John Grindrod: The Ladybird Book of Postwar Rebuilding

It's remarkable how many people have the wrong idea about Ladybird Books, dismissing them as nostalgic, conservative and twee. 

Someone who very much does get Ladybird is John Grindrod:

Since I first wrote about the Ladybird books obsession with modernism (article here) I've become increasingly fascinated by the role they played in fostering a spirit of excitement in Britain's postwar schemes to modernise. 

Picking up copies in second hand bookshops I've started to see a much more concerted effort to portray a positive image of the rebuilding of Britain in these books than even I'd given them credit for. 

With their warm and sensible illustrations and no-nonsense prose, Ladybird has an incredible knack of bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the fairy-tale and the starkly realistic, taking the fear out of everything and showing a unified, positive and optimistic vision of life. 

And so this selection of images portrays a top ten in that mould: The Ladybird Book of Postwar Rebuilding.

And at the top of this post you will find one of those ten images.