Overview
The Angry 30’s is a pictorial book about Britain in the 1930s, compiled by Julian Symons. Its roughly 150 pages are given over chiefly to pictures rather than to continuous prose: the book is a visual survey of the decade, built from images reproduced from contemporary sources and held together by Symons’s own connective commentary and captions. It belongs, in other words, to the class of illustrated social histories of interwar Britain, and its interest lies in what the pictures show and in the arrangement and annotation of them rather than in any sustained narrative argument.
The title announces the book’s governing emphasis. The 1930s in Britain were remembered, and are presented here, as a decade of grievance and conflict — the “angry” years — and the pictorial record assembled in the volume is organised around that characterisation of the period. The subject registered for the book is the social life and customs of the time, and it is the everyday texture of the decade, as much as its headline politics, that the images are meant to convey: how people lived, worked, queued, marched, holidayed and amused themselves while the country passed through economic depression and mounting international crisis.
Because the book works through photographs and other contemporary visual material, its portrait of the thirties is necessarily a portrait of surfaces and occasions — streets and workplaces, crowds and ceremonies, the look of housing and dress, the machinery of politics and leisure. Symons’s text is subordinate to the pictures: it introduces, links and explains, supplying dates, names and context for what is shown, rather than offering a full narrative history. The result is a book to be looked at and browsed, in which the sequence of images carries the argument and the commentary supplies the minimum of framing needed to make sense of them.
The decade the book covers is bounded by the aftermath of the First World War’s settlement at one end and the approach of the Second at the other, and the volume reflects the familiar shape of those years as contemporaries and later historians have understood them: a period of industrial depression and mass unemployment in the older industrial areas, of economies and retrenchment, alongside visible prosperity in newer industries and in the south; a period of political agitation at home, of ideological confrontation on the continent, and of rearmament and failed diplomacy abroad; and, at the same time, a period whose commercial culture — the cinema, the popular press, the dance hall, organised sport, the holiday camp and the seaside resort — reached a mass audience as never before. The book’s selection of pictures is designed to hold these contrasting aspects of the decade in view, so that the anger and the pleasure, the deprivation and the new consumer comforts, are seen as parts of a single society.
What the volume does not attempt is a sustained analysis of causes or a detailed political chronicle. It is a compilation, and its value is documentary and evocative rather than interpretative: it aims to give the reader the look and feel of the 1930s through the images that the decade itself produced, with Symons acting as editor and guide. Readers should therefore approach it as a visual sourcebook on interwar British social life, organized around the themes of hardship, protest and public crisis that gave the decade its sobriquet, rather than as a narrative history of the period.
Its deeper interest is as an exercise in historical mood rather than causal explanation. By foregrounding photographs and other contemporary visual material, the book makes the 1930s legible through contrast: images associated with deprivation and conflict sit alongside evidence of commercial leisure and ordinary domestic life, so that “anger” functions as a lens on a varied society rather than as a single undifferentiated mood. The editorial commentary supplies orientation without imposing a thesis, leaving the reader to infer connections between public crisis and everyday custom from the sequence itself.
The volume’s significance therefore lies partly in what it resists: it does not convert the decade into a tidy political morality tale, nor does it use pictures merely as decoration for a prewritten argument. Instead, selection and annotation become the interpretive acts, and the reader is invited to compare the decade’s self-presentation with the retrospective label under which it is gathered. In this respect the book belongs to pictorial social history as a form of arrangement and suggestion — a compact visual archive that also demonstrates how a period acquires a character through editorial choices about what is shown, what is juxtaposed, and what is left to speak for itself.
