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

This important and intriguing book, which uses a wide range of varied and rich sources, is a multi-faceted study of London in the 1960s and 1970s, through Margaret Thatcher becoming prime minister in 1979. It is not a traditional study nor a narrative of London’s history for those years. Rather it is a series of sixteen discrete chapters, each dealing with important aspects of London life, but deliberately not integrated with one another (although there are some connections between them, particularly over housing issues). The first chapter, “Why London? Why Now? The Swinging Moment,” introduces the study, and the last, “Becoming Postindustrial,” has some concluding remarks that place an emphasis on the decline of the docks as a major indication and cause of London no longer being as active as an industrial center. Davis doesn’t explain his interesting title, Waterloo Sunrise. Presumably it is designed to suggest a parallel to the years after 1815. It was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s that Britain really recovered from the various costs, physical and psychological, of war. In many ways the years after 1945 were more difficult and austere in Britain than during the war years themselves.Although Davis calls his second and third chapters “The Death of the Sixties,” his subtitle for the second is “Soho—Sixties London’s Erogenous Zone,” reflecting the growth and openness of sexual permissiveness taking place in Western Europe. There was a sense that a new and freer world was coming into place, reflected in the music of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Britain, perhaps surprisingly, was becoming a leader of the counter culture. That trend is even more evident in the third and fourth chapters. The third (although it has as its subtitle “The Fall of the House of Biba,” the story of the opening and closing of that large department store) also discusses the worldwide fame primarily of Carnaby Street and also the King’s Road as centers of “with it” clothing known around the world. The fourth chapter deals with the food revolution in London (which also happened elsewhere in Britain to a lesser extent) with the frequently dull British cooking and some French high cuisine giving way to a vast array of new and fashionable restaurants offering a variety of international menus, though the author could have better explored the influence of The Good Food Guide in bringing about this change. The succeeding chapters are deeply researched discussions of various developments in London that are more firmly tied with what one might call their pre-history. The discussion of the growth of home ownership is combined with that of many Londoners moving into the city’s suburbs. It is illuminating to read about their growth, more successfully in Harrow, less