Britain in the aftermath of the second world war is remembered as a land of hope and progress. The 1945 Labour landslide opened the way for the welfare state and the National Health Service. Old injustices began to melt away. David Kynaston’s prolific and engrossing study reveals how the postwar years seemed to ordinary people who lived through them, and it becomes clear that they were hungrier, colder, dirtier, sadder and more hopeless than anything we can adequately imagine from our pampered vantage-point in time.

After five years of war, people were exhausted, undernourished and, thanks to clothes rationing, poorly clad. The rations of basic foods – meat, cheese, fats, sugar, tea – seemed punitively small (the bacon ration in 1949, for example, was 1oz per week), and bread, which had been exempt from rationing during the war, was now rationed. Queues formed outside bakers’ shops early each morning. There were bombed-out buildings everywhere, and the grime of destruction permeated furniture, clothes, skin and hair. Over a third of Britain’s 12m dwellings had no bath or hot water. The icy winter of 1946-7, coupled with a coal shortage, reduced many to despair. Longer-term problems remained too. All the big cities had verminous slums, and unchecked pollution lay like a deadly pall over the industrial areas.

Kynaston’s method is to take us through year by year, charting first the political initiatives and then the public reaction, as recorded in diaries, letters and the invaluable Mass Observation archive. The pattern is always the same. The politicians’ claims are exorbitant, and the public response is fatalistic, jaded and sceptical. When the public does show a decided preference, the politicians ignore it. This was most evident in relation to the housing shortage. Surveys made it overwhelmingly clear that most people wanted to live in a suburban house with a garden. The politicians and planners, on the other hand, were convinced that 60-storey blocks of flats, as recommended by Le Corbusier, were the ideal habitat for human beings. So that became the official policy, and local protests were overruled. “It’s no good your jeering: it is going to be done,” Lewis Silkin, the minister of town and country planning, told an unruly public meeting in Stevenage. There were cries of “Gestapo” and “dictator”, and when he returned to his ministerial car he found that someone had deflated the tyres and put sand in the petrol tank.

Outrages of this kind made it clear that the British public must be converted into a more serious-minded, socialist people, working, as Herbert Morrison put it, in “an altogether different atmosphere of ideas”. How this could be achieved was much debated. The leading Labour thinker Evan Durbin suggested that “selective breeding was probably the answer”. Meanwhile, despite all the fiery socialist rhetoric, the one decisive and democratic step that could have changed British society was not taken. With its huge majority, and a bewildered upper class that had not had time to regroup, Labour could, Kynaston points out, have seized the moment to abolish the most important source of political, social and economic privilege, the public schools. It did not do so because its leadership was itself steeped in privilege. Prime Minister Attlee was a devout old Haileyburian, and he told the school, on a visit in 1947, that he hoped the “great traditions” of the public schools would continue and “might even be extended”

The Britain that Kynaston describes was poor and miserable, and the most useful lesson his book teaches is that poverty and misery breed intolerance. We are infinitely more tolerant than our counterparts 50 years back, not because we have received some mysterious influx of moral enlightenment, but because we are more prosperous. Surveys showed that in Kynaston’s Britain a majority condemned premarital and extramarital sex. Divorce was an unthinkable social disgrace. Homosexuals were defamed and persecuted. When the first black immigrants from the West Indies arrived in 1948, reaction was swift. “Regret No Coloureds” notices went up in London boarding houses, and in Liverpool a white mob attacked a black seamen’s hostel. Asked to explain their prejudice, few whites could muster even a pretence at rationality. “Don’t know; can’t say, just dislike them”, was a popular reply. Prejudice against the disabled was similarly strong and irrational. At the 1948 London Olympics, the cox of the British rowing VIII, who had lost a leg as a boy, was banned from taking part in the initial parade of athletes.

It was prosperity, together with technology, that changed the lot of women. In Kynaston’s Britain their inferiority was taken for granted, even by women. Woman’s Hour, which began in 1946, was presented by a man, and the BBC ordained that only men could read news bulletins. Of the 1,700 candidates in the 1945 election, 87 were women. The wages of women who worked were on average half what men received, and the male-dominated trades unions took no interest in righting this wrong. Most women did not have jobs. Films, radio and women’s magazines all emphasised that their place was in the home. They occupied themselves in queuing, in the time-wasting round of small-scale shopping, and in the laborious routines of wash-day, involving a coal-fired copper and a hand-turned mangle. Gleams of their future freedom came with the opening of Britain’s first launderette in 1949 and the appearance, a year later, of Sainsbury’s first supermarket – it was in Croydon, and an early customer, a judge’s wife, swore violently at Alan (later Lord) Sainsbury for requiring her to do the job of a shop assistant.

Foreign food and foreign travel were other symptoms of prosperity that broadened the British mind and taught us tolerance. A Gallup poll in 1949 revealed that most people’s idea of a luxury meal was tomato soup, roast chicken and trifle. Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food the following year switched attention to olives, apricots, rice, lemons, oil and almonds, which, it seemed to her, were “dirty words” to Britons. In travel, the pioneer was the Russian émigré Vladimir Raitz. Almost everyone who could afford a holiday in the postwar years went by train to a British seaside resort. A photograph of chilled holiday-makers cowering under shacks constructed out of deck chairs on Margate beach in 1948 is the most poignant in this book. Raitz’s company Horizon Holidays took 20 Britons to Corsica on a chartered Dakota in 1950 – the first package holiday. They were, he stressed, “people like teachers, the middle classes”. Over the next few years, his destinations included Benidorm, which had, at the time, one hotel.

Even readers who can remember the years Kynaston writes about will find they are continually surprised by the richness and diversity of his material. Who would have guessed, for example, that the die-hards and carpers who denounced the inauguration of the National Health Service included the Catholic church and the Manchester Guardian? Catholic hospitals opted out of the NHS on the grounds that charity was a religious concern and should not be taken over by the state. The Guardian’s worry was that state provision of health-care would eliminate natural selection, so that congenitally deformed and feckless people would survive. Austerity Britain is the first volume in a series entitled Tales of a New Jerusalem that will take the history of Britain up to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. It is a mouth-watering start.

Bloomsbury £25 pp702

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £22.50 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 Buy the book

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy