London: The Biography

A poster extolling the virtues of the Lansbury council estates in Poplar, built upon the ruins of the old East End. Some of the energy and the animation of the original tenements had gone but the East End was a safer and healthier place.

CHAPTER 77. Fortune not Design

How Shall We Rebuild London? This was the title of a book, by C.B. Purdom, which described the postwar city “dulled by such extensive drabness, monotony, ignorance and wretchedness that one is overcome by distress.” That drabness or “greyness,” so characteristic in recollections of London in the 1950s, was a matter of privation; in the years immediately after the Second World War, most commodities were rationed. But in another sense it was the greyness of twilight. If one natural reaction after the war lay in the desire to create a “new world,” as the urban planners wished, then another was to reconstruct the old world as if nothing particular had happened. So when Roy Porter in London: A Social History invokes the 1950s in terms of a “knees-up at the pub” and “contented commuters,” he is remarking upon the atavistic tendency of London to go on doing all the things which it had been doing before the unhappy interruption of hostilities. Yet it could not, and did not, succeed. The desire to impose a set of familiar conditions, in changed circumstances, led only to a vague atmosphere of oppression or constriction.

The two great set-pieces of London theatre were the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. This sense of London as a successful and enthusiastic community, miraculously reassembled after the war, was subtly reinforced by the resurgence of orthodox values and conventional activities. Youth organisations, like the Scouts and the Cubs, flourished; it was a great period for Boys Clubs in east and south London. Attendance at football matches rose once again to prewar levels; the cinemas were also crowded, perhaps because, as one Londoner of the period recalled, “there was practically nothing else to do.” This air of mild oppression, like a hangover after the excitement of war, was intensified by a concerted if unspoken desire to redefine sexual and social mores which had been considerably relaxed during the conflict. The relative sexual freedom of women, and the chummy egalitarianism of enforced contact between the classes, were phenomena strictly of the past. And that in turn led to further if ill-defined unease, especially among the younger population. The standards of the 1930s were being reintroduced within a quite different society. The imposition of two years of compulsory military service, known as “National Service,” only served to emphasise the atmosphere of general constriction. It was a less advantageous aspect of the newly formed “welfare state.”

So London, then, was drab. Compared with other great cities, such as Rome and Paris and New York, it was ugly and forlorn; for the first time in its history it had become something of an embarrassment. And yet there were already stirrings of change, arriving from unexpected quarters. The Teddy boys of Elephant and Castle, and other parts of south London, were joined by the bright young things of the Chelsea set and the beatniks of Soho, as objects of moral outrage. It is perhaps significant that these various groups were closely associated with certain areas of the city, as if local historical forces were also at work. They were all intent upon breaking free from what they considered to be the dreary uniformity of urban life still modelled on outdated systems of class and belief. The dead areas of Walworth or of Acton, of Islington or of Stoke Newington, were a standing reproof. Their territorial spirit, too, was manifest in what they wore; the clothes of the Teddy boy, as well as his successor the Mod, were the single and often only mark of identity. The Teddy boys had in fact borrowed their “look” from the more respectable tailors of Savile Row and Jermyn Street who were trying to promote the images of “Edwardian” refinement among their male customers. Edward became “Teddy,” and a new hybrid was created. Instead of those images of working-class youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shabbily dressed and with the uniform cloth cap perched upon their heads, there emerged a picture of boys in velvet jackets and drainpipe trousers. The recklessness and freedom, already evinced by the children of the Blitz, were still apparent. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries clothes were “handed down” from class to class in the spiral of trade, but on this occasion the disadvantaged actively promoted the transaction. It was another feature of native London egalitarianism accompanied by a self-possession and aggression which have been evident in London since the days of the medieval apprentices. In fact many Teddy boys were themselves apprentices.