Planning for Retirement in Post-war Britain

Abstract This article explores how Britons envisaged and planned for the end of working life across the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how retirement was established in this period as a transition in the life course for which individuals were encouraged actively to prepare. ‘Pre-retirement’ experts popularised a reflexive ideal which presented knowledge and cultivation of the self as equal in importance to shrewd financial management and the maintaining of physical health. Pioneered by bodies such as the Pre-Retirement Association, this ideal found its audience in the 1970s, facilitated by the spread of occupational pensions and a more generous welfare state, before losing ground to a narrower conception of planning centred on managing financial risk. While this reinforces, in some respects, accounts of the ‘neoliberalisation’ of old age, the article deploys life-writing and archived interview data to reveal the deeply personal meanings which individuals attached to the transition out of work. These ‘retirement imaginaries’, the article argues, offer a framework for connecting the ‘big’ stories of welfare universalism, affluence and financialisation to the ‘small’ ones shaping everyday experience and identity in later life.