It is important to record that the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was never mass-produced until 2008. However, there are few images of the last decade that are quite so riddled with ideology, and few ‘historical’ documents that are quite so spectacularly false. They might have liked it as an example of the slightly dotty retro-Englishness that made them buy those DVDs of Downton Abbey with their overdubbed Polski Lektor. Some or none of these thoughts may have been in the heads of the customers at Empik buying their printed tea towels they may have just thought it was funny. Also contained in this bundle of signifiers was the enduring pretension of an extremely rich (if shoddy and dilapidated) country, the sadomasochistic Toryism imposed by the Conservative–Liberal coalition government of 2010–15, and their presentation of austerity in a manner so brutal and moralistic that it almost seemed to luxuriate in its own parsimony. My assumption was that the combination of message and design were inextricably tied up with a plethora of English obsessions, from the ‘Blitz spirit’, through to the cults of the BBC and the NHS and the 1945 post-war consensus. How had this happened? What was it that made the image so popular? How did it manage to grow from a minor English middle-class cult object into an international brand, and what exactly were people saying when they were saying that they were carrying on?

As a logo, it was nearly as recognisable as Coca-Cola or Apple. As an iconic image, it was now there alongside Rosie the Riveter, the muscular female munitions worker on the US World War II propaganda image as easily identifiable as the headscarved Lily Brik bellowing ‘BOOKS!’ on Rodchenko’s famous poster. I was going into the flagship Warsaw branch of the Polish department store Empik and there, just past the revolving doors, was a collection of notebooks, mouse pads, diaries and the like, featuring a familiar English sans serif font, white on red, topped with the crown above the legend, inEnglish:Īside from the horror film–like feeling that I was being chased wherever I went by an implacable enemy, I was chilled by the proof that this image had finally entered the pantheon of truly global design ‘icons’.

I can pinpoint the moment when I realised that what had seemed a typically, somewhat insufferably, English phenomenon had gone completely and inescapably global.

Original keep calm and carry on