FABULOUS FIFTIES BACK IN STYLE

fruit on the wallpaper, and Omo under the sink. As Woman’s Own described it: “This is the room more than any other you love to keep shining and bright. A woman’s place? Yes it is! For it is the heart and centre of the meaning of home.” Sixty years ago, there was a discrepancy between highbrow designs and everyday living, as Susannah Walker found while writing 1950s Modern, a Shire book to be published later this year. “A three-piece suite represented your married life,” she says. “You had to have something solid enough to last the length of your marriage. People didn’t necessarily go for the spindly wooden-legged look, as they thought it wasn’t substantial enough.” The bright colours made her retinas hurt. “There were wild pinks, limes, mustards, which were astonishing.” Day-glo accessories — lamps, magazine stands, telephone tables — are what we often regard as Fifties kitsch, and are as collectable now as they were then. In response, Cath Kidston (cathkidston.com) has devised a Jubilee kitsch all her own, with tea-towels (£10), plates (£15), mugs (£8), oilcloth tablecloths (£35) and aprons (£20) in red-white-andblue with images of the Queen, crowns, corgis and Union flags. So popular is the retro look that sales of the John Lewis of Hungerford’s Crème de la Crème kitchen doubled in 2011. It is based on the 1953 English Rose design, built by CSA Industries using aluminium left over from Spitfire noses. Today’s are made of handpolished wood (from £17,000, johnlewis.co.uk). Jo Adlam and her husband, Ben Harrold, have just had one fitted in their one-bedroom fisherman’s cottage in Brancaster Staithe, Norfolk. “It’s a mini one, in pale blue, very sleek, modernist, not too beach-hut in colour, but with a hint of kitsch,” Jo says. The Jubilee has revived a sense of pride in Britishness. Horrockses, which started selling ready-to-wear dresses, housecoats and beachwear in 1946, have come back this year with bed linen using some of the designs from dresses of the Forties and Fifties. The fabric design of a day dress worn by the Queen, with tiny pink roses and yellow stripes, is reproduced as a limited edition cushion (see offer) and scarf. The cushion bears a photograph of the Queen wearing the dress on her 1954 Commonwealth Tour.