself what a Maplins or Comet used to look like.
But if, like me, you’re a little older, 2009 is the cut-off point. Of course, you can flip through your own photos, or see the odd cherry-picked shot that goes viral on a local social media group, but you can’t walk through the whole lot, Google Street View style. Which of us spent their time taking photographs of every town centre street to capture a sense of how they really looked over time? Who was there in the snow and rain as much as the dappled sunshine?
As it turns out, there was an elite group of people who were – inadvertently – doing precisely that: Britain’s bus-spotters.
Standing on street corners with their cameras year after year, these hardy omnibus obsessives evidently spent a lot of time documenting the various-liveried Leylands and Daimlers of their passion. But behind the buses, captured on 35mm film and now uploaded all these years later onto photo-sharing websites, are the nation’s shop fronts and alleyways and disappointing town centre pubs. They caught Britain as it really was, in all its mundane glory.
To my own personal joy, they were active in my home town of Chesterfield in my own younger years. I went on image sharing site Flickr – by far the best resource for this – and started searching. Behind a 1973 Daimler Fleetline is the long-closed clothing shop I was taken to for my first school uniform (you can see it in all its glory here). Another has a double-decker passing the branch of Supasnaps I’d get my holiday pictures developed at (here) waiting for days to get back my blurry images of beaches with a Quality Advice sticker of shame slapped on them.
You can try it yourself. Search for anywhere with a population of over, say, 20,000, add in a year, and boom: an instant nostalgia hit to the heart. You can more or less recreate the entirety of Bill Bryson’s 1994 journey through Britain as he wrote Notes On A Small Island, just through bus pictures. It’s wonderful.
My hope is that there is enough data to one day use AI to totally recreate the centres of most British towns just from the backgrounds of bus photos. Imagine being able to virtually walk through Newcastle in its shipbuilding pomp, or Birmingham as it was when Villa won the European Cup. You would see both things that were better than their equivalents now (art deco cinemas, public gardens) and worse (cigarette ads outside schools) – but the point is you would see it as it actually was.
Why does this matter? Because nostalgia has been a big motivator for right-wing parties in recent years. Researchers found that the more nostalgic American voters were, the more likely they were to vote Republican in the 2022 mid-terms; even the phrase “make America great again” is nostalgic. An ad shared by Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right AfD in Germany, paired AI-generated images of happy children with the question: “Do you remember how beautiful Germany once was?” In last summer’s election, Reform UK’s “contract” with voters promised it would “take back control over our borders, our money and our laws”.
There is a vast effort put into weaponising our memories – to convince us everything was better in an imagined past, and that it is a world we can go back to if only we elect the right people.
So it’s important to remind yourself that that world never existed. Things were never perfect. If you could see things as they actually were – and thanks to these bus-spotters you absolutely can – you’d know the days were no more golden then than now. Thanks to the bus photos we can see there were the same fine cars and traffic jams, the same mix of upmarket and tatty shops, the same bad weather and neglected buildings there ever were.
When you see things as they really were, you realise things were, for the most part, neither better nor worse in the past. You were just young.
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