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'The Youngest Legend in History': Cultures of

Consumption and the Mythologies of Swinging
London

David Gilbert

To cite this article: David Gilbert (2006) 'The Youngest Legend in History': Cultures of
Consumption and the Mythologies of Swinging London, The London Journal, 31:1, 1-14, DOI:
10.1179/174963206X113089

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/174963206X113089

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

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The London Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, June 2006, 1–14

Editorial
‘The Youngest Legend in History’: Cultures
of Consumption and the Mythologies of
Swinging London
DAVID GILBERT
Royal Holloway, University of London,UK

This opening article to the special edition argues that the mythologies of Swinging
London need to be placed in a longer history of the consumption and fashion cultures of
London. The following articles all provide new contextualisations of sixties London in
their analyses of the ‘rag trade’, shop design, department stores, and the representation of
the city and its new consumer identities in the films of the period. The opening article also
discusses contemporary reactions to the Swinging London phenomenon and
reviews its subsequent interpretation by cultural and urban historians. It argues that
changing academic interpretations and moral judgments about cultures of consumption
have been central to debates about sixties London, and that this recent past has had a
lasting and haunting influence on certain key sites in the city.

In 1970, Tom Salter, the owner of ‘Gear’ in Carnaby Street, published a short book
about the street, complete with Yellow Submarine-style illustrations by Malcolm
English. The book was intended as a riposte to many in the national press who were
pronouncing the end of Carnaby Street as a significant site in the geographies of
London fashion. However, Salter’s response to these obituaries acknowledged the
transformation of Carnaby Street from a site of experimentation and insider sub-
cultural knowledge to a place whose success needed to be measured by its turnover,
footfall and above all, its popularity as a tourist destination. In the early sixties,
only a few young men walked through on a Saturday morning, just to see what they
ought to be wearing. Numbers grew, until from far outside London, youngsters would
make this weekly trip, a kind of pilgrimage to the shrine of fashion. Now they come in
coachloads, old and young, from all over Britain, and from all over the world; visitors
who tell their travel agents to put what is old and mellow in London after what is bright
and new. All come to look, some come to shop, a few come to thieve. They photograph
the street and themselves, even tape-record its sounds.1
Salter was not alone in commenting on the rapidity of the changes that were taking
place in the West End of London, and the way that relatively recent events had become
what he described as ‘the youngest legend in history.’2 In a rather different end-of-
decade perspective, Christopher Booker remarked that by 1969, the ‘most notable of all
symbols of the English social revolution, the image of “Swinging London” . . . was

© The London Journal Trust, 2006 DOI 10.1179/174963206X113089

 2
DAVID GILBERT

The Geographies of Fashion in Central London in the 1950s and 1960s. Adapted from R.M. Chapin, Jr’s map of ‘The Scene’
from Time magazine, April 15 1966, by Jenny Kynaston, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway. (Belgrave Square was
marked as ‘Belgrade Square’ on the original.)
 THE YOUNGEST LEGEND IN HISTORY 3

being recalled almost as a historical event, which might have taken place ten or fifteen
years before, rather than just three or four.’3 Forty years on from the most famous
(if not the first) identification of Swinging London in the 15 April 1966 edition of
Time magazine, the fascination with the culture of the sixties, and particularly with
London’s distinctive position in wider cultural transformations, is as strong as ever.4
Yet while contemporaries commented on the speed of the myth-making process (and
tellingly both Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ and Marshall McLuhan’s claim
that the ‘medium is the message’ date from the same period), in the succeeding popular
imagination these mythologies have become fixed.
Looking now at Geoffrey Dickenson’s cover for Time, what is striking is how
stubborn and pervasive the visual clichés of Swinging London have become. According
to Time, Dickenson had ‘prowled from Carnaby Street to King’s Road, slipping in
and out of boutiques and coffee houses . . . and summed up the scene in a collage tech-
nique.’ Yet the iconography of the cover — a Mini Cooper and mini-skirts, an E-type
Jaguar and a Routemaster bus, Union-Jack shades and Op-Art fashions, John and Paul
in a Rolls Royce, and the film ‘Alfie’ advertised in neon lights — seemed to come less
from direct urban observation than from the copy of earlier articles about the new
culture of the city. For Booker, what was significant about the Time edition and the
subsequent frenzy in the American press (Esquire eulogised about ‘the only truly
modern city’, while Life had its own even more derivative ‘Swinging London’ special
later in 1966) was the way that it prompted an extraordinary outburst of exhibitionist
self-consciousness among the British themselves.5 Booker argued that this was a ‘last,
unexpected, narcissistic spree,’ and ‘an almost conscious epitaph’ on an era ‘whose sun
was nearly set.’6 Yet while the immediate frisson may have been short-lived, the idea of
the swinging city has survived in the form of both national mythology and interna-
tionalised stereotypes. The mid-1990s era of ‘Brit-pop’ and ‘cool Britannia’ clearly drew
upon these cultural memories, while the success of the Austin Powers films showed that
a mass audience, mostly unborn in the 1960s, knew enough (or thought they knew
enough) about its culture and iconography to appreciate the satire. Like Salter’s tour-
ists in Carnaby Street, later generations have returned to the streets, shops and clubs of
1960s London, to look or listen, but also to steal.
Swinging London is not the only subject of this special edition of The London
Journal on aspects of London’s fashion and consumption cultures between 1945 and
1970. It is however unavoidably a central issue in these discussions of the ‘rag trade’,
shop design, department stores, and the representation of the city and its new consumer
identities in the films of the period. These articles form part of the work of a research
project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and
Humanities Research Programme in their joint ‘Cultures of Consumption’ programme.
This project has been a collaboration between fashion historians and historical geogra-
phers based at the London College of Fashion, the Victoria and Albert Museum,
and Royal Holloway, University of London.7 The project’s title, ‘Shopping Routes:
Networks of fashion consumption in London’s West End 1945–1979’ gives some
indication of the way that the events of the sixties have been placed in the context of
a longer time period. Several of the papers in this collection do this, particularly by
thinking about the relationship between the consumption culture of the 1950s and what
4 DAVID GILBERT

was to follow. The project has also sought to broaden the study of metropolitan
consumption during this important period by connecting the immediate and visible
routes of commodity culture in the shop and on the streets with the more hidden
networks of production and supply, and by positioning London within international
networks of fashion promotion, popular culture, travel and tourism.
The intention here then is not to provide the ‘real’ story of fashion and consump-
tion practices in the West End during the 1960s as a corrective to the mythologies of
Swinging London. Rather, these essays explore the connections between the specific
developments in fashion, music and lifestyle that were the focus of the Swinging
London phenomenon, and the wider cultures of fashion and consumption in the city.
This collection is not another consideration of the lives and influence of key figures in
the ‘scene’ of the 1960s — to co-opt the introduction to Barry Dallas’s 1967 guidebook
to Swinging London, ‘we can’t promise you that you’ll meet Mick Jagger or frug with
Jean Shrimpton or be personally fitted for bell bottoms by Mary Quant or John
Stephen. But we can point you in their direction and what they represent.’8
This work draws upon and develops recent work that has treated the spaces
and places of consumption not so much as ‘passive surfaces’ but as ‘actively produced,
represented and contested.’9 Several of the most significant works in this idiom have
concentrated directly on the complex geographies of fashion and consumption in
London at different periods of its history. Frank Mort’s groundbreaking study of what
he describes as ‘topographies of taste’ in 1980s London argued that the city needed to be
considered as more than the backdrop to changes in the relationship between identity
and consumption. In Mort’s interpretation of the transformation of Soho, the con-
sumption spaces of the city — shops and cafes, restaurants, bars and night-clubs and
increasingly, the streets of Soho themselves — played an active role in the construction
of new metropolitan masculinities, particularly the ‘yuppie’ and the gay urban flâneur.10
This key emphasis of Mort’s work, on the inter-relations of urban landscapes, con-
sumption practices, retailing strategies and metropolitan identities has been developed
by Erika Rappaport in her study of the role of women consumers in the making of
the West End in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. Rappaport’s study of the
development of the West End as a shopping centre involved a ‘reinterpretation of public
life, the economy and consumption, and class and gender ideology.’11 What comes
across very strongly in Rappaport’s study is that the West End was (and indeed is still)
marked by complex intersecting and overlapping geographies of consumption and
identity, and that differences of class and gender were associated with different path-
ways through the city. This sense of the West End as a nexus of shopping routes has also
been a feature of earlier work by some of the project team, notably in Christopher
Breward’s work on the geographies of masculine fashion consumption in London
between 1860 and 1914, and Bronwen Edwards’ study of the spaces and architectures
of fashion consumption in the inter-war city.12
These ideas about the geographical complexity of the landscape of fashionable
consumption are developed in Christopher Breward’s essay in this collection. Breward’s
subject is the relationship between the organisation of production and wholesaling in
London’s fashion industries and the forms and spaces of retailing. Major fashion cities
such as Paris and New York as well as London have often been understood both as sites
 THE YOUNGEST LEGEND IN HISTORY 5

of spectacular consumption in their shops and streets, but also as distinctive production
economies, often characterised by the flexible specialisation of a sector of small firms
and exploited low-cost labour.13 Breward’s essay discusses the interconnections between
these two sides of the fashion city. While acknowledging the distinctiveness of the trans-
formation of fashion culture that took place in the sixties, the essay also points to the
ways that pre-existing industrial and supply structures, particularly those that had
worked with earlier couture houses in the West End, were an important foundation for
those changes. Central to Breward’s account is a distinctive reading of the fashion geog-
raphy of the West End, which draws upon Goffman’s notion of front and back regions.
Here the routes and networks that are traced are between the highly visible shopping
spaces of Bond Street or Carnaby Street, and the ‘backstage’ areas of the fashion city,
particularly the wholesaling and ready-to-wear sector clustered north of Oxford Street,
and the small tailors and seamstresses in the basements and upper-storeys of Soho.
Sonia Ashmore’s essay also situates the changes of the sixties in the context of the
wider West End. Her subject is the success or failure of the department stores of the
district. As she shows, throughout much of the post-war period some of these stores
were represented as inflexible relics of a passing age of retailing, too large and institu-
tionalised to respond to the changing nature of fashions and consumers. The boutique
boom of the early sixties was clearly the most obvious example of this, with the estab-
lished stores threatened both by this very high-profile local competition, and by more
general changes in consumer behaviour, tastes and identities. Ashmore shows how
some stores suffered in this new environment, but also suggests that many were remark-
ably innovative, and were able to build upon earlier experiments in the 1950s with
‘stores within stores.’ Developments like the opening of ‘Miss Selfridge’ in 1966 and
‘Way In’ in Harrods a year later, were arguably of more lasting significance in the fash-
ion culture of the West End than the short-lived brilliance (and chaos) of boutiques like
Bus Stop or Biba. Ashmore’s essay also warns against understanding changes in
London’s retail environment solely in terms of changes in fashions and consumers.
Some of the casualties among the West End’s department stores were indeed ‘dinosaurs
of retailing’, but other stores with more successful strategies were still vulnerable to the
aggressive acquisition tactics of retail entrepreneurs and property magnates.
Bronwen Edwards’ contribution to the collection focuses on London’s built envi-
ronment. Edwards makes connections between the common focus in architectural
literature on the effects of planning and modernism on London’s landscapes, and
discussions of the designs of the independent boutiques of Swinging London, more
commonly found in works of cultural and popular history.14 She argues that while
formal ‘modernism’ was becoming dominant in urban planning, a new generation of
architects, designers and consumers were looking for more pleasurable, ‘swinging’ ways
of being modern. From this perspective, it was significant that the new shop designs
were radical incursions into the landscape (including a boot-shaped interior in New
Bond Street and a car bonnet protruding into the King’s Road) that nonetheless
worked within the historic patterns and scales of the city’s streets, rather than obliter-
ating them. There were unexpected connections between a seemingly ephemeral
design culture which nonetheless drew upon the traditional strengths of the shopping
street, and a developing conservation movement that was hostile to comprehensive
6 DAVID GILBERT

development. While many of London’s conservation battles of the late-1960s and 1970s
emphasised the defence of urban communities, it is striking that new retailing spaces
have been pivotal elements of ‘conserved’ districts as different as Covent Garden and
Coin Street.15
Pamela Church Gibson addresses the mythologies of sixties London head-on in an
analysis of the films of the period, particularly those like Alfie, Darling, The Knack and
Blow-Up that have been regarded as part of a distinctive ‘Swinging London’ cycle.
Church Gibson makes two main arguments about these films and their relationship
with the consumer culture of the times. First, she argues that far from a naïve celebra-
tion of the supposed liberations of the times, these films generally work within a reac-
tionary moral framework that was particularly severe on independent young women
partaking in the pleasures of fashionable consumption. A corollary of this is that these
films represent a much more diverse urban geography than the anticipated focus on the
key consumption sites of Swinging London. The London that is portrayed is often drab
and hostile, and there are stronger continuities than is usually acknowledged with the
films of the earlier British New Wave, which were characterised primarily by Northern
industrial settings and male working-class protagonists. The second theme of the essay
is therefore that we need to look more broadly to understand the origins and develop-
ment of the staple iconography of Swinging London. These films need to be understood
not just as stand-alone ‘texts’, but also as a part of a developing extra-diegetic network
of promotion and celebrity. For new stars like Michael Caine, Terence Stamp and Julie
Christie, there was a vital conflation or confusion between their ‘real’ public lives in the
new London, and their on-screen roles and personae. The so-called Swinging London
films were not the origin of the lasting images and understandings of the period, but
instead worked as part of a distinctive amalgam of what have subsequently been
described as cultural or symbolic industries.16 The lasting iconography of Swinging
London is a testament not to the significance of contemporary British cinema, but
to the emerging power of advertising, marketing and popular journalism, organised
primarily around popular music and new fashion cultures.
In each of the essays in this edition, new forms of consumption and new consumer
identities are related to wider aspects of London and national history. In both contem-
porary and later historical responses to Swinging London, ideas about consumption
also played a central role in the way that events were understood and remembered.
The Time article was satirised almost as soon as it was published, often in terms that
indicated the superficiality or unrepresentativeness of the focus on metropolitan con-
sumer culture. Private Eye reacted to the wave of American interest by publishing a
‘Swinging England All-Purpose Titillation Supplement’ to help the ‘very small number
of American periodicals which have not yet produced their twenty-four-page survey of
the Swinging, Vibrant, Thrusting, New England Where Even The Hovercraft Wear
Miniskirts etc. etc.)’17 Other responses also pointed to the triviality of this culture.
In a special edition of Queen magazine strap-lined ‘Swingeing London: The Truth’
published two months after Time’s article, a John Glashan cartoon (fig. 1) showed two
cloth-capped workers discussing the latest papers, in front of an empty dockyard (there
was a major strike by the seamen’s union during the summer of 1966): ‘I think it’s
TERRIBLY EXCITING — Britain, the fashion capital of the world . . . swingy little
boutiques springing up everywhere . . . groups and things.’18
 THE YOUNGEST LEGEND IN HISTORY 7

Fig. 1. ‘Terribly Exciting’: John Glashan cartoon from Queen

magazine’s ‘Swingeing London’ edition, June 1966, p. 41. With
kind permission of the Glashan family.

Other responses pointed to the elitism of the scene and to how few people were
actively involved in it. Despite the classless rhetoric, and the examples of new celebrities
with working-class backgrounds, like Caine, David Bailey or the model Twiggy (Lesley
Hornby), many of the most prominent producers of the scene were decidedly upper
class. The Time edition of April 1966 itself trod a difficult path between the celebration
of a new popular culture sweeping all classes before it (as is the implied message of the
cover collage), and the identification of a new coalition of the old aristocracy and a new
elite of the beautiful and stylish. Much of Piri Halasz’s text presents an imaginary stay
in London as a whirl of elite parties in the grandest houses, a confection of a city
peopled only by the famous, the aristocratic and the beautiful, all dressed in the latest
cutting-edge fashions. Others were more analytical about this double-sidedness. Writ-
ing in 1967, Jonathan Aitken argued that, ‘in the narrow Time magazine sense, Swing-
ing London consists of a few hundred exhibitionists with a flair for self-promotion.’
However, Aitken indicated that its significance was far more extensive, and likely to be
much longer lasting:
8 DAVID GILBERT

the changes in tastes, behaviour and attitudes of the younger generation over the last
few years have at least to a small extent influenced the lives of every Londoner under the
age of 35. Whether these changes have anything to do with ‘swinging’ is a matter of
semantics, but the fact remains that without these changes today’s younger generation
would be imperceptibly different from their youthful parents, whereas in fact they are
enormously different. Therefore it seems to me that the inflated ballyhoo about Swing-
ing London does have some serious relevance to the generation of which I am writing,
particularly through its indirect influence on advertising and communications, so I
make no apology for giving so many pages over to what may seem essentially frivolous
people.19
This too had been the theme of Queen’s ‘Swingeing London’ special edition in June
1966. It was a response to what it described as the ‘grand debunk’ that had set in almost
as soon as the Time article was published. Queen argued that longer term, more signifi-
cant changes had happened in the previous five years or so, and were not about to be
undone just because the publicity machine had shifted into reverse gear: ‘London is too
big a place to be demoted, when all the fuss has died down, into Last-Year’s-Girl, and
too important to be abandoned like the yo-yo, too real to be walked out of like a spy
film.’20 Queen had a sense of the momentum of events, of agency moving from the ‘pro-
ducers of Modern London’, for the most part ‘oblivious to this plastic primary coloured
Frankenstein thing that they have created.’ Instead this was a new order, where the
‘Swings and Roundabouts’ of the consumers would ‘go whirling merrily on with or
without the people that started them off, and — one hopes whether the beady lens-eye
of global publicity is still focused on them, or whether it has long since swivelled off.’21
Historians of the sixties have also debated the significance of changes in fashion
and consumer culture, and London’s role in those developments. In Arthur Marwick’s
broad survey of what he describes as the ‘long sixties’ (the period between 1958 and
1974) in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, he argues that changes in con-
sumption formed key elements of a broader ‘cultural revolution’. Marwick points to the
massive improvements in material life, with millions fully joining the consumer society,
to the rise in influence of young people, dictating taste in fashion, music and popular
culture more generally, to a new entrepreneurialism with boutiques, fashion designers,
clubs and modelling agencies as key examples, and to ‘new modes of self-presentation
involving emancipation from the old canons of fashion, and a rejoicing in the natural
attributes of the human body.’22
Those old enough to remember the dictates of the new canons of fashion in the
sixties might raise an eyebrow at this last comment. However, what is significant here is
that Marwick argues that these changes in consumption and consumption practices
were every bit as important as developments in politics, gender roles, class relations,
family structures and sexual behaviour. Indeed through much of Marwick’s account,
there is a sense that some of the seemingly more profound changes of the period were
directly predicated on such trends in popular culture and consumption. In addition to
these claims, Marwick gives a distinctive geography to the sixties. While recognising
different national traditions, and arguing that ‘British dominance of popular culture’
was ‘not as total as some patriots would like to maintain’, Marwick argues that Britain,
and particularly London, played an unprecedented role with respect to pop music,
fashion, film and television.23
 THE YOUNGEST LEGEND IN HISTORY 9

This might be described as the strong argument for the significance of Swinging
London. Other cultural histories of the period are much less convinced. Jonathon
Green, in All Dressed Up, acknowledges the contribution of consumption to broader
social changes, but argues that Swinging London was ‘elitist, style-obsessed, hedonistic
and apolitical’, a ‘synthetic side-show’ and the ‘gaudy offspring of a magazine writer’s
fantasies.’24 In a recent retrospective essay, contemporary journalist Nik Cohn criticises
histories and memoirs of the period ‘ploughing over the same old turf, gamely pretend-
ing that Swinging London changed the world.’25 While the myths of Swinging London
were destined to last, for Green the emergence of the so-called ‘underground’ counter-
culture was far more transformative than the narcissistic fancy dress party that pre-
ceded it. In Green’s account, a different sixties London is given precedence, one whose
core period lasted from the Albert Hall ‘Happening’ poetry readings of 1965 to the Oz
trial of 1971. London is also less important in this account, with much of what took
place a British eddy in currents that flowed across the Atlantic. However, in an impor-
tant recent essay, Simon Rycroft emphasises the continuities between these seemingly
ideologically antithetical sixties’ Londons. Underground London ‘sprang from the
same, same socio-economic, aesthetic and theoretical developments’ as the Swinging
scene.26 Swinging London gave impetus to the newly established culture of ‘permissive-
ness’, and its various scenes were vital in creating new kinds of social network. These
networks, while not ‘classless’ as the contemporary hype often claimed, were certainly
more mixed and fluid than what had gone before.
Historians of London have also struggled to understand the wider significance of
the Swinging London phenomenon. In London: A Social History, Roy Porter echoes
John Glashan’s cartoon in titling his review of the post-war city ‘Swinging London,
Dangling Economy’. Porter’s analysis is Marxian in tone, suggesting that Swinging
London was ‘a veneer of modernity on an ageing superstructure.’27 The real action in
sixties London was to be found not in the consuming enclaves of central London, but in
the disintegration of the manufacturing base taking place across the city. Nonetheless,
Porter does acknowledge both the cultural and economic significance of the changes of
the sixties. The boom businesses of fashion, design and music, together with photogra-
phy, modelling, magazine publishing and advertising, ‘created wealth for almost a
quarter of a million Londoners, in the process giving London a new image, and its
people a fresh sense of identity and vitality.’28
Other city historians have stressed the development of such creative industries and
their relationship with wider changes in the urban economy. Jerry White’s reading of
Swinging London in his history of the twentieth-century city makes direct connections
between the period and London’s rise as a global city characterised by creative
clusters.29 From this perspective, the period’s lasting legacy for the city has been the
establishment and subsequent growth of the PR, advertising and marketing industries.
Steve Humphries and John Taylor, in The Making of Modern London, indicate the
connections between the ‘style capital’ and the ‘new office world.’30 Property specula-
tion not only created a new cityscape in central London, as discussed by Ashmore
and Edwards here, but also brought many new workers into the West End. The inde-
pendent young woman, with an income of her own, sometimes stereotyped as the
‘dolly-bird’ secretary or ‘girl Friday’ was in many ways the primary target of the new
10 DAVID GILBERT

fashion sector, and a driving force for change in consumption patterns. This new urban
type was formed in the intersection of new consumption practices, property specula-
tion, and changes in the class and gender order of white-collar work in central London
(and also, as the vocabulary indicates, in the casual sexism that was a hallmark of the
new permissive culture).31
Peter Ackroyd, never at his best or most comfortable writing about the twentieth-
century city, gives a distinctly conventional and sober reading of the swinging city in
London: The Biography.32 In a book elsewhere characterised by an intense engagement
with the sights, sounds, noises and smells of the city, fashion and popular culture in
sixties London is approached sociologically, with Ackroyd emphasising the demo-
graphic context. London gave the impression of being a city dominated by youth
because the high birth rates of the immediate post-war period ensured that there were
more youths. In this section of the book, Ackroyd’s usual obsession with unexpected
continuity and resonance in the London cityscape — the genius loci — deserts him. This
fits with a strain of writing that treats the sixties as a distinctive break with what had
gone before. Shawn Levy’s popular history of sixties London is typical in stressing a
sudden shift from a monochromatic to a technicolour city.33 In this view, the prehistory
of Swinging London went back no further than a 1950s vanguard of jazz-clubs, coffee
bars, the early mods, and Mary Quant opening her first boutique on the King’s Road. It
has been fashion historians, rather than urban historians or cultural historians, who
have done most to think about the links between Swinging London and the city’s longer
history. In both Breward’s Fashioning London and a collection accompanying a recent
exhibition on The London Look at the Museum of London, sixties fashion culture is
interpreted as a further stage in the city’s traditions of popular demotic styles that have
often crossed the divide between the bespoke and the edgy.34 Studies like Breward’s
contribution here or Alistair O’Neill’s essay on John Stephen and Carnaby Street
explore these connections with a longer past in very precise locations in the city.35
Such continuities can be traced in the after-life of Swinging London. It is not only
remembered through histories and biographies, through revivals of its music and fash-
ions, through recycling of its styles, or the appropriation of its iconographies in film and
video; Swinging London also haunts the London cityscape. Writing in 1970, Tom
Salter proclaimed that Carnaby Street would be a site of permanent revolution and
constant modernisation (figs. 2 and 3). One of Malcolm English’s pictures imagined
‘Carnaby 1984’ as a force spreading across the world, with Chairman Mao in a Union-
Jack tie, instant clothes from a Union-Jacked tin, and ‘Gear’ expanding into its own
art-deco skyscraper.36 In the future:
you will go to Carnaby Street for your new car, to book up a pop holiday. Who’s going
to be the first to put up a hotel? The street has got its discotheque but what about
theatres and cinemas? In short a whole pop culture developed within one area.37
Yet instead of being a site of the constantly new, Carnaby Street was a place that
became caught in its own immediate past. If it was well past its best even by 1966, by the
mid 1970s, the street was increasingly dominated by shops selling cheap Union-Jack T-
shirts and Carnaby souvenirs. This was a process that had been started by John Stephen
himself in the late sixties, who deliberately marketed the street to foreign tourists, but
 THE YOUNGEST LEGEND IN HISTORY 11

Fig. 2. Henry Grant’s fine photograph of Carnaby Street in 1968

includes some of the elements of Swinging London iconography —
the open-top sports car, a black cab, the Union-Jack branding.
However, it also shows the disorganisation of the street, still
marked by war-time bomb damage and surviving non-fashion
businesses, as well as the new boutiques of John Stephen and
others. Permission of the Museum of London.

which was accelerated with the pedestrianisation by Westminster Council in the early
1970s. A move designed to manage increasing numbers of tourists in the street had the
effect of accelerating its transformation into a space whose chief function was to cater
for them.
In 1997, the majority of holdings in Carnaby Street were bought by the Shaftesbury
property company. Shaftesbury cleared out most of the souvenir and jean shops, raised
rents and attempted to rebrand the area as the ‘Carnaby urban village.’38 Shaftesbury
has had an ambiguous relationship with Carnaby Street’s past. It has played down the
sixties iconography, and the Union Jack is conspicuous in its absence. Yet the deliberate
encouragement of independent fashion companies in Kingly Court off Carnaby Street,
and of major sportswear and streetwear firms on the main street indicates the way that
this is a twenty-first-century commercial appropriation of an established historical
legacy, rather than an attempt to lose the connection with the past. Recent work on the
‘places of memory’ has tended to concentrate on national memorials and symbols, and
the complex debates surrounding sites of trauma.39 The example of Carnaby Street tells
12 DAVID GILBERT

Fig. 3. Carnaby Street in 2005. The latest rebranding of the

street by the Shaftesbury property company plays down direct
associations with its sixties past. Nonetheless the company’s
strategy of encouragement of independent fashion companies,
alongside major sportswear and streetwear firms indicates that
this is a still an inflection of the established historical legacy in
the street. Photo: the author.

us that the connections between social memories and particular sites may also be one
that is intermediated by cultures of consumption and by commercial strategies.

Notes
1
T. Salter, Carnaby Street (Walton-on-Thames, 1970), 34–9.
2
Ibid. 10.
3
C. Booker, The Neophiliacs. The Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (1992 [1969]),
308.
 THE YOUNGEST LEGEND IN HISTORY 13
4
P. Halasz, ‘London: The Swinging City’ Time, 15 April 1966. Many commentators have pointed to
significant articles on the newness of London culture that predated Time, particularly ‘London —
the most exciting city’ Weekend Telegraph 30 April 1965, and even the first edition of the Sunday
Times Colour Magazine of 4 February 1962, which featured Mary Quant, Alexander Plunket
Greene, David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton and Peter Blake.
5
Booker, Neophiliacs, 294.
6
Ibid.
7
ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption programme, research project RES-143-25-0038. The
project team would like to give particular acknowledgement for the support given by the
programme director, Frank Trentman. We would also like to thank Andrew Church and Nicola
Avery for their editorial work on this edition, and our anonymous referees for their helpful
comments and suggestions.
8
B. Dallas, Swinging London: a Guide to Where the Action is (1967), 11.
9
N. Blomley, ‘“I’d like to dress her all over”: Masculinity, Power and Retail Space’, in N. Wrigley
and M. Lowe (eds), Retailing, Consumption and Capital: Towards the New Retail Geography’
(Harlow, 1996), 239. For overviews of this work, see Wrigley and Lowe; articles in the special
edition of Urban Studies, 35 5/6 (May 1998), 815–1008; and P. Jackson, M. Lowe, D. Miller and
F. Mort (eds), Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces (Oxford, 2000).
10
F. Mort, Cultures of Consumption. Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain
(1996), 11.
11
E. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure. Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton,
2000), 7.
12
C. Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester,
1999); B. Edwards, ‘Making the West End Modern: Space, Architecture and Shopping in 1930s
London’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, 2005).
13
See N. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris
and New York (Durham NC, 1997).
14
See for contrasting examples M. Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and
Reconstruction in Britain (2002) and M. Fogg, Boutique. A 60’s Cultural Phenomenon (1960).
15
See P. Ambrose and B. Colenutt, The Property Machine (Harmondsworth,1975) for a classic
contemporary discussion of these struggles.
16
A. Scott, The Cultural Economy of Cities: Essays on the Geography of Image-Producing Industries
(2000).
17
Quoted in Max Décharné, King’s Road. The Rise and Fall of the Hippest Street in the World (2005)
xix.
18
Queen, 22 June 1966, 41.
19
J. Aitken, The Young Meteors (1967), 10.
20
Queen, 22 June 1966, 40.
21
Ibid.
22
A. Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–
c.1974 (Oxford, 2000), 18.
23
Ibid. 16, 18.
24
J. Green, All Dressed Up. The Sixties and the Counterculture (1999), xi and 86.
25
N. Cohn, ‘It was 40 years ago today . . .’ GQ Magazine (April 2006), 130–38.
26
S. Rycroft, ‘The Geographies of Swinging London’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28 (2002),
566–88, quote at 580.
27
R. Porter, London: A Social History (1994), 363.
28
Ibid.
29
J. White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People (2001), 341–51.
30
J. Humphries and J. Taylor, The Making of Modern London (1986).
31
See C. Breward, ‘The Dolly Bird’ in Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis
(Oxford, 2004), 151–76.
14 DAVID GILBERT

32
P. Ackroyd, London. The Biography (2000), 758–60.
33
S. Levy, Ready Steady Go! Swinging London and the Invention of Cool (2002).
34
C. Breward, Fashioning London; C. Breward, E. Ehrman, and C. Evans, The London Look: Fashion
from Street to Catwalk (New Haven, 2004).
35
A. O’Neill, ‘John Stephen: A Carnaby Street Presentation of Masculinity 1957–1975.’ Fashion
Theory, 4/4 (2000), 487–506.
36
Salter, Carnaby Street, 68–9.
37
Ibid. 63.
38
www.shaftesbury.co.uk; www.carnaby.co.uk
39
For a recent critical review of this literature, see S. Legg, ‘Contesting and Surviving Memory:
Space, Nation, and Nostalgia in Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, 23/4 (2005), 481–504.

David Gilbert is Professor of Urban and Historical Geography at Royal Holloway,

University of London. He is co-director of the ‘Shopping Routes’ project, part of the
ESRC/AHRC ‘Cultures of Consumption’ programme and has published widely on the
history of modern London. He is co-editor of the books Swinging Sixties (V&A, 2006)
and Fashion’s World Cities (Berg, 2006) that also present work from the project.