I've always really enjoyed the Scarfolk Council blog ever since I've discovered it from some source or another, Richard Littler had a frightening childhood, too, but as a designer and screenwriter, he turned his memories of life in suburban Britain during the 1970s into a haunting and hilarious blog and book about the fictional dystopian town of Scarfolk. Littler mined the dark side of his childhood to create pamphlets, posters, book covers, album art, audio clips, and television shorts—remnants of life in a paranoid, totalitarian 1970s community, where even babies are not to be trusted. Specially trained police officers patrolled streets, public and private buildings, and handed out on-the-spot fines for various misdemeanours such as not standing up straight, running in corridors and not paying attention. At the officer's discretion, the fines could be substituted for corporal punishment with a slipper, belt, cane or rabid Alsatian.

The Quietus | Features | Tome On The Range | Mandatory

When this poster was distributed by Scarfolk Council in 1977, many people were concerned that they did not understand the poster's message correctly and were thus at risk of unintentionally breaking the law by either talking or not talking about it. Scar Toys exploited this expanding market opportunity and created a range of toys aimed at the many children in the process of being orphaned. One such toy, the Breath Mirror Set, aimed at young girls, was designed to accompany their more traditional beauty/vanity toys. The deluxe set (see picture above) included one mirror for each parent, colour-coded as per gender convention: pink for girls, blue for boys. Sanctioned "Scarfolk Annual" On Its Way". downthetubes.net. 8 August 2019 . Retrieved 18 October 2019. At the end of the decade, the council decided that because of a small handful of troublemakers, the whole town would have to be punished: Everyone would have to resit the 1970s. Brilliant graphics! I couldn’t help but think about Welcome to Nightvale, reading this. And of Stranger Things to a certain level. The vision of dystopian, time-distorted towns in the 70’s and 80’s does seem to be something that’s trapped in the collective consciousness of this generation…Cory Doctorow (23 April 2013). "Wyndhamesque missives from Scarfolk, an English horror-town trapped in a 1969-79 loop – Boing Boing". Boing Boing . Retrieved 14 October 2014.

Discovering Scarfolk | Richard Littler

During the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977 a ghostly figure was spotted by alarmed viewers in a BBC broadcast. The spectre appeared to be sitting beside the Queen in her carriage. The apparition's identity remains unknown, though some claim it is Scarfolk resident Herbert Empire. The clever perfection of the parody images, combined with the Pythonesque word play and riffs on the stranger aspects of British culture, are a masterpiece in absurdist horror." Britain in the 1970s was a very strange time and place. Caught in the brutal come-down after the Sixties yet still retaining more than a hint of pagan mysticism in the air, Britain had a distinctive otherworldliness underlying the economic woes, ever-present threat of nuclear war and public service films warning children that horrific death lurked in every field, every street. Both grubby and garish, represented equally by Abigail’s Party and Children of the Stones, Albion seemed caught in an awful liminality. There was nothing quite like living through that strange time, in that weird place. The Scarfolk Annual demands that you read it multiple times to decode every secret inside it. It’s beautifully built to conjure a hilarious yet sinister world built on the foundations of Britain’s genre fiction. Littler’s creation is easily able to stand beside works such as The League of Gentlemen and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace as a unique addition to the canon of contemporary weird Britain. It doesn’t hurt that the book is also very, very funny. In January 2014, the London Evening Standard published an article [7] by Charles Saatchi, which accidentally included the cover of a Scarfolk book called Eating Children: Population Control & The Food Crisis instead of the intended Jonathan Swift publication A Modest Proposal ( 1729).The blog has already spawned a successful book, Discovering Scarfolk, and Littler now has a TV version of Scarfolk at the development stage. Scientists (and advertising agency executives who planned to exploit the results) predicted the result would produce “a wide variety of positive images, including majestic British landscapes accompanied by the sounds of waves and music as beautiful as anything written by maestros such Sir Edward Elgar or Cliff Richard”. Recently, Littler has also been creating illustrations for the Open Rights Group. In a way, they’re a kind of more serious counterpoint to the message of Scarfolk.

Scarfolk Council Scarfolk Council

Though the charity raised awareness, it had little impact on the number of people impacting the valuable concrete from great heights. Part-comedy, part-horror, part-satire, Discovering Scarfolk is the surreal account of a family trapped in the town. Through public information posters, news reports, books, tourist brochures and other ephermera, we learn about the darker side of childhood, school and society in Scarfolk. A book called Discovering Scarfolk, which tells the story of a family trapped in the town, was published in October 2014 by Ebury Press. [18] [19] It is a guide to all aspects of Scarfolk and covers the "frenzied archive of Daniel Bush, whose sons 'disappeared' in Scarfolk in 1970." [18] Littler has said that the book "attempts to guide you through the darkness by making light of the contradictions and it promises not to unnerve you. Well, not too much anyway." [3] The Fougasse homage posters I have created for the Open Rights Group are also a way for me to compare and contrast historical and contemporary British values” he explains. “They are still satirical, so the work itself comes from the same part of my brain as Scarfolk. But of course, the intention is to highlight serious political issues and hopefully inspire support that will help bring about tangible change. It seems like lots of people have become more political in recent years, but then, do we have a choice?” Based on the darkly hilarious Scarfolk blog, which presents odd items from the archives of an insular, paranoid, medically unsafe and supernaturally haunted town in the northeast of 1970s England, Discovering Scarfolk attempts to understand what happened to a man who may or may not have been named Daniel Bush, and who may or may not have lost two children who may or not have been his, and may or not have subsequently been held captive in Scarfolk itself. A town which may or may not exist.I’ve come to appreciate that municipal/government aesthetic, including post-war architecture, more since I started Scarfolk. I like ephemeral artefacts, old branding, library music, public information campaigns that have been largely relegated to the cultural dustbin and didn’t have a life outside of their time, though I’m aware that people like me recycling them give them a new kind of life.”

Scarfolk - Wikipedia

Scarfolk was initially presented as a fake blog which purportedly releases artefacts from archive of the fictional town council, Scarfolk Council. Artefacts include public information literature, out-of-print books, record and cassette sleeves, advertisements, television programme screenshots, household products, and audio and video, many of which suggest brands and imagery recognisable from the period. Additionally, artefacts are usually accompanied by short fictional vignettes that are also presented as factual and that introduce the town's residents. The public information literature often ends with the strapline: "For more information please reread." Littler: I like the clean lines and simple typefaces of modernism, and I’ve come to appreciate the aesthetic of Brutalist architecture. But it’s not just the period design I’m drawn to—I’m also interested in the pre-digital age and the idea that everything from that period is physically decaying. Littler’s twin interests in design and writing make the Scarfolk blog a perfect fit for his talents. The Scarfolk blog draws on a particularly late 20 th Century aesthetic, one which Littler has grown to increasingly like during the time he’s been using it. Crime in Scarfolk did not rise substantially between 1976 and 1977, largely due to the latest in thought detection techniques* and random public executions. The government, however, did announce that there had been a significant increase in naughtiness.It is only later that I realized the framing device of the entire book: it is a research paper by one Dr. Ben Motte. Who, it is intimated in certain footnotes, is himself incompetent and incapable. The unreliable narrator strikes again.