INDICE

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INTRO

• London experienced a drastic change from a dull
  post-War city in the 50s to a bright, affluent
  capital of cool in the 60s
• By the mid-60s, 40 of the population was under
  25, and youth weekly earnings increased
  dramatically in contrast to the cost of living
• The combination between youth and affluence
  resulted in a social phenomenon against the
  limitations and restrictions of the post-War
  London society
• A blossoming of pop music, fashion, design, films
  and creative literature of all kinds gravitated
  to the capital becoming the mainstay of the
  London economy
• Industrial decline and rising unemployment in the
  70s, and the derivative social problems made
  Swinging London vanish

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THE SETTING

• British Govts in the 60s
• - Tories from 1957 to 1963
• - Whigs from 1964 to 1970
• National Mandatory Military Service abolished in
  1960
• Abortion regulated in 1967
• Cultural Tribes Outburst The Beatniks, the
  Rockers, the Mods

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THE FEATURES

• ARTS Pop Art and Op(tical) Art
• MUSIC Beat music evolved to psychedelic rock
• Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks ? Pink Floyd,
  Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Cream
• FILMS Blow Up, The Party, Yellow Submarine, The
  Magic Christian
• LITERATURE Postmodernism, Nonsense Literature
• FASHION Miniskirts, Maxicoats, Winklepickers,
  Widebrim Hats, Flare/Bell Bottoms, Skinny Jeans
• TRANSPORT Vespa, Mini Morris

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Peter BlakeOn the Balcony (1955-57)
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Bridget RileyMovement in Squares (1961)
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MARY QUANTS MINISKIRTS
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THE MAXI COAT
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THE WINKLEPICKERS
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WIDE BRIM HATSOPHIA LOREN AT ASCOT (1960)
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FLARE/BELL BOTTOMS
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SKINNY JEANSBRIGITTE BARDOT
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VESPA AND MINI MORRIS
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THE TERM

• The term Swinging London" was actually invented
  by Time magazine as late as 15 April 1966, and
  celebrated the name of the pirate radio station
  Swinging Radio England
• However, "swinging" in the sense of hip or
  fashionable had been used since the early 1960s
• In 1965, Diana Vreeland editor of Vogue magazine,
  said "London is the most swinging city in the
  world at the moment

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MODS AND ROCKERS

• The mods and rockers are two conflicting British
  youth subcultures of the late 1950s to mid-1960s.
• Media coverage of mods and rockers fighting in
  1964 sparked a moral panic about British youths,
  and the two groups became labelled as folk
  devils.
• The rocker subculture was centred on
  motorcycling. Rockers generally wore protective
  clothing such as black leather jackets and
  motorcycle boots. The common rocker hairstyle was
  a pompadour, which was associated with 1950s rock
  and roll.
• The mod subculture was centred on fashion and
  music, and many mods rode scooters. Mods wore
  suits and other cleancut outfits, and preferred
  1960s music genres such as soul, rhythm and
  blues, ska and beat music.

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LONDONS LITTLE ITALY

• Since the Middle Ages Italians have settled in
  London. Back then they were merchants but the
  19th century saw the Italian community grow and
  many settled in Clerkenwell. In the early 1800s
  the Italians who arrived in London were affluent,
  skilled craftsmen who manufactured thermometers,
  telescopes and optical instruments. Following the
  Napoleonic Wars more Italian migrants arrived
  driven by terrible economic conditions. Most were
  poor and unskilled and travelled to London on
  foot. Organ grinding and knife grinding were
  common trades, as was making plaster statuettes
  with many of the craftsmen coming from Lucca in
  Tuscany. Ice-cream selling soon took off and as
  the men brought their spouses over to join them
  more Italian restaurants and cafes opened. The
  women also became domestic servants and got
  involved in lace manufacture. Others chose street
  entertainment and made money singing and dancing
  or telling fortunes by means of parakeets in
  cages.
• The area known as Little Italy covered north and
  south of Clerkenwell Road. Rosebery Avenue and
  Farringdon Road were the boundaries in the north
  and the south took in the streets and alleyways
  around Saffron Hill, Leather Lane and parts of
  Hatton Garden. By 1850 there were over 1,000
  Italians in Clerkenwell living in
  densely-populated, slum-ridden streets. The area
  was made famous by Charles Dickens in Oliver
  Twist
• In 1895 the Italian consul published a report
  estimating there were 12,000 Italians in London
  with southern Italians traditionally making their
  home in Little Italy while those from farther
  north were establishing a newer base in Soho
• Since the 1880s there has been a carnival each
  July (with a few years of exception during
  wartime). The Processione della Madonna del
  Carmine goes around the St Peter's Church on
  Clerkenwell Road which is still the centre of the
  Italian community. St. Vincent Pallotti started
  planning the church in 1845 as he wanted
  somewhere for the Italian community to worship.
  The Irish architect, Sir John Miller-Bryson,
  modelled the church on the Basilica of San
  Crisogono in Trastevere, Rome. St Peter's Church
  opened in 1863 and at that time it was the only
  church in Britain in the Roman Basilica style.

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ST. PETERS CHURCH
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WEST INDIAN IMMIGRATION

• During the 1950s, the increase of West Indian
  migration to the UK and especially London created
  racial tensions that were met by white and
  non-white writers with novels that tried to
  portray the lives of Black immigrants from a non
  prejudiced perspective.
• George Lanning (Barbados) and Samuel Selvon
  (Trinidad), in The Emigrants and The Lonely
  Londoners (both published in the mid 1950s)
  stressed how the colour line created barriers
  that isolated the black communities but also, in
  doing so, helped them to create a shared
  consciousness.
• In The London Trilogy (City of Spades, 1958
  Absolute Beginners, 1959 Mr. Love and Justice,
  1960) Colin MacInnes tries instead to show how
  the racial barriers were beginning to be
  dismantled by the new, much more open, youth
  culture that would soon give birth to the
  Swinging London phenomenon.

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LONDON RACE RIOTS (1958)

• The Notting Hill race riots were a series of
  racially motivated riots that took place in
  London, over several nights in late August and
  early September 1958.
• By the 1950s white working-class "Teddy Boys"
  were beginning to display hostility towards the
  black families in the area, a situation exploited
  and inflamed by groups such as Sir Oswald
  Mosley's Union Movement and other far-right
  groups such as the White Defence League, who
  urged disaffected white residents to "Keep
  Britain White.
• There was an increase in violent attacks on black
  people through summer, but the real riot is
  theorized to have been set off by the assault of
  Majbritt Morrison, a Swedish former sex worker,
  on August 29, 1958. Morrison had been arguing
  with her Jamaican husband Raymond Morrison at the
  Latimer Road tube station. A group of various
  white people attempted to intervene in the
  argument and a small fight broke out between the
  intervening people and some of Raymond Morrison's
  friends. The following day Morrison was verbally
  and physically assaulted by a gang of white
  youths that had recalled seeing her the night
  before. Later that night a mob of 300 to 400
  white people, many of them Teddy Boys, were seen
  on Bramley Road attacking the houses of West
  Indian residents. The disturbances, rioting and
  attacks continued every night until they petered
  out by 5 September.
• The Notting Hill Carnival was started in January
  1959 as a response to the riots and the state of
  race relations in Britain at the time.

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ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS (THE NOVEL)

• Absolute Beginners, the novel, is written from
  the first person perspective of an anonymous
  teenage freelance photographer, who lives in a
  rundown yet vibrant part of West London he calls
  Napoli. The area is home to a large number of
  Caribbean immigrants, as well as English people
  on the margins of society, such as homosexuals
  and drug addicts.
• The themes of the novel are the narrator's
  opinions on the newly formed youth culture and
  its fixation on clothes and jazz music, his love
  for his ex-girlfriend Crêpe Suzette, the illness
  of his father and simmering racial tensions in
  the summer of the Notting Hill race riots.
• In June takes up half of the book and shows the
  narrator meeting up with various teenaged friends
  and some adults in various parts of London and
  discussing his outlook on life and the new
  concept of being a teenager. He also learns that
  his ex-girlfriend, Suzette, is to enter a
  marriage of convenience with her boss, a
  middle-aged gay fashion designer called Henley.
• In July has the narrator taking photographs by
  the Thames, seeing the musical operetta H.M.S.
  Pinafore with his father, has a violent encounter
  with Ed the Ted and watches Hoplite's appearance
  on TV.
• In August has the narrator and his father take a
  cruise along the Thames towards Windsor Castle.
  His father is taken ill on the trip and has to be
  taken to a doctor. The narrator also finds
  Suzette at her husband's cottage in Cookham.
• In September is set on the narrator's nineteenth
  birthday. He sees this, symbolically, as the
  beginning of his last year as a teenager. He
  witnesses several incidents of racial violence.
  His father dies, leaving him four envelopes
  stuffed with money. Suzette has separated from
  Henley, but still seems uncertain as to whether
  she should resume her relationship with the
  narrator. The narrator decides to leave the
  country and find a place where racism does not
  exist.