At 7.59pm on Christmas Day 2019, a meme was posted to the Facebook page Memory Lane UK. It was a simple, low-resolution image with text in three fonts, two union jack flags and a Facebook logo. Just over an hour later, a second meme appeared: a collage of grainy old photos of smiling binmen, asking: “WHO REMEMBERS Proper bin men?” These posts have since garnered nearly 7,000 likes, 3,000 shares and 900 comments, spawning countless imitations.
The images typically show binmen in flat caps, donkey jackets and dark trousers, rather than modern hi-vis vests. The postwar Britain they depict features clunky bin lorries, smaller cars and cylindrical metal bins hoisted onto shoulders. To their admirers, these ‘proper binmen’ embody a lost idyll, with modern counterparts seen as lacking in spirit and service.
The memes are part of a wider galaxy of social media nostalgia. Memory Lane UK, created in December 2017 by a reclusive Yorkshireman called David Rowding, now has 500,000 followers. Its profile picture shows two 1970s Mini 1275 GTs, and its header features claymation characters Morph and Chas. Similar Facebook groups, such as The Yesteryears Revisited and Do You Remember This?, collectively have close to 2 million members—more than the official pages of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats combined.
These groups share a humdrum array of nostalgic memes: injunctions like “SHARE IF YOU REMEMBER” over pictures of Steptoe and Son, questions about childhood rules, and declarations such as “In our day, you only had Lucozade when you were ill.” Wordless posts display lost everyday objects: three-bar electric fires, blackboard erasers, spud guns. The memes ask: Who remembers the cockle man? A dripping sandwich? Rag and bone men? One pound notes? Drinking water from a hose? Choppers? The saying “act your age, not your shoe size”? Queueing for a phone box? Playing in the street and yelling “car!”? French cricket?
