Stephen Tall

The Conservative Party: the party of house-building. Really. Don’t believe me? It’s true. They used to talk about little else.

Of course you have to go back a little way…

Here we are in 1950, the year before the Conservatives began 13 years of continuous rule…

A one-off? Nope. Here’s 1951…

By the time it got to 1954, one poster just wasn’t enough…

So they did a second…

Then a third…

Then it was an election year, 1955. Time to hit the message home…

Again (1956)…

And again (1957)…

And again (1958)…

A new decade began. But, in 1960, it was the same old message…

With no let-up in 1962…

Or 1963. Got the message yet? No? Well, then…

Let’s keep ’em coming…

And coming…

Then it was time for another election (1964)…

Which meant more posters…

The Tories lost power in 1964. Labour governed for six years. So what did the Tories do in 1970?

Attack Labour for not building more houses…

After five more years out of power, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives repeated the attack on Labour for not building more houses in 1979…

And: that’s it.

After 1979, the Conservatives turned their attention from house-building to home-owning, from those in need of a house to those who already have one.

There hasn’t been a single Conservative Party poster calling for more house-building in the last 35 years (to my knowledge).

Unless you count David Cameron’s oh-so-specific pledge in 2007:

(All images above sourced from the Conservative Party Archive digital poster collection held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.)