Rosy Retrospection Won’t Improve Our Towns

Remembering what was good is important. Pretending everything was better is holding us back

I’ll be straight with you. I am not immune to nostalgia.

Show me a photo of a Woolworths pick and mix, an old Argos catalogue, a PlayStation 2 loading screen, a Nokia 3310, an Arsenal shirt from the 2003-04 season, or a Blockbuster video case, and part of my brain immediately goes: yes, that was better. Let’s bring that back.

Of course it does. Nostalgia works because it is warm, simple and emotionally efficient.

My generation does this. At the same time, we laugh at older people for romanticising the 1950s, 60s or 70s, then immediately share posts about how life was better when Freddos were 10p and children supposedly roamed the streets until dark with nothing but a packet of crisps and a vague promise to be home for tea.

Some of that may be true. Maybe times were better back then.

But what if they weren’t?

What if a lot of it is just the fact that we were children?

Children are not generally worrying about mortgage rates, planning policy, public sector budgets, road safety audits, social care demand, business rates or whether the town centre economy is structurally viable.

Sometimes things did not get worse. We just got older.

That sounds harsh, but it is often true. You remember the sweet shop, not the rent review. You remember the park, not the maintenance budget. You remember the high street as a place of possibility because you were not the person trying to keep a small business afloat through rising costs, changing habits and competition from the internet.

You see this all the time whenever anyone talks about the future of a town.

“This place used to be so much better.”

Sometimes it is about the shops. Sometimes traffic. Sometimes buses, parking, young people, pubs, empty units, roadworks, litter, antisocial behaviour, housing, community spirit, or the general feeling that everything has become a bit harder, colder and less ours.

And, to be fair, people are not always wrong.

Some things really have been lost. Much-loved shops have closed. Services have been cut. Communities can feel more fragmented. Roads are busier. Town centres have lost some of their everyday usefulness. Public spaces are not always cared for as they should be.

It would be glib to pretend all of that is just nostalgia.

But there is another thing going on too.

A lot of our debates about towns are haunted by a slightly unreal version of the past. Not the past as it actually was, with all its problems, exclusions, inconveniences and arguments, but the past as remembered through a warm filter. A past where the shops were always full, the traffic was always manageable, the buses always turned up, children always played outside, everyone knew their neighbours, and everything somehow worked.

This is sometimes called rosy retrospection, or the golden age fallacy.

Put more simply: the belief that things were always better before.

The trouble is that our towns cannot move forward if every conversation about their future is forced to compete with an edited version of the past.

History is not the problem

I should say something clearly: history is amazing.

History is one of the best things our towns have, especially my town of Abingdon. It is what makes a place different and unique. It is in the street names, old buildings, market places, churches, pubs, riversides, civic traditions, local characters and half-remembered stories people pass down.

Without history, towns become interchangeable. They become retail parks with a clock tower.

So this is not an argument against caring about the past. Quite the opposite.

A town that does not understand its history will make bad choices. It will fail to protect what is special. It will flatten local character. It will forget why certain views, spaces and buildings are important.

Good history gives a town roots.

The problem is not history. The problem is bad nostalgia.

History asks what really happened. Nostalgia often asks only what feels comforting. History helps us understand how a place became itself. Nostalgia can trick us into thinking the town reached perfection at some unspecified moment in the past, probably around the time we personally felt young, secure and happy.

That is where the trouble starts.

The internet has industrialised nostalgia

Nostalgia accounts are everywhere now.

Some are harmless and lovely. They post old photographs, local memories, vanished shops, street scenes, school uniforms, old buses and reminders of what places used to look like. At their best, they are a kind of public archive. They help people remember. They connect generations. They preserve local identity.

But they can also become engagement machines, farming your clicks for their own benefit.

“Remember when Britain looked like this?”

“Who remembers proper high streets?”

“Back when children played outside and people had respect.”

“Before everything went downhill.”

Literally the first example since I started writing this post. Lazy, sloppy, thoughtless engagement farming

These posts work because they invite a very easy emotional response. Like. Share. Comment. “So true.” “Those were the days.” “Not like now.” “We’ve lost so much.”

The problem is not that the memories are fake. Often they are real.

The problem is that they are incomplete.

Nostalgia accounts rarely show the past in full. They show aesthetic fragments: busy high streets, old shop signs, packed markets, department stores, children on bikes, local newspapers, bus stations, pubs with darts teams, and people in town centres before online shopping, out-of-town retail parks, smartphones and supermarket deliveries changed everything.

They do not tend to dwell on damp housing, unsafe workplaces, casual racism and sexism, smoking everywhere, poor accessibility, dangerous roads, lower environmental standards, weaker consumer protections, or the fact that plenty of people at the time also thought the country was going to the dogs.

Nostalgia accounts are not history accounts.

They are mood accounts.

And this happens to be important because mood shapes politics.

Our towns are not doomed

There is another risk in all this, which is that we talk ourselves into believing our towns are doomed.

My own town of Abingdon is not immune from these feelings. Far from it. You see the same complaints here as everywhere else: the old shops people miss, the traffic people hate, the buses that are not good enough, the buildings people wish had been treated differently, the sense that the town centre is not quite what it was.

Some of that is fair.

But Abingdon is also still a place people want to live. People move here. Families try to settle here. House prices remain painfully high. Schools, river walks, community groups, sports clubs, pubs, independent businesses, history, location and local identity still make it attractive.

That does not mean everything is fine. High house prices are not exactly a sign of civic perfection, especially for younger people and families trying to stay near where they grew up.

But it does mean the doom narrative is incomplete.

If a town were truly finished, people would not still be desperate to live there.

The reality is more complicated. Our towns are not dead. They are under pressure. They are changing. They are being asked to absorb national problems that no single town created: housing shortages, ageing populations, online shopping, stretched public finances, traffic growth, social care demand, climate adaptation, changing work patterns and the long tail of austerity.

That is a very different thing from saying everything is ruined.

And if we misdiagnose the problem, we will reach for the wrong solutions.

Why things really changed

This is especially true when people talk about high streets.

Most towns have a list of lost shops that people still talk about with real affection. The department store. The butcher. The record shop. The hardware shop. The toy shop. The local cinema. The pub that changed hands. The bank branch that closed. The market that used to feel busier.

These losses are not simply commercial changes. They change how a place feels.

But we have to be honest about why they happened.

The modern high street has been hit by enormous forces. Online shopping changed how people buy things. Supermarkets and retail parks changed what people expect from convenience, parking and price. The pandemic accelerated habits that were already shifting. Banks moved services online. Chains consolidated. Independent businesses faced rising rents, wages, energy bills, insurance costs and supply pressures.

Many people who mourn the loss of local shops also, quite understandably, buy a lot of things from their sofa because it is cheaper, faster and easier.

That is not a moral failing. It is just reality.

The law has also changed to match this. The old idea that every unit has one fixed use forever is increasingly out of date. In England, planning rules now give a lot of flexibility to many town centre uses. A building that people think of simply as a “shop” may, depending on the details, be able to become a café, office, gym, clinic or other service use without the kind of planning fight people might expect.

You can dislike that. You can think councils should have more control. You can worry about the loss of traditional retail. But it does mean we have to be realistic about what can and cannot be controlled locally.

The high street of the future will not be a perfect recreation of the high street of the past. It may have fewer traditional shops and more food, drink, leisure, services, community uses, events, pop-ups, markets, workspaces, health uses, homes nearby, and public spaces where people actually want to spend time.

That does not mean giving up.

It means adapting.

A town centre can still be useful, beautiful and alive. But it will not get there by pretending the world has not changed.

Councils have not escaped the real world either

People look around and say: why is everything harder now? Why are councils not doing more? Why are roads not better? Why are services stretched? Why does everything take so long?

Some of that frustration is fair. Councils are not perfect. They can be slow, bureaucratic and maddening. Things fall through cracks. Communication is not always good enough. Mistakes happen.

But we should also be honest about the wider picture.

For well over 15 years - probably going back to the global financial crisis - local government has been battered by austerity and government cuts. At the same time, demand has risen sharply in areas councils are legally required to provide, especially adult social care, children’s services and support for people with special educational needs and disabilities. This means less money for the nice things people remember.

We are also an ageing society. That is not a bad thing. People living longer is a sign of progress. But it does mean more people needing care, more complex needs, more pressure on families, more pressure on the NHS, and more pressure on council budgets.

All combined, it means there is not one big magical pot labelled “make the town nicer”.

Increasingly, a huge share of local government money is swallowed up by statutory services. Social care alone now takes a vast proportion of council spending. I have written about this before, and it is hard to overstate how much it shapes everything else. Almost everything you hate comes back to this.

Every pound spent meeting urgent care duties is a pound that cannot also be spent filling potholes, maintaining grass verges, subsidising buses, cleaning streets, improving parks, repairing pavements, supporting youth services or making town centres look better.

That does not mean we accept decline.

But it does mean we should stop pretending every local frustration is caused by a lazy councillor, a useless officer, or someone “not caring”.

Most councillors I know, from all parties and none, are trying their best within systems that are often underfunded, overcomplicated and thankless. You may not always see the work. You may not like every decision. You may think some councillors are better than others. Fair enough.

But casual abuse of local councillors has become a cheap shot.

It is easy to sit online and say they are all useless, corrupt, stupid or only in it for themselves. It is much harder to put your own name on a ballot paper, knock on doors, take the abuse, read the papers, sit through the meetings, make the compromises, answer the emails, and have people blame you personally for problems built up over decades.

If more people put their own neck on the line, they might discover that local government is not full of villains twirling moustaches. It is full of imperfect people, working with imperfect tools, often around full-time jobs, trying to make difficult decisions in a country that often expects Scandinavian services on bargain-basement funding.

By all means criticise councillors. Hold us to account. Challenge decisions. Demand better.

But do not pretend that shouting “they don’t care” is a serious substitute for understanding the problem.

So what do we do with nostalgia?

Every town has its version of this.

The old department store. The cinema that closed. The pub that became flats. The shop everyone misses but perhaps not enough people used. The bus route that used to run. The playing field that became an estate. The market that used to feel busier. The road that “never used to be this bad”.

These memories are fine, and important. They are part of the story of a place. They should not be sneered at.

Often, when people say “the town used to be better”, what they are really mourning is belonging.

They miss knowing their neighbours. They miss children being able to move around independently. They miss useful local shops. They miss buses that felt like a proper public service. They miss homes ordinary families could afford. They miss public spaces that felt cared for.

Those are not silly things to miss.

But nostalgia is only useful if we treat it as a clue rather than a destination.

Ask not “how do we recreate 1995?”

Ask: “what was 1995 giving people that they miss today?”

Usually the answer is not Woolworths.

It is belonging. Independence. Safety. Affordable homes. A lively high street. Knowing your neighbours. Feeling that the town is looked after.

Those things can still be built.

But they will not be built by automatic resistance to change. We cannot simultaneously complain about empty town centres while opposing every change that might bring people back into them. We cannot lament traffic while rejecting better alternatives. We cannot say homes are unaffordable while resisting every proposal to build them. We cannot say children no longer play outside while treating every change to street design, crossings, speeds or parking as an attack.

Of course people can object to bad development. Of course design matters. Of course some schemes are poorly thought through. Of course councils, developers and national government can all get things wrong.

Local criticism is not the problem.

The problem is when criticism becomes automatic. When the starting point is always no. When the past is treated not as something to learn from, but as a reason why the town must never evolve.

The past is a good teacher, but a terrible town planner.

Moaning is easy because it asks almost nothing of us. Building a better town is harder because it involves compromise, patience, paperwork, meetings, volunteering, trade-offs, and occasionally accepting that someone else’s needs are as real as our memories.

Every minute spent moaning on the internet is a minute not spent trying to help.

That does not mean people should never complain. Complaints can be justified. Criticism can be useful. Anger can sometimes get things moving.

But if complaint is where our civic contribution begins and ends, we should not be surprised when nothing improves.

The internet rewards outrage, but towns are improved by people who do the unglamorous things.

The people who water new trees.

The people who run community groups. There are loads of amazing people in Abingdon who already devote their time to this.

The people who organise community events.

The people who serve on PTAs, parish councils, town councils, charities, sports clubs, flood groups, heritage societies and residents’ associations.

The people who respond constructively to consultations rather than just assuming a stitch-up.

The people who report blocked drains, broken signs, dangerous pavements and overgrown paths.

The people who use local businesses before they vanish.

The people who welcome newcomers instead of treating them as the reason everything has changed.

The people who understand that if the same dozen volunteers are always expected to do everything, the town will eventually reflect their energy, their limits, their blind spots and their available evenings.

This is not glamorous work. It rarely goes viral. Nobody creates a nostalgia account for “people who filled in the survey properly” or “residents who spent three years patiently getting a crossing installed”.

But this is how towns actually improve.

The challenge, then, is not to love the past less. It is to love it more honestly.

We should remember what was good without pretending everything was better. We should mourn what has been lost without using that grief to block everything new. We should listen carefully when people say they miss the old town, but we should not mistake missing something for a workable plan.

The better question is not: how do we get the old town back?

The better question is: what did the old town give people that they still need today?

If the answer is pride, then take part in the place, not just in the comment thread about the place.

That might mean joining something. It might mean starting something. It might mean using a local shop rather than merely mourning it after it has gone. It might mean accepting an imperfect housing scheme because it gives younger people a chance. It might mean accepting a change to parking if it makes a street safer. It might mean supporting a new event even if it causes a bit of disruption. It might mean responding to a consultation with specific, practical suggestions rather than a general howl of despair.

Above all, it means refusing the comfort of permanent complaint.

Because a town cannot be run as a tribute act to someone’s childhood.

Nor can it be saved by remembering it harder.

The future of our towns will not be built by nostalgia accounts, angry comment threads, or people insisting everything was better when they were young. It will be built by people who turn up, get specific, accept trade-offs, and do the boring work of making somewhere better.

Our towns do not need less memory. They need more imagination.

They need people who can look backwards with affection, look around with honesty, and look forwards with enough confidence to believe that the best days of a place do not have to be behind it.

The past can tell us what mattered, but it is still up to us to build what comes next.