Making it in Balham

The characters, Agnes Bracken, Inga Johansson, and Michael Odide are based upon real people who lived in London during the late 1950s. Everyone else is fictional.

Making it in Balham is set in London during 1958 against a backdrop of slum clearance and post war building. There are riots taking place and racial tension is rife.

Despite all this, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced the previous year that most of our people have never had it so good. This sentiment was viewed with some scepticism by the majority of working people, but proved true for the moneyed classes, who marvelled at the growth in the economy; set back during the austerity of the post war years, and now seen to be booming. This sense of increasing affluence generally gave rise to a feeling of optimism as Britain headed towards the 1960s.

We meet Agnes Bracken, at the age of twenty-seven, aware of these changes, but feels left behind. Agnes works as a short-hand...