Oliver Twist has given a startling and lasting impression of what the streets of London were like at the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, with dens of thieves in the East End turning boys like Oliver into "fogle-hunters" burly housebreakers like Bill Sikes setting off through the sleeping town to practice their skills in the leafy suburbs, and loose women like Nancy being battered to death in dingy rooms or down dark alleys.
A generation later, Charles Dickens (Jr) is hardly more reassuring than his father, advising householders to lock up carefully and bring their mud-scrapers in at night if they happened to like the patterns on them. Later in the reign too, social problem novels like George Gissing's The Nether World (1889) were still painting a lurid picture of slums in the East End, whose denizens grew as "vile" as their surroundings and were, of course, only a stone's throw from the City and (worse!) only a couple of stone's throws away from the monied residents of the West End.
For a few years in the 1960s, London was the world capital of cool. When Time magazine dedicated its 15 April 1966 issue to London: the Swinging City, it cemented the association between London and all things hip and fashionable that had been growing in the popular imagination throughout the decade.
London’s remarkable metamorphosis from a gloomy Victorian grimy post-War capital into a bright, shining epicentre of style was largely down to two factors: youth and money. The baby boom of the 1950s meant that the urban population was younger than it had been since Roman times. By the mid-60s, 40% of the population at large was under 25. With the abolition of the National Service for men in 1960, these young people had more freedom and fewer responsibilities than their parent's generation. They rebelled against the limitations and restrictions of post-War society. In short, they wanted to shake things up…
Added to this, Londoners had more disposable income than ever before – and were looking for ways to spend it. Nationally, weekly earnings in the ‘60s outstripped the cost of living by a staggering 183%: in London, where earnings were generally higher than the national average, the figure was probably even greater.
This heady combination of affluence and youth led to a flourishing of music, fashion, design and anything else that would banish the post-War gloom. Fashion boutiques sprang up willy-nilly. Men flocked to Carnaby St, near Soho, for the latest ‘Mod’ fashions. While women were lured to the King’s Rd, where Mary Quant’s radical mini skirts flew off the rails of her iconic store, Bazaar.
Even the most shocking or downright barmy fashions were popularised by models who, for the first time, became superstars. Jean Shrimpton was considered the symbol of Swinging London, while Twiggy was named The Face of 1966. Mary Quant herself was the undisputed queen of the group known as The Chelsea Set, a hard-partying, socially eclectic mix of largely idle ‘toffs’ and talented working-class movers and shakers.
Music was also a huge part of London’s swing. While Liverpool had the Beatles, the London sound was a mix of bands who went on to worldwide success, including The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces and The Rolling Stones. Their music was the mainstay of pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline and Radio Swinging England. Creative types of all kinds gravitated to the capital, from artists and writers to magazine publishers, photographers, advertisers, film-makers and product designers.
But not everything in London’s garden was rosy. Immigration was a political hot potato: by 1961, there were over 100,000 West Indians in London, and not everyone welcomed them with open arms. The biggest problem of all was a huge shortage of housing to replace bombed buildings and unfit slums and cope with a booming urban population. The badly-conceived solution – huge estates of tower blocks – and the social problems they created, changed the face of London for ever. By the 1970s, with industry declining and unemployment rising, Swinging London seemed a very dim and distant memory.
1. Why do you think Tower blocks were a bad idea for working class people. Use your logic and say what you think might have been the problem_
2. What do you think was a fogle hunter
3, What made London officially hip
4.denizens grew as "vile" as their surroundings. What does this mean
5. Why did swinging London seem a distant memory
6.What does the son of Dickens advise householders to do
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