This world, beyond its binmen, is populated with a fascinatingly humdrum array of nostalgic memes. The baby boomer nostalgia industrial complex is thriving. Together, these Facebook groups have close to 2 million members: more than the official pages for Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems combined. There are many rival Facebook groups devoted to commemorating the same mundane aspects of life: The Yesteryears Revisited, Do You Remember This?, I Grew Up In The 1970s, The British Nostalgic Bible, One Hundred and Ten Percent British. Though there is nothing generationally unique in the desire to bask in the banalities of your past, these nostalgia communities have flourished on Facebook as its user base has grown ever older in the past decade. At the time of writing, Memory Lane UK has a photo of two 1970s Mini 1275 GTs as its Facebook profile picture, and a header photo of claymation icon Morph and his friend Chas. The birthplace of the binmen meme, the Memory Lane UK Facebook page, is the sepia-tinted sun at the heart of that galaxy, a community 500,000 followers strong, created on 30 December 2017 by a reclusive Yorkshireman called David Rowding. The proper binmen bestride a wider galaxy of social media nostalgia. They attract phenomenal interest and enthusiasm from older Britons on Facebook, where a whole constellation of meanings and memories are projected on to them: pride, anger, resentment, weariness, ennui and fond, at times very touching, personal recollection. The “proper binmen” memes are popular to a degree that may feel initially baffling. To their admirers, proper binmen embody a lost postwar idyll – and the decline in national character can be seen in the appalling state of their modern-day counterparts, who are rotten in spirit, in character and in service. Unlike their plastic, colourful modern counterparts, these bins are hoisted on to the bin men’s shoulders.

And then there are the bins themselves: cylindrical, metal, plain.

The postwar Britain they inhabit looks different, too: from the clunky old bin lorries to the smaller cars in the background. They wear flat caps, donkey jackets and dark trousers or dungarees, rather than hi-vis yellow vests, or overalls marked with reflective stripes and subcontractor logos. The first thing you notice about these images – most of which are black and white – are the proper bin men’s outfits. They were not the first “proper binmen” posts, but they were the first to find a wide audience, and inspired countless imitations. At 9.16pm that same day – barely a Christmas film later – a second meme was posted, this time a collage of grainy old photos of smiling binmen, insistently asking the same question: “WHO REMEMBERS Proper bin men?” At the time of writing, these two Facebook posts have attracted almost 7,000 likes, 3,000 shares and 900 comments.

Childhood nostalgia memes