I came to Churchill as an Archive By-Fellow from September to December 2024 to investigate the history of ‘futurology’ in the United Kingdom from the 1960s to the 1990s. Futurology emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a set of new tools to help predict the future, and included techniques like scenario planning and world modelling. Some of these techniques were famously used in the 1970s to help governments, including the British government, and corporations, like Shell, to negotiate oil shocks and fears about energy and resource scarcity.
Churchill Archives Centre holds the papers of various figures who took part in futurological projects. I spent the most time working with the collections of Jeremy Bray (1930-2002), Wayland Young, the 2nd Baron Kennet (1923-2009), and Michael Young (1915-2002).
Jeremy Bray was a Labour MP from 1962 to 1970 and 1974 to 1997, and I’m interested in him for several reasons. He was one of the few British members of the ‘Club of Rome’, an international organisation that funded the ‘Limits to Growth’ report, published in 1972, which notoriously predicted the total collapse of global society by the mid-21st century due to overpopulation and resource scarcity. He also published a book, Decision in Government (1969), which advocated for using a cybernetic, computerised decision-making system to manage the British economy, and because of this, he fell out with the Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Finally, he was Labour’s shadow spokesperson for science throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and his calls for an official British science policy influenced the Major government’s creation of the Government Office for Science and its Technology Foresight programme, which tried to anticipate groundbreaking technologies that the UK should invest in.
The Churchill Archives Centre has extensive holdings on Jeremy Bray, who seems to have never discarded a document that he laid hands on. Through using these rich collections, I found new insights on Bray’s role in environmentalist debates about futurology in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as his influence on both Labour and Conservative science policy and technology forecasting in the 1990s.
Wayland Young, the 2nd Baron Kennet, was an interesting figure. He sat in the House of Lords for Labour, the SDP, and the Liberal Democrats, and had a wide-ranging career, writing as a theatre critic, novelist, and commentator on issues such as disarmament and sexuality. I came to his papers because he was the project leader for ‘Europe Plus 30’, funded by the European Commission in the mid-1970s. Europe Plus 30 investigated whether the Commission should create a European forecasting unit to predict the futures of Europe. The project’s recommendations, to Young’s disappointment, were not fully taken up – the European Commission never launched a comprehensive forecasting unit, although it did create a smaller unit, FAST (‘Forecasting and Assessment of Science and Technology’) a couple years later, and Young himself published a book, The Futures of Europe, based on the Europe Plus 30 project.
Wayland Young’s papers had never been seen before, and I was extraordinarily lucky that the Churchill Archives Centre made access possible. Young’s papers have since spawned a rich line of collaborative research. Since working with these papers, I’ve organised a two-day workshop, ‘Predicting Europe’, with a colleague, Aleksandra Komornicka, which took place in Brussels in June 2025. Through the workshop, I met a PhD student, Margaret Pulk, who’s also working on the history of the Europe Plus 30 project, and we hope to publish an edited collection, European Futures, that will include the history of Wayland Young and his Europe Plus 30 project.
The life and work of Michael Young – no relation to Wayland Young – has been, in contrast, much better documented by other historians, including a former Archival By-Fellow, Lise Butler. Michael Young was one of the most influential left-wing social scientists in twentieth-century Britain. He was the lead writer and editor of the Labour Party’s 1945 election-winning manifesto, and helped create the Consumers Council, Which? magazine, the Social Science Research Council, and the Open University.
I was at first interested in Young for his ‘Committee on the Next Thirty Years’, which Lise Butler has already written about in her fantastic book Michael Young, Social Science & The British Left. I looked at the afterlife of the Committee on the Next Thirty Years and how Young helped create a pseudo-successor project, ‘Social and Technological Alternatives for the Future’, at the University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit, funded by the Social Science Research Council and chaired by his friend and colleague Marie Jahoda.
Serendipity struck while in Michael Young’s papers, however, and I came across a project he launched in the 1980s, the ‘Argo Venture’, to colonise Mars and transform into a habitable planet. The Argo Venture, as you might have realised, never succeeded, but its history shows the convergence of Michael Young’s socialist utopianism with new predictions about planetary ecologies and space exploration, and I hope that an article on its history will be the first of many publications to come out of my research at the Churchill Archives Centre.
I’d like to finish by expressing my gratitude to Churchill College, Cambridge, for appointing me as Archival By-Fellow, to the John Antcliffe Memorial Fund for supporting my by-fellowship, and to the archivists who made my fellowship so productive, including Andrew Riley, Cherish Watton, and Sophie Bridges, as well as the Archives Centre’s director, Allen Packwood.
Dr Jacob Ward, February 2026