London by Phil Baker

Author:Phil Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books Ltd

Michael Caine at home with his mother Ellen Micklewhite and brother Stanley, 1964.

Along with peace and love, violence was in the air: anyone indiscriminately nostalgic for pubs of the 1960s and ’70s – then much more numerous, including endless bad pubs in bad areas – should remember the words ‘Who are you looking at?’ The first generation of skinheads, a wilfully proletarian youth cult related to ‘hard’ Mods, inspired real fear in the streets, stoked up by rumours and friend-of-a-friend stories of their atrocities. ‘Aggro’ and ‘bovver’ (as in ‘bovver boots’, usually ox-blood Doc Martens) were major words of the time, from the oddly genteel gangland euphemisms ‘aggravation’ and ‘a bit of bother’. Skinheads particularly loathed hippies – soft, middle-class, long-haired, studenty and left-wing – and immigrants, despite their own love of Jamaican ska and reggae. ‘Paki-bashing’ was another phrase of the ’70s that no one could be nostalgic for.

‘Race relations’ were at an all-time low. ‘Mugging’, a nineteenth-century British word, had come back from America to mean black street robbery. Enoch Powell, a former professor of classics with his memorably odd Old Testament name, was a popular figure with sections of the working class after his 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech predicting racial violence, and 1,000 Powellite dock workers marched from the East End to parliament.

The economy was in trouble, with unemployment, high inflation, militant trade unionism – the docks, in particular, were having their death throes hastened by strikes – and a decline in manufacturing. The Northern Ireland troubles hit the mainland with IRA bombs going off – including one at the Post Office Tower in 1971, after which its high-tech revolving restaurant was closed – and there was more intellectually driven trouble from the Angry Brigade, who bombed the house of the home secretary. Ted Heath’s government was hit by the oil crisis, a miners’ strike, the three-day week and television technicians’ strikes. With no television and no electricity, families played board games by candlelight.

The underground had evolved into an ‘alternative’ scene – as in the seminal paperback guide Alternative London, which first appeared in 1970 – associated with the squatting movement, but embracing everything from civil liberties to macrobiotics. The listings magazine Time Out began as part of the same scene, featuring music, cinema and a political ‘agitprop’ section of demonstrations: anti-apartheid, gay and women’s issues, and ‘Troops Out of Ireland’.

There was a sense of late blooming and going to seed. Biba had expanded from a small boutique to a larger boutique (bombed by the Angry Brigade) and then to a seven-storey Art Deco department store in the old Derry & Toms building – famous for its roof gardens – selling its own glamorously branded baked beans. Glam rock was in the air. As well as the latest news of small Trotskyite factions you might want to join, Time Out carried ads for water beds; the height of luxury. Along with patches for denim and ‘executive toys’ such as chrome Newton’s cradles, Carnaby Street and Kensington

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