Waterloo Sunrise

London from the Sixties to Thatcher

John Davis

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780691223797
  9780691220529
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691220581
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

A kaleidoscopic history of how the 1960s and 1970s changed London forever

Waterloo Sunrise is a panoramic and multifaceted account of modern London during the transformative years of the sixties and seventies, when a city still bearing the scars of war emerged as a vibrant yet divided metropolis. John Davis paints lively and colorful portraits of life in the British capital, covering topics as varied as the rise and fall of boutique fashion, Soho and the sex trade, eating out in London, cabbies and tourists, gentrification, conservation, suburbia and the welfare state.

With vivid and immersive scene-setting, Davis traces how 'swinging London' captured the world's attention in the mid-sixties, discarding postwar austerity as it built a global reputation for youthful confidence and innovative music and fashion. He charts the slow erosion of mid-sixties optimism, showing how a newly prosperous city grappled with problems of deindustrialisation, inner-city blight and racial friction. Davis reveals how London underwent a complex evolution that reflected an underlying tension between majority affluence and minority deprivation. He argues that the London that had taken shape by the time of Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister in 1979 already displayed many of the features that would come to be associated with 'Thatcher's Britain' of the eighties.

Monumental in scope, Waterloo Sunrise draws on a wealth of archival evidence to provide an evocative, engrossing account of Britain's ever-evolving capital city.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. ‘Why London? Why Now?’ The Swinging Moment
• 2. The Death of the Sixties, Part 1: Soho—Sixties London’s Erogenous Zone
• 3. The Death of the Sixties, Part 2: The Fall of the House of Biba
• 4. ‘Now That Londoners Have Discovered the Delights of the Palate’: Eating Out in 1960s and 1970s London
• 5. ‘Hot Property—It’s Mine!’ The Lure and the Limits of Home Ownership
• 6. ‘You Only Have to Look at Westway’: The End of the Urban Motorway in London
• 7. The Conservation Consensus
• 8. East End Docklands and the Death of Poplarism
• 9. The London Cabbie and the Rise of Essex Man
• 10. Protecting the Good Life: London’s Suburbs
• 11. Containing Racism? The London Experience, 1957–1968
• 12. Unquiet Grove: The 1976 Notting Hill Carnival Riot
• 13. Reshaping the Welfare State? Voluntary Action and Community in London, 1960–1975
• 14. Strains of Labour in the Inner City
• 15. Selling Swinging London, or Coming to Terms with the Tourist
• 16. Becoming Postindustrial
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index