CHAPTER THREE: Dedicated followers of fashion
‘Nothing happened in the Sixties except that we all dressed up.’
John Lennon
‘Fashion is not frivolous. It is a part of being alive today.’
Mary Quant
In April 1966 America’s Time magazine devoted one of its famous covers to ‘swinging’ London – ‘a city steeped in tradition, seized by change, liberated by affluence’.
The cartoonish medley of images combined the old (Big Ben, ‘bobbies’, red double-decker buses, city gents in Rolls-Royces) with the new (discos, miniskirts, rock stars, dolly birds, casinos and bingo halls, E-type Jags and Mini Coopers), while the article inside trumpeted the notion that ‘In a once sedate world of faded splendor, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life.’
Roger Miller’s limp contemporary ballad ‘England Swings (Like a Pendulum Do)’ chose to highlight the traditional – eulogising the supposed ‘rosy red cheeks of the little children’ – but it was the sassy, dynamic, cash-fuelled outburst of colour and style that startled any visitor to mid-Sixties London and, thanks to a rapid osmosis, Britain as a whole.
At the wheel of this gaudy charabanc were the baby-boomers, a teeming generation of youngsters conceived in the aftermath of the war and now suddenly revelling in a new prosperity. Jobs were plentiful – you could walk out of one in the afternoon and pick up another in the morning – and the idea of saving for a rainy day was little short of pitiful.
Carnaby Street and the King’s Road in London were suddenly the fashion epicentre for every style-conscious youngster – the ‘pretty flamingo’ of the Manfred Mann song, the ‘dedicated follower of fashion’ parodied by the Kinks. These were the well-groomed Mods we’ve already seen engaged in fisticuffs with greasy Rockers at the seaside, and it was their culture which now came out on top.
What they said at the time
‘London has something that New York used to have – everybody wants to be there. There’s no place else. Paris is calcified. There’s an indefinable thing about London that makes people want to go there.’
Robert Fraser, art gallery owner
‘The planet which was England has given birth to a new art of living – eccentric, bohemian, simple and gay.’
Candide magazine, Paris
‘When I was a kid I was indoctrinated with the idea of a job that would pay a pension at 55 [sic]. Now the kids are prepared to spend what they’ve got . . . There’s been a fantastic opening of horizons.’
Actor Terence Stamp
‘Youth has become emancipated, and the girls have become as emancipated as the boys.’
Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones
‘The war is over. The Mods have won.’
Fashion guru Cathy McGowan
Revving up
Lambretta and Vespa scooters were the ubiquitous Mod means of transport, but owning a car became more and more feasible as the decade lengthened. Only the most prosperous could afford a sleek E-type Jaguar, but that other motoring icon of the Sixties, the Mini, was everyone’s favourite – even if its front-mounted engine proved so liable to flooding in wet weather that many an owner placed a sheet of cardboard behind the radiator grille to protect it.
Designed by Alec Issigonis in response to petrol rationing after the 1956 Suez crisis, the Mini was launched in 1959, had notched up sales of a million by 1965, and eventually became the best-selling British car in history, with a production run of 5.3 million by the time it was discontinued in 2000.
It was a sporting sensation, too. In 1964 Paddy Hopkirk drove one to victory in the Monte Carlo rally, and the Finnish driver Timo Mäkinen repeated the performance the following year when only 35 out of 237 cars reached the finishing line in atrocious conditions – three of them being Minis.
One gloriously daft pastime was cramming as many people as possible into the car, with scores of above twenty commonplace. (They mercifully didn’t take to the road with this payload.) The practice has continued with the evolution of the car into the rather larger BMW Mini, and in January 2011 the Pilobolus dance company entered the Guinness Book of Records when the doors were closed – with some difficulty – on no fewer than 26 of their slim and lycra-clad members.
The World Cup
As if conquering the worlds of fashion and pop music weren’t enough, swinging Britain added an improbable sports trophy to its cupboard in July 1966 when England’s footballers beat West Germany at Wembley to win the World Cup for the only time in their history.
The victory owed a great deal to the distinctly old-fashioned grit of players such as Nobby Stiles and Jack Charlton (not to speak of a questionable decision by a Russian linesman), but the euphoria which greeted it was all part of the 60s’ spirit of carefree rejuvenation.
Top gear
What were the Sixties young things wearing? By its very nature fashion is fickle (the Kinks’ popinjay could be seen one week in polka-dots, the next in stripes), but here’s a range of popular Mod clothes and accessories around the middle of the decade.
For her:
• Miniskirts and A-line minidresses, the hemline several inches above the knee
• Chiffon baby-doll dresses and shift dresses
• Tights, often patterned (it was their invention which made the wearing of miniskirts possible)
• White, knee-high go-go boots
• Beehive hairdos
• False eyelashes and kohl eyeliner
• Short plastic raincoats on top
• Bikinis for the beach.
‘It’s a bad joke that won’t last – not with winter coming.’
Designer Coco Chanel on the miniskirt, 1966
For him:
• ‘City gent’ look, with tailored suits and button-down shirt collars
• Slim ties
• Tight, tapered trousers
• Levi jeans for casual wear
• Winkle-picker shoes
• Short, neat hair, often ‘bowl-style’ as sported by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones
• Anoraks on top when out on the scooter.
By the late Sixties the hippie movement had inspired a more casual style for both sexes – flares, bell-bottom jeans, peasant shirts and blouses, T-shirts, bandanas and floral scarves. Hair was grown longer, and you would indeed sometimes see a flower in it.
A taxing problem
Rapidly rising hemlines raised eyebrows and temperatures everywhere, but they were a special worry for the Inland Revenue.
Any dress less than 24 inches (61 cm) long was classed as children’s clothing and was therefore free of tax – but now mature women were proudly flaunting their thighs in garments that had been designed with youngsters in mind.
The taxman, as ever, found a remedy. From 1 January 1966 women’s clothes were assessed according to their bust size rather than their length.
Something from nothing
Sixties fashion designers were nothing if not inventive:
• John Stephen, ‘the king of Carnaby Street’, had the bright idea of turning a mohair rug into a pullover, and Cliff Richard wore it to appear on BBC’s Top of the Pops programme the very next day.
• In 1967 Paul Reeves and his business partner Pete Sutch bought several Indian bedcovers from a Kensington department store and turned them into full-length kaftans complete with Nehru collars and half-belts at the back. Mick Jagger and George Harrison bought a couple in Chelsea antiques market, and they went on to become a major fashion craze.
Fashion icons
All this colourful primping and preening made household names of certain enterprising individuals who seized the moment to stamp their own mark on the rampant couturial world about them.
The Welsh fashion designer Mary Quant, who opened her first Bazaar boutique in Chelsea as long ago as 1955 and followed it with a second in Knightsbridge six years later, is generally credited with inventing the miniskirt – although the French designer André Courrèges also laid claim to the achievement.
Born in 1934, Quant was older than most of her clients, but she was such a dynamic trendsetter that she was awarded an OBE as early as 1966. (She arrived at Buckingham Palace to receive her award in a micro-miniskirt and black cutaway gloves.)
A girl dressed by Quant might be seen, as the mood took her, in hotpants (she devised those, too), a sweater dress with plastic collar, a balloon-style dress or knickerbockers over brightly patterned stretch stockings. The designer’s knee-length lace-up boots in white plastic, together with plastic raincoats, became part of the ‘London Look’.
One thing you might prefer not to know about Mary Quant: up above she sported a short, bobbed hairstyle which became all the rage, but down below she shaved her pubic hair into a heart shape – and dyed it green.
Barbara Hulanicki, only a little younger than Quant, launched her clothes store Biba in Kensington in 1964, and pop stars, film stars and would-be stars flocked to it. Its vibrant interior was inspired by Art Deco and Art Nouveau. Here you could buy unisex T-shirts in rich, dark colours, velvet trouser suits, floppy felt hats and even feather boas.
Hulanicki made her own claim about the miniskirt. Soon after her store opened, she said, she rather desperately put on the shelves a consignment of skirts in stretchy jersey fabric which had shrunk drastically in transit and were only 10 inches (25 cm) long: ‘God, I thought, we’ll go bust – we’ll never be able to sell them. I couldn’t sleep, but that little fluted skirt walked out on customers as fast as we could get it onto the hatstands.’ (Antique hatstands were a distinctive feature of the shop’s displays.)
When the Victoria and Albert Museum displayed her designs years later, it gave a pen portrait of ‘the classic Biba dolly’, who was young and very pretty:
‘She had an upturned nose, rosy cheeks and a skinny body with long asparagus legs and tiny feet.
‘She was square-shouldered and quite flat-chested. Her head was perched on a long, swan-like neck. Her face was a perfect oval, her lids were heavy with long, spiky lashes. She looked sweet but was as hard as nails. She did what she felt like at that moment and had no mum to influence her judgement.’
This romantic view caught an essential point about the young clientele. Most of them certainly weren’t orphans, but they were shopping with an abandon their mothers could only have dreamed of, and choosing styles that, with a few brave exceptions, only their own generation would think of wearing.
Imagine, for instance, tripping out in a dress with flashing lighbulbs down the front. This was the creation of Ossie Clark for his 1965 degree show at the Royal College of Art, and it was splashed across newspapers and fashion magazines everywhere.
Clark became synonymous with Sixties Op Art flair, and collaborated with Alice Pollock to create dresses for her exclusive King’s Road boutique Quorum, working in collaboration with Celia Birtwell, who produced textiles and designed scintillating prints. Clark and Birtwell eventually married, and sat for one of David Hockney’s most famous portraits, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970).
By 1967 there were two thousand boutiques in the Greater London area – and they weren’t only catering for the girls. For their fathers a (rare) night out meant putting on a smart suit and a tie, but the young men of the Sixties generation expected to flock to the nightspots looking every bit as striking as their dates.
Pretty faces
Models aplenty were required to show off the inventive designs of the period, but two stood out in Sixties Britain.
• The Shrimp
Jean Shrimpton, born in November 1942, had undeniable beauty. Doe-eyed and pouty, slim and long-legged, she appeared on the covers of every fashionable magazine. She had affairs with the photographer David Bailey and the actor Terence Stamp before marrying another photographer, Michael Cox.
• Twiggy
Lesley Hornby’s modelling name was no exaggeration. Born in September 1949, she was 5 ft 6 in (1.68 m) tall but weighed a mere 8 stone (51 kg). Some critics thought her thinness unhealthy, though in fact it was her natural build. Her early career was managed by her then boyfriend, the hairdresser Nigel Davies, who restyled himself Justin de Villeneuve. Her hair was cut in a short, boyish style, her eyelids fluttered dark (multi-layered) lashes and her stick figure was ideal for the androgynous A-line dresses of the period.
She retired from modelling in 1970, saying that she couldn’t spend her life being ‘a coat-hanger’, but she returned to it in her maturity and was still in front of the cameras as this book went to press.
The London guru of men’s fashion was John Stephen. A grocer’s son from Glasgow, he opened his first boutique in 1963 and at one time owned more than a dozen of them in Carnaby Street alone, as well as branches in the United States, Italy and Norway. Although he always dressed in traditional fashion himself, he knew exactly what his young clientele wanted.
His stores (he soon catered for women, too) were crammed with his own creations and loud to the beat of rock music – fittingly, since groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Bee Gees and the Kinks were regular customers.
A few of his triumphs, major and minor:
• He imported the first pair of Levis into the UK, and they were an instant success.
• The singer Petula Clark and pianist Liberace filmed one of their TV spectaculars in one of his Carnaby Street shops.
• He was so successful that he bought the first of his many Rolls-Royces at the age of 20.
But what if you lived far from the bright lights of London? Not to worry, because there were chain stores throughout the country (Chelsea Girl, Bus Stop, Miss Selfridge) offering the latest fashions at affordable prices.
There had been, that Time cover piece trumpeted brazenly, ‘a bloodless revolution’. It quoted the sociologist Richard Hoggart (‘a slum orphan’, it reminded its readers) to the effect that a new group was emerging into society, ‘creating a kind of classlessness and a verve which has not been seen before’.
Ready, steady, McGowan
In a typical Sixties rise to fame, Cathy McGowan, who formerly worked in the fashion department of Women’s Own magazine, was chosen as the face of ‘the typical teenager’ by the Friday night Rediffusion TV programme Ready Steady Go! (slogan: ‘The weekend starts here!’) and soon became its regular presenter. The fact that she regularly mangled her lines didn’t matter. She had style – becoming known as the ‘Queen of the Mods’ – and she was down to earth. Twiggy later said: ‘I’d sit and drool over her clothes. She was a heroine to us because she was one of us.’
Watch the birdie
This was a wild exaggeration, of course, but the age certainly threw up a host of celebrities who boasted humble beginnings (yes, you could brag about that now) and yet mingled easily with the ‘nobs’. This was nowhere better exemplified than in the world of fashion photography, where Patrick Lichfield, who inherited an earldom in 1960, and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who married Princess Margaret and became the Earl of Snowdon, were joined by a bevy of up-and-comers from the working class.
The most famous of them was David Bailey, who bought his first Rolleiflex camera on being demobbed from the army in 1958 and within two years was working for Vogue magazine. His Box of Pin-Ups, brought out in 1964, contained prints of celebrities such as the model Jean Shrimpton (his lover), the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp, Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol and those notorious East End gangsters, the Kray twins – their inclusion in this Sixties pantheon occasioning an angry outburst from Lord Snowdon.
Bailey was both attractive and energetic, with a dangerous edge. Married four times (one of his wives was the actress Catherine Deneuve), he found the stars practically queuing up to be captured by his lens.
Something unlikely about David Bailey: he once shared his house with sixty parrots – and contracted psittacosis.
Blow-Up
David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles and Jane Birkin were among the star-studded cast of Michelangelo Antonioni’s quintessential Sixties film Blow-Up. The story of a photographer who suspects he has witnessed a murder, it was partly inspired by the life of David Bailey.
Because of its explicit content (Premiere magazine termed one scene ‘the sexiest cinematic moment in history’), it was refused approval in the USA. MGM’s decision to go ahead and release it anyway had the effect of changing the US rating system to match the more relaxed times.
Terence Donovan, born in the East End of London in 1936, took his first photograph at the age of 15 and used local bomb sites as a backdrop for his original work. His early ‘photo-essays’ documented the seedier underbelly of London life, but by the mid-Sixties he had become a regular contributor to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar – and, of course, a regular on the celebrity circuit, mingling with artists, rock singers, actors and actresses.
He was no flatterer, however, and Cecil Beaton, one of the old school, recognised that something had changed: ‘Donovan’s young girls’, he said later, ‘had no innocence and he somehow contrived to make them look as if they were wearing soiled underwear.’
Norman Parkinson, another old-timer, described Bailey, Donovan and Brian Duffy – the third star in the Sixties photographic firmament – as a ‘black trinity’. Duffy had his own riposte to that kind of put-down: ‘Before us,’ he said, ‘fashion photographers were tall, thin and camp. We’re different. We’re short, fat and heterosexual.’
Jackie lends a hand
What every young girl needed in the turbulent Sixties was advice about growing up in a world whose rules were rapidly changing. In 1964 along came Jackie magazine with a ‘Cathy and Claire’ problem page which handled 400 letters every week. It immediately sold 350,000 copies a week, and the circulation rose steadily.
Most of the letters were about sex, but the Scottish publishers didn’t feel the time was yet ripe for explicitness about such matters in the public prints. What they did was create a series of leaflets covering the main areas of concern, and they sent these out in reply.
Cut and bob
This new world of unashamed dash and display made stars of hairdressers, too, although ‘Teasy Weasy’ Raymond began the decade with his Mayfair salon already famous. In 1956 he had been flown to the United States merely to cut the hair of the film star Diana Dors (for the price of a small house in Britain), and in 1968 he would perform a similar service for another actress, Mia Farrow, for a cool $5,000.
Born Raymondo Bessone to Italian parents in Brixton, south London, in 1911, Raymond started his working life by making false beards and moustaches in his father’s barber shop. By the time he had become the nation’s first celebrity hairdresser he had transformed himself into a camp figure with a fake French accent, his salon fitted out with gilt mirrors, chandeliers and champagne fountains.
Credited with being the originator of the bouffant hair style, he was the first hairdresser to appear on television, and he had his own Saturday afternoon show during the Sixties.
Spend, spend, spend!
One of the saddest sagas of the Sixties (some regarded it as a morality tale) was the huge football-pools win in 1961 by the penniless Yorkshire couple Keith and Vivian Nicholson and its unedifying aftermath. Viv was determined to splash the cash as ostentatiously as she could – a pink Cadillac was but one indulgence among many – and her declared motto was ‘Spend, spend, spend!’
By the time Keith died at the wheel of his Jaguar four years later they had got through it all. A musical based on her life opened in 1998 and had a run in London’s West End.
Teasy Weasy was secretive about his cutting techniques, but one man who worked under him picked up enough of them to become the biggest name of all. Vidal Sassoon broke into the new barriers-down world of the time in similar fashion to that ‘black trinity’ of working-class photographers. Brought up in poverty in Shepherds Bush, west London, and spending years in a Jewish orphanage, he discovered a talent that gave him star status – and made him wealthy.
Sassoon created the first worldwide chain of hairdressing salons and made a fortune from his hair-treatment products. While Teasy Weasy looked back to a glamorous age of extravagant film-star hairdos, his protégé revolutionised the cutting business, creating simple but striking styles for the Mods. His ‘wash and wear’, low-maintenance philosophy did away with the need for lacquer sprays to keep the hair in place, releasing women from the tyranny of a regular shampoo-and-set. Sassoon typically cut hair short and into geometric shapes, relying on its natural shine to achieve what lacquer had done before, and in 1963 he created the classic ‘bob cut’ – angular and on a horizontal plane. Another of his styles, originally created for models showing off a Mary Quant collection, became known as the Nancy Kwan cut, after the Eurasian-American actress who first sported it in a Vogue photoshoot by Terence Donovan.
Doc Martens
They hardly suited every Mod style, but we should give a nod in the direction of Doc Martens, which were born in an earlier age but were first launched in the UK on 1 April 1960 – and have never gone away.
The German army doctor Klaus Martens invented the boots after damaging an ankle in a 1945 skiing accident and finding nothing on the market sufficiently comfortable.
When they at last arrived in Britain they were popular among postmen, police officers and factory workers – and would later become a fashion statement for Seventies skinheads.
Habitat
The exciting new life on the streets and in the nightclubs was matched by a burst of colourful stylishness in the home, and the star of this expanding domestic firmament was Terence Conran.
There’s no better indicator of the changing times than the explanation he gave for the success of his first Habitat store, opened in the Fulham Road, Chelsea, in 1964: it was, he said, one of the few places where you could buy cheap pasta storage jars just at the moment when dried pasta was appearing in kitchens all over Britain.
Conran wasn’t a working-class lad made good. The son of a businessman, he’d been privately educated at Bryanston school in Dorset before studying textiles at the Central Saint Martins college of art and design in London, working for a firm of architects, and then starting his own design practice. (He created a shop for Mary Quant.) His philosophy, he said, was ‘plain, simple and useful’, and his target customer was someone on a teacher’s salary.
It was chiefly as a vehicle for his own Summa range of furniture that he opened that first Habitat, and there were soon branches throughout the country with the same trademark quarry-tiled floors, whitewashed brick walls, wood-slatted ceilings and spotlights, the merchandise stacked on the shelves as in a warehouse.
In these bright emporiums ‘baby-boomers’ with cash in their pockets discovered how to express themselves at home through a range of fabrics and furnishings their postwar parents could never have imagined seeing in the shops, let alone being able to afford.
For Habitat’s customers it was goodbye to dark, heavy wooden sideboards, three-piece suites, floral carpets and willow-patterned china, and welcome to a fresher, cleaner look: plastic mugs and storage cubes in vibrant colours, rustic French cookware, modular shelving, pine floors, Scandinavian furniture.
And, fittingly for a store that was part of Swinging London, its early customers included stars such as the actress Julie Christie and Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison, while Mary Quant not only designed the staff’s outfits but bought complete settings of Habitat linen, glassware and crockery for her dinner parties.
On trend
Time magazine offered this guide to the argot of Swinging London in 1966:
‘Talking the flip jargon that has become basic English for teenagers, jet setters and indeed any knowledgeable adult striving to maintain the illusion that he is at least young in heart, the switched-on London bird or beatle calls his urb “super”, “fab”, “groovy”, “gear”, “close” or “with it”.’
What every home needed
It was fun setting up home in the Sixties, because there were so many new things to buy:
• Lava lamps. They weren’t much good as lighting, but their introduction in 1963 gave everyone’s sitting room a ‘talking point’.
• Glass-topped coffee tables. It was the clean-cut look which appealed, however impractical they proved to be.
• Goatskin rugs. Foreign travel encouraged many a fad. These were fine if you didn’t trip over them – and if they didn’t get wet.
• Futons. Another foreign import, and very trendy. Ideal for latecomers who needed somewhere to crash.
• Japanese paper lanterns. Fly traps, of course, but they seemed indescribably elegant.
• Bean bags. In bright colours, and wonderful to snuggle down into.
• Inflatable plastic chairs. Equally colourful – but not quite so comfortable!
The Great Train Robbery
In the early hours of 8 August 1963 a Royal Mail train on its way from Glasgow to London was stopped by a hooded gang some 15 strong dressed in blue boiler suits. The driver, Jack Mills, was badly beaten, and the men got away with £2.6 million in banknotes – worth something like £40 million today.
The Great Train Robbery became the stuff of legend, books and films, though admiration for the audacity of the operation was compromised by its (unplanned) violence.
Within months most of the gang had been caught – several were given 30-year prison sentences – and although only about £400,000 was ever recovered, much of their haul was lost, spent on lawyers’ fees or used to pay off underworld contacts.
Ronnie Biggs, who played a minor role in the robbery, became famous after escaping from Wandsworth prison to enjoy years of freedom, first in Australia and then in Brazil. He returned to Britain voluntarily in 2001 and was ordered to serve the rest of his sentence, but he was released on compassionate grounds eight years later because of ill health.
DIY
Why were the young so keen to create modern nests for themselves? Because they were marrying at what now seems a very early age – an average of around 23 for men and 21 for women – and having children very soon afterwards. Many of those who wore the latest fashions and danced to the latest rhythms were home-builders, too. They found that the new relaxed spirit of the age had also affected bank managers: no longer stern upholders of fiscal chastity, these former pillars of rectitude were now willing to bestow their favours on anyone who could make a decent case for a mortgage.
The surprised new home-owners not only decked out their rooms with modern furniture and the latest gadgets, but busily changed the very fabric if it failed to suit their style.
Not the way to do it!
By far the least fashionable character in these pages is Barry Bucknell, the BBC’s rolled-shirt-sleeved do-it-yourself expert. He worked under a severe handicap: his TV programme went out live, accidents and all. On one occasion, struck by a length of freshly glued wallpaper, he had to admit: ‘That’s how not to do it.’
His 1962 series Bucknell’s House showed viewers how to modernise older properties by getting rid of clutter ‘to introduce clear, modern lines’. This meant ripping out period features or covering them with plywood, and the amiable broadcaster is now remembered for promoting cultural vandalism.
What they ate at the time
A restaurant meal in the Sixties offered much less choice than today. A young couple pushing the boat out for a special occasion might have chosen from the following, to the soothing accompaniment of a dinner-jacketed pianist:
Aperitif
• A Babycham or vodka and lime for her; a lager for him
Starter
• Prawn cocktail in Marie Rose sauce
• Avocado with prawns
Main course
• Quiche lorraine (the very first quiche to reach Britain, it seemed very swish)
• Duck à l’orange (again, what sophistication!)
• Beef bourgignon
Dessert
• Black Forest gâteau from the sweet trolley
Wine
• White: German Riesling, Liebfraumilch or Blue Nun; Graves or Mâcon from France
• Red: Médoc or St-Emilion
• Rosé: Mateus Rosé from Portugal
Afterwards
• Gaelic coffee and mints.
Out with the old
A house-building boom provided a rash of new starter homes, many of them poorly constructed but nevertheless catering for the taste of the time: well lit, open plan, pine boards and so on. Older buildings, on the other hand, often seemed dark and pokey, and their occupants set about stripping and remodelling with a ruthlessness which has left its mark half a century later.
In days when it was still possible for the mechanically minded to get under a car and fix the engine, tampering with walls, chimneys and staircases seemed a straightforward task; it often made good sense to create a larger living space from two small rooms front and back. Many a home ‘improver’ had little respect for architectural details from an earlier age. What was the point of them?
Dado rails, picture rails and cornices were fussy adornments which could easily be ripped away; remove that ceiling boss and it was much easier to apply a coat of dimpled Artex; internal wooden doors could only be improved by a few thick layers of bright paint; and elegant, tiled fireplaces were best sold off to an antiques dealer, the space boarded up with plywood behind a modern gas fire.
In their cheerful, freshly designed pads the young things of the Sixties enjoyed more home entertainment than any generation had ever known before, although they provided little of it themselves. There was no need for an old-fashioned knees-up with uncle punishing the ivories when so much professional music was available on your stereo record player, so much first-rate comedy and drama on your television set – a luxury owned by about two-thirds of the population at the beginning of the decade, but by nearly everyone at the end of it.
And what choice! Whether in the clubs, the discos, the cinemas, the theatres, the artists’ studios or the writers’ garrets, a burst of creativity in the arts and entertainment seemed to be making the world anew…