Euston Arch and Coal Exchange poised to go, Birmingham’s Inner Ring Road laying waste to all before it, farewell the Victorian barracks of Aldershot, T. Dan Smith ready to turn Newcastle into the Venice of the North (but ring roads, not canals), streets in the sky in Sheffield, plans afoot for Glasgow’s brutalist Red Road blocks (six point-blocks, two slab-blocks) to be the highest dwellings in Europe, the heart being ripped out of Bradford, high-rise everywhere, old people trapped, mothers and small children trapped, an urban world of compulsory purchase and developers’ boom time, of good intentions compromised by hubris, by greed, by the lure of size for size’s sake, John Betjeman almost the lone voice
Modernity Britain 1959– 62
Summer 1961: The past is disappearing, modernity now unstoppable. London’s
of protest, most people shrugging their shoulders and mutely accepting destruction as the inevitable price of progress . . . A shake of the dice – and landing, who knew where?
DAVID KYNASTON
Modernity Britain DAVID KYNASTON
David Kynaston’s history of post-war Britain has so far taken us from the radically reforming Labour governments of the late 1940s in Austerity Britain, through the growing prosperity of Family Britain’s more placid 1950s, to the very cusp of the 1960s and
Book Two
the coming of a new zeitgeist in Modernity Britain. The
A Shake of the Dice,
themes of the new spirit of the age. Now, in part
1959–62
sources, Kynaston gets up close to a turbulent era as
first part, Opening the Box, 1957–59, plotted the main two – A Shake of the Dice, 1959–62 – through a rich haul of diaries, letters, newspapers and many other the speed of social change accelerates. By the early 1960s consumerism was inexorably
David Kynaston was born in Aldershot
taking hold (stripes for Signal toothpaste, flavours
in 1951. He has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written nineteen books, including The City of London (1994–2001), a widely acclaimed four-volume history, and WG’s Birthday Party, an account of the Gentlemen v. Players match at Lord’s in July 1898. He is the author of Austerity Britain, 1945–51 and Family Britain, 1951–57, the first two volumes in a series covering the history of post-war Britain (1945–79) under the collective title ‘Tales of a New Jerusalem’, as well as Modernity Britain, Book One: Opening the Box, 1957–59, the first half of the third volume. He is currently an honorary professor at Kingston
for potato crisps), relative economic decline was becoming the staple of political discourse (entry into Europe increasingly seen as our salvation), immigration was turning into an ever-hotter issue (the controversial coming of controls), traditional norms of morality were perceived as under serious threat (Lady Chatterley’s Lover freely on sale after the
‘The fullest, deepest and most balanced history of our times’ Sunday y Telegraph g p
‘Kynaston is the most entertaining historian alive’ Spectator
famous court case), and traditional working-class culture was changing (wakes weeks in decline, the end of the maximum wage for footballers) even as Coronation Street established itself as a national institution. The greatest shake of the dice, though, concerned urban redevelopment: city centres were being yanked into the age of the motor car, slum
‘Volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face’
University.
Hilary Mantel, Observer
www.bloomsbury.com
clearance was being intensified, and the skyline studded with brutalist high-rise boxes. Some of this transformation was necessary, but too much would destroy communities and leave a harsh, fateful legacy. This profoundly important story of the period of transformation from the old to the brink of a new world is now told brilliantly and in full for the first time.
Cover photographs: Tower blocks, Glasgow, 1960 by Albert McCabe (Getty Images); Terraced street, Salford, 1962 by Shirley Baker (Mary Evans Picture Library) Series design by www.willwebb.co.uk Author photograph by Adam Sherratt / Rex Features
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