VE Day street parties took place across the country
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When we think of VE Day, we think of impromptu celebrations with soldiers hugging girls in fountains, and street parties in villages across Britain. As the guns fell silent, long tables were constructed on roads, covered with sheets and surrounded with a mishmash of chairs. Locals stayed up, making ‘rounds of sandwiches and biscuits… ’til four in the morning’, as cook Ruth Mott would later recall, packing them into bags printed with Union Jacks.
For as much as VE Day was about speeches and fireworks, it was also about food and drink, and the coming together of people over a series of feasts, compiled in the face of years of rationing. As our thoughts turn to our own gradual return to normality, what are the parallels with May 1945?