Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher, by John Davis

Abstract

The London of the 1950s was a city the late Victorians would have recognised. By the 1970s, John Davis writes in his idiosyncratic and wide-ranging history of post-war London, the city’s driving economic, social and cultural forces had shifted in ways that would have confounded a Victorian observer. Davis examines this process of urban transformation in sixteen chapters that cover, among other things, the life and death of ‘the Sixties’, changing patterns in home ownership, the rise of the conservation movement, and the Notting Hill riots. Ultimately, he argues, these changes laid the groundwork for a political environment in which the ideology of Thatcherism could take root. In lieu of an introduction, Chapter One examines how the capital’s increasingly visible youth culture and a trend-hungry media converged to create ‘Swinging London’, a public relations exercise that nonetheless captured the city’s post-war optimism. So why did the party end? Davis highlights the obvious factors, notably deindustrialisation and the erosion of manufacturing jobs, paired with economic headwinds after the Wilson government’s deflationary measures in 1966–7. But the book also identifies a growing, if inchoate, resistance to the paternalism of the Beveridge welfare state. Chapters Six and Seven detail the backlash against urban modernism, as expressed in protests against motorway construction and a renewed impulse to conserve the Victorian cityscape. Chapters Nine, Ten, and Twelve chart the emergence of new, oppositional identities among groups as varied as East End cab drivers, suburban home-owners, and Black British youth. Chapters Eight, Thirteen, and Fourteen sketch the reorientation of municipal politics, from the demise of the consensus around the East End’s subsidised post-war prosperity to the emergence of grass-roots voluntary action groups that sought to redefine the imperatives of the welfare state, to the breakdown of local Labour Party hierarchies in the 1960s and 1970s.