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Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher
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.
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.
600 pages, Hardcover
Published March 15, 2022
About the author
John Davis
676 books9 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database. This profile contains books by more than one author with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 6, 2023
Davis only intends these essays to be joined loosely by a few common themes. As a reader, one finds an ever-changing array of interesting stories. This is a diverse survey. We have fashion fads, the restaurant boom, and cabbies, alongside some more sober examinations of housing, municipal government, and race relations. I enjoyed this greatly, though I did find some of Davis’s language a bit racist or misogynistic sounding. I’m not sure if Davis is trying to replicate the language of those in the past he’s studying, or if he’s just irrevocably an emeritus fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford. The book is also well designed and colourful, with many illustrations throughout.
January 2, 2024
Interesting book about aspects of life in London during the sixties and up to the end of the seventies. It looks at hosing issues, racism, family life etc and makes for an interesting read
May 15, 2024
This is an excellent history of London in the sixties and the seventies and it manages to combine a light readable tone with a real feeling that the author knows his stuff and there are over 120 pages of footnotes and bibliography.
Now that Londoners have discovered the Delights of the Palate - Eating Out in 1960s and 1970s London decribes how the number of restaurants grew massively in the period (think Bistros and Trattorias) but were short-lived, faddish and most awful.
You Only have to Look at the Westway - The End of the Urban Motorway in London...
Familiar with the demise of the urban motorway concept in London but it was startling to hear just now technocratic and paternalistic the planners who wrote the Greater London Development Plan in the 1960s were similar to Abercombrie or Buchanan. 'How do the GLC know what the people of London want? Have they ever asked them?' demanded one of the objectors to the GLDP. The short answer was that they had not preferring information gathering the opinion sampling. Interesting to read the influence of 'the Death and Life of Great American Cities (The Failure of Town Planning) among the objectors. I am reading this at the same time incidentally. Eventually when the planners were forced to bring in an enhanced consultation process, the process became a political and institutional battleground and the urban demographer brought in to lead the process (David Eversley) ended up having a nervous breakdown.
East End Docklands and the Death of Poplarism -
Shows the devastating impact of the end of housing subsidies and the collapse of the docklands economy and local tax base had on the Councils and communities of inner east London. I think that there was a failure of vision in many of the community action groups which sprang up at the time. "They call themselves an Action Group; they are an un-action group. The docker-turned lecturer Danny Connolly of the East End Docklands Action Group effectively acknowledged this in his evidence to a 1975 Parliamentary C0mmittee when he said "We are a conservation group. We view the preservation of the way of life that has gone on and developed in East London...[as] of as much greater importance than the preservation of the osprey, or the golden eagle or the peregrine or various other sorts of species of life on which people spend enormous sums of money to preserve. The submission to the report argued that exising industry should be preserved in situ and that all new industry should relate to the traditional skills of the area.
The new left in Inner London had few effective responses to deindstrialisation either. Their economic illiteracy is explored further in 'Strains of Labour in the Inner City' Neither sit-ins and occupations or proposals for Councils to intervene directly in local economies through the expansion of Direct Labour Organisations proved even remotely effective. The gap left by these economic dead ends opened the door for Thatherite interventions in local government procurement and the London Docklands Development Corporation of the 1980s.
Now that Londoners have discovered the Delights of the Palate - Eating Out in 1960s and 1970s London decribes how the number of restaurants grew massively in the period (think Bistros and Trattorias) but were short-lived, faddish and most awful.
You Only have to Look at the Westway - The End of the Urban Motorway in London...
Familiar with the demise of the urban motorway concept in London but it was startling to hear just now technocratic and paternalistic the planners who wrote the Greater London Development Plan in the 1960s were similar to Abercombrie or Buchanan. 'How do the GLC know what the people of London want? Have they ever asked them?' demanded one of the objectors to the GLDP. The short answer was that they had not preferring information gathering the opinion sampling. Interesting to read the influence of 'the Death and Life of Great American Cities (The Failure of Town Planning) among the objectors. I am reading this at the same time incidentally. Eventually when the planners were forced to bring in an enhanced consultation process, the process became a political and institutional battleground and the urban demographer brought in to lead the process (David Eversley) ended up having a nervous breakdown.
East End Docklands and the Death of Poplarism -
Shows the devastating impact of the end of housing subsidies and the collapse of the docklands economy and local tax base had on the Councils and communities of inner east London. I think that there was a failure of vision in many of the community action groups which sprang up at the time. "They call themselves an Action Group; they are an un-action group. The docker-turned lecturer Danny Connolly of the East End Docklands Action Group effectively acknowledged this in his evidence to a 1975 Parliamentary C0mmittee when he said "We are a conservation group. We view the preservation of the way of life that has gone on and developed in East London...[as] of as much greater importance than the preservation of the osprey, or the golden eagle or the peregrine or various other sorts of species of life on which people spend enormous sums of money to preserve. The submission to the report argued that exising industry should be preserved in situ and that all new industry should relate to the traditional skills of the area.
The new left in Inner London had few effective responses to deindstrialisation either. Their economic illiteracy is explored further in 'Strains of Labour in the Inner City' Neither sit-ins and occupations or proposals for Councils to intervene directly in local economies through the expansion of Direct Labour Organisations proved even remotely effective. The gap left by these economic dead ends opened the door for Thatherite interventions in local government procurement and the London Docklands Development Corporation of the 1980s.
March 30, 2026
Congratulations are due to Davis, an Oxford-based historian, for producing a thoroughly researched and heavily footnoted collection of essays which is nevertheless readable and entertaining. More congratulations are due to the publisher, Princeton University Press, for stumping up for a full-colour edition printed on bright white paper and illustrated throughout with photos in colour and black and white, and the odd chart or table. That said, bring a forklift truck, because a full-colour hardback is a heavy tome and you wouldn’t want to drop it on your face while reading in bed.
Davis’ thesis is that Thatcher didn’t arise in a vacuum, but that the conditions for the Thatcherite revolution developed in Britain after the initial post-War settlement (NHS, Welfare State) and as various institutions declined and the economy flatlined, Thatcher’s Britain was already there. She was pushing on an open door.
The essays are thematic rather than chronological. Davis, or his editors, set out to please the casual reader with the first two chapters (proper) on the Soho sex trade and the Swinging London fashion trade. Ultimately, the permissive society was a short-lived expansion of Soho strip clubs etc, exploiting legal loopholes and pushing the envelope of what was acceptable. But eventually, commercial interests enter the scene and the reputation of Soho was at odds with the desire to attract tourists and not leave them feeling like they’d been fleeced.
And when it comes to Sixties London and the great cultural flowering represented by the pop scene, theatre, film, photography, and fashion, it was the success of the fashion industry that had the most impact. On the other hand, it’s a cut-throat business, with designs easily copyable, horrific labour conditions, and precarious finances. The fact that in those pre-security tag days a lot of stuff went walking out the door without being paid for didn’t help.
There are also interesting chapters on the increasingly cosmopolitain London restaurant scene, housing, urban planning, taxi drivers, racism, life in the suburbs, and The Problem With The Fucking Labour Party, which (as always, as ever) was more concerned with infighting than working for a better society.
Not every part of every chapter was of interest to me, but this certainly hit the spot in terms of research for my next writing project. It’s accessible, readable, illustrated, and fascinating. And so, so, heavy.
Davis’ thesis is that Thatcher didn’t arise in a vacuum, but that the conditions for the Thatcherite revolution developed in Britain after the initial post-War settlement (NHS, Welfare State) and as various institutions declined and the economy flatlined, Thatcher’s Britain was already there. She was pushing on an open door.
The essays are thematic rather than chronological. Davis, or his editors, set out to please the casual reader with the first two chapters (proper) on the Soho sex trade and the Swinging London fashion trade. Ultimately, the permissive society was a short-lived expansion of Soho strip clubs etc, exploiting legal loopholes and pushing the envelope of what was acceptable. But eventually, commercial interests enter the scene and the reputation of Soho was at odds with the desire to attract tourists and not leave them feeling like they’d been fleeced.
And when it comes to Sixties London and the great cultural flowering represented by the pop scene, theatre, film, photography, and fashion, it was the success of the fashion industry that had the most impact. On the other hand, it’s a cut-throat business, with designs easily copyable, horrific labour conditions, and precarious finances. The fact that in those pre-security tag days a lot of stuff went walking out the door without being paid for didn’t help.
There are also interesting chapters on the increasingly cosmopolitain London restaurant scene, housing, urban planning, taxi drivers, racism, life in the suburbs, and The Problem With The Fucking Labour Party, which (as always, as ever) was more concerned with infighting than working for a better society.
Not every part of every chapter was of interest to me, but this certainly hit the spot in terms of research for my next writing project. It’s accessible, readable, illustrated, and fascinating. And so, so, heavy.
June 8, 2023
Dry But Informative
When I bought this book I thought it looked really interesting and engaging. It was interesting, but not engaging. I did learn a lot but I'm glad I finished it and can move on to something more engaging.
When I bought this book I thought it looked really interesting and engaging. It was interesting, but not engaging. I did learn a lot but I'm glad I finished it and can move on to something more engaging.
February 27, 2023
A charming and readable compilation of essays on London, between the 60,s and early Thatcher years. As one would expect when addressing London’s history through the benefit of hindsight, this retelling goes a long way in explaining some of the Capital’s economic and social issues, particularly those of immigration, racism and de-industrialisation. A must read for anyone interested in social history and perhaps also an ‘explainer, for those of us who lived through the period.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews