In the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses, the road sweeper Trigger is proud that he has used the same broom for 20 years. In that time, he explains, it has needed 17 new heads and 14 new handles.
The scene is from the episode “Heroes and Villains,” first broadcast on Christmas Day 1996. In Britain, “Trigger’s broom” is sometimes used as a name for an object whose parts have all been replaced but which is still treated as the original.
On 28 October 1943, Winston Churchill asked the House of Commons to rebuild its chamber, destroyed by bombing in 1941, on its old foundations. He told the House: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
He set two conditions. The new chamber should keep its old shape, “oblong and not semi-circular.” It should also “not be big enough to contain all its Members at once without over-crowding.”
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Edmund Burke wrote: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”
In his essay “On Being Conservative,” published in 1956, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott described the conservative disposition. To be conservative, he wrote, is “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery.” The essay was later collected in his book Rationalism in Politics.
The Fabian Society, a socialist society that helped found the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party, took its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus. His nickname was Cunctator, “the Delayer.” The society chose a tortoise as its emblem, for a slow, almost unnoticed transition to socialism.
In 1923, the leading Fabian Sidney Webb gave the presidential address at the Labour Party conference. His phrase from that speech is usually quoted as “the inevitability of gradualness.”
The House of Lords Act 1999 removed most hereditary peers from the House of Lords. Under a compromise, 92 of them were allowed to stay. The government offered this on an interim basis and expected a second stage of reform to follow.
The second stage came 27 years later. The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 repealed the section of the 1999 Act that had kept the 92.
On 15 February 1971, Britain changed to decimal currency. The pound was now divided into 100 new pence instead of 240 old pence.
The new 5p and 10p coins had the same size and value as the old shilling and florin. The old coins therefore stayed in circulation beside them. They were withdrawn only when smaller 5p and 10p coins came in, in 1990 and 1992. The word “new” stayed on the coins until 1982.
In March 2001, when the Post Office group became a public limited company, it took a new name, Consignia. The name change cost £500,000, as part of a rebrand that cost £2 million.
The name lasted little more than a year. In 2002 the company returned to the Royal Mail name. A trade report at the time estimated that changing back could cost more than £1 million, mostly for new signs on 3,000 buildings.
On 10 June 1997, British Airways unveiled a new corporate identity. The tails of its aircraft would carry a range of designs called “World Images.”
At the Conservative Party conference that year, the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher covered the tail of a model British Airways plane with a handkerchief. Some accounts say it was a tissue. In May 2001, the airline announced that the World Images would go. All its aircraft would carry the Chatham Dockyard design, based on the Union flag.
The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 remains the official prayer book of the Church of England. From the 1960s, the church produced new forms of service, followed by the Alternative Service Book in 1980 and Common Worship in 2000.
The new forms were technically supplements to the 1662 book. In practice, they largely replaced it for the main Sunday services of most English churches.