London: The Biography

Yet this was not generally understood at the time and, in London, the 1960s were particularly charged with forgetfulness. The American weekly Time proclaimed on its front cover “LONDON-THE SWINGING CITY.” Its affluence was visible enough; real earnings had risen by approximately 70 per cent in the twenty years since the war, and the high birth rate in the first years of peace certainly gave the impression of a city dominated by youth. The fact that National Service had been abolished in 1960 itself represented a literal and emblematic lifting of restrictions upon young males in particular. So music, and fashion, returned on an unprecedented scale. One designer, Mary Quant, has suggested that she wished to create clothes that “were much more for life-much more for real people, much more for being young and alive in.” So there was an efflorescence of boutiques in well-defined areas of London; Carnaby Street became the centre for young men who wore Mod fashions, with the familiar London emphasis upon what was “new” or “in the news,” while the King’s Road in Chelsea became the destination for young women who wished to be trendy. Music, too, emanated from London with groups such as the Who, the Kinks, the Small Faces and the Rolling Stones, many of their members having come from London art schools and colleges. Those groups from outside the city, like the Beatles, necessarily migrated to it. Designers had also caught the prevailing mood. Terence Conran recollected that “I’d always believed that well-designed things should be available to the whole population, that it shouldn’t be an elitist thing. And I think this coincided with a lot of people who’d had further education coming through who were discontented with the way things were.” So broader access to higher education played its part in what Conran called “the atmosphere of discontentment.” It was discontent, primarily, with the postwar world of hierarchy and repression but also with the perceived shabbiness and dreariness of London. It was a way of lightening the surroundings. The actual nature and identity of the city were no longer of any consequence. For a few years instead it became the “style capital” where music and fashion attracted the ancillary industries of magazine publishing, photography, advertising, modelling, broadcasting and film-making to create a bright new city.

But of course “Swinging London” was not “new” at all. The city’s familiar instincts had never ceased their operation. The commercial imperative of the city’s life, for example, had identified a “market” among the newly resurgent youth which could be in turn exploited by intelligent entrepreneurs. The commercial infrastructure of the music business, for example, was already in place. In all areas of this teenage revolt, in fact, the youths themselves were exploited by a vast commercial project. It was a thoroughly London undertaking. The phenomenon of the 1960s was essentially theatrical and artificial in nature, too; like so many London displays, it glided over the fundamental underlying life in the capital. To see the decade clearly it is important to see it steadily, and as a whole, encompassing all of its realities.

It is significant, for example, that the age of the boutique and the discothèque was also the age of the tower block, of public vandalism, and of increased crime. They are not unconnected. Of the tower blocks of the 1960s, much has been written. They had become the resort of planners and architects motivated by aesthetic, as well as social, reasons. They seemed to offer the vision of a new kind of city; many Georgian and Victorian terraces were razed by the civic authorities to make way for an experiment in urban living in which a new kind of vertical community might be forged. The popularity of the tower blocks-some four hundred were erected in London during the late 1960s-was also animated by economic principles. They were standardised, and therefore could be quickly and cheaply assembled. There were so many people on housing lists, or living in parts of the “inner city” which were deemed unfit for human habitation, that the “high-rise estates” seemed at the time to be the only efficient and affordable means of translating citizens from relative squalor into relative comfort.