ABSTRACT
In what would become an ‘iconic’ image in the history of the ‘Right to Buy’ housing policy of the Conservative governments from 1979 to 1997, Margaret Thatcher posed in front of 39 Amersham Road, Harold Hill, Essex on the 11th of August 1980. It was a little over a year since she had triumphed in the 1979 General Election and just two months before her Government's 1980 Housing Act would pass into constitutional law, effectively assuring the 122implementation of a policy that had been appropriated by the Conservative Party in the previous decade, and which would characterise its agenda and economic pact with an aspiring working class electorate for almost the next 20 years. The image itself was non-descript and the family notionally at the centre of the press story for which it was confected, the Pattersons, were alluded to only in passing. They were however, key elements in the promotional ensemble, functioning as visual reference points appellating the masses in what would be the largest privatisation programme of the first term of Margaret Thatcher's three term leadership of Britain.
