How art and design made Britain go Pop

A new exhibition at the Barbican reveals how consumerism helped to put the colour back into postwar austerity Britain

There was a time when consumerism was a magical thing. Take yourself back to the late 1940s. London is in full (real) austerity mode. I interviewed the late architect Colin “Sandy” St John Wilson, about his youth then, as a member of the Independent Group. “You have to remember how completely and utterly dreary postwar London was,” he told me. “It’s hard for your generation to understand, in the city as it is today. But there was no colour after the war, like it had drained into the gutter.”

You can see the exact moment when colour began coursing through