From the archive: ‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today

从档案中:谁还记得那些尽职尽责的垃圾清道夫?那些唤起怀旧情绪的模因,帮助我们理解今日的英国

The Audio Long Read

2026-02-18

38 分钟
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单集简介 ...

We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2022: Idealising the past is nothing new, but there is something peculiarly revealing about the way a certain generation of Facebook users look back fondly on tougher times By Dan Hancox. Read by Dermot Daly. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod
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  • This is The Guardian.

  • After civil war, Regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned.

  • But Britain would never be the same.

  • I'm Professor Cezanne Lipscomb and this month, on not just the Tudors,

  • we're transported back to the age of restoration royalty.

  • from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire.

  • Join me on Not Just The Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

  • Hello, my name's Dan Hancox and I'm the author of the 2022 Guardian Long Read,

  • Who Remembers Proper Bin Men, The Nostalgia Memes That Help Explain Britain Today.

  • This is an article about the weirdly popular world of nostalgic baby boomer Facebook memes,

  • which kind of summon up a half-remembered post-war idyll in Britain in which the bin men were Real men,

  • not like the apparently emasculated, useless jobs with health and safety obsessed bin men of today.

  • And these memes get across the idea that life was tougher,

  • Britain was authentic and proper like the bin men, and everyone was happier as a result.

  • I really wanted to understand why these memes were so numerous and so popular,

  • and why they were so obviously a distortion of history, and what that says about Britain today.

  • And I ended up with the idea of what we decided to call bin-menism,

  • which is not quite like normal nostalgia.

  • Normal nostalgia says things were better in my day.

  • But I think bin-menism represents something stranger, which I've summed up as the following.