9

Metro-Land

Well, what’s wrong with being the same as everyone else? What’s wrong with trying to make a little bit of modest progress?

– Bob Ferris, in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973)

As London’s commuters trudged home on the dark winter’s evening of Monday, 26 February 1973, the headlines made for miserable reading. With the unions in revolt against Stage Two of Heath’s pay policy, more than half a million people, from Civil Service clerical staff and non-medical hospital staff to train drivers, firemen and Ford car workers were planning to walk out in the next three days. Both the railway network and the London Underground were expected to shut down, and experts were already warning of chaos on the roads. So gloomy were the predictions of traffic jams on the main routes into Britain’s major cities that thousands of people were expected to stay at home. So it seemed supremely ironic that the highlight of that night’s television was a BBC2 film celebrating London’s first and fastest Underground line, the Metropolitan, the original artery of the capital’s commuter network.¹

Edward Mirzoeff’s film Metro-Land, which follows the poet Sir John Betjeman along the Metropolitan Line’s north-western branch from the heart of the capital into rural Buckinghamshire, was not so much a tribute to the capital’s public transport network as a lyrical celebration of what had followed in its wake: the sprawling suburbs of Greater London, from Neasden and Harrow to Pinner and Amersham, a mosaic of grand houses and modernist stations, country hedgerows and suburban golf courses, mock-Tudor villas and art deco cinemas. During the early decades of the century, Metro-land had been a marketing slogan, designed to promote both the line and the housing estates that sprang up around its stations. It was a symbol of the middle classes and of Middle England, of suburban gentility and material ambition; it was a marriage of urban and rural, neither town nor country, tantalizingly close to London but (at least according to the brochures) surrounded by quiet, empty fields. Millions dreamed of owning their own Metro-land home, their own bow-windowed, fake-timbered house in Harrow or Ruislip. Intellectuals saw it as the supreme symbol of narrowness, materialism and sheer bad taste, the symbol of mass affluence and suburban banality. Yet even suburbia’s most virulent critics temporarily put their hatred aside after Betjeman’s tribute to Rickmansworth and Chorleywood, so taken were they with his blend of melancholy and celebration. In the Observer, Clive James called it an ‘instant classic’, and predicted that it would be repeated ‘until the millennium’. But the review Betjeman liked best came in affectionate verse from his friend Simon Jenkins in the Evening Standard: ‘For an hour he held enraptured / Pinner, Moor Park, Chorley Wood. / “Well I’m blowed,” they said. “He likes us. / Knew one day that someone should.” ’²

What was so striking about Metro-Land, as Betjeman pottered amiably from a half-timbered mansion at Harrow Weald to the golf course at Moor Park, was his deep affection for London’s suburban fringes, which emerged as far more interesting and quirky than most viewers had suspected. For the Poet Laureate to be waxing lyrical about the joys of Neasden (the ‘home of the gnome and the average citizen’, as he put it) seemed quite extraordinary, for everyone knew that the suburbs were terrible places, dull and soulless at best, claustrophobic and confining at worst. In Private Eye, for which Betjeman had once written, Neasden was the symbol of everything base, boring and banal, the very worst of Middle England, the place where romance and imagination came to die. Indeed, hatred of the suburbs had an impressive pedigree: in the early years of the century, intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton to E. Nesbit and E. M. Forster had queued up to denounce their ‘dullness and small-mindedness’. To the high-minded and well bred, the fact that Metro-land represented a dream come true for millions of ordinary families, not just in London but across the nation, was beside the point. Intellectuals loathed its mock-Elizabethan façades, its quiet leafy streets, its crowds of clerks on the station platforms at dawn and dusk. For the writer Cyril Connolly, the suburbs were ‘incubators of apathy and delirium’, while Graham Greene shuddered at their ‘sinless, empty, graceless chromium world’, Suburbia is ‘just a prison with the cells all in a row,’ says the narrator in George Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939), imagining thousands of clerks, just like himself, ‘with the boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches’.³

Although the 1950s and 1960s had been decades of tremendous growth for housing estates and New Towns, Metro-land’s image remained as bad as ever. Architects and planners were quick to condemn what they saw as the suburbs’ ugly, monotonous conservatism, while in the novels, plays and films of the period, to be suburban is to be cheap, crass, joyless and materialistic. Urban legend had it that the suburbs were unfriendly, loveless places, without warmth or community, where husbands mechanically washed their cars every weekend and wives pined for excitement behind their net curtains. Even pop and rock music, which had millions of followers in the suburbs, presented the same mocking picture. The Kinks’ album Muswell Hillbillies (1971), which affectionately evokes the Davies brothers’ youth in the suburbs of North London, was a rare exception: more conventional was the attitude of the punk bands of the late 1970s, which took a uniformly hostile view of suburbia and its inhabitants. The very first lines of the Members’ song ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ (1978), for instance, caustically describe the atmosphere of a ‘same old boring Sunday morning’: Dad outside washing his car, Mum in the kitchen cooking Sunday dinner, Johnny upstairs annoying the neighbours with his electric guitar. That the same year saw the release of Siouxsie & the Banshees’ ‘Suburban Relapse’, narrated by a housewife who snaps and lashes out while washing the dishes, reinforces the impression that punk bands had their knives out for Metro-land. The suburbs were ‘middle-class’ and ‘puritanical’, full of people ‘always going on about Hitler,’ remarked the singer Siouxsie Sioux – actually Susan Ballion from Bromley.⁴

The most sustained and popular indictment of suburbia, however, came in the television sitcoms so popular in the mid-1970s. In a sense, the fact that so many sitcoms were set in greater Metro-land, from Bless this House and Happy Ever After to Butterflies and George and Mildred, was a testament to its newfound place at the centre of Britain’s physical and imaginative landscape. And yet their portrait of a monotonous world of lonely, frustrated housewives and henpecked husbands might have been scripted by the upper-class intellectuals of the inter-war years. When Terry Collier first visits his friend Bob Ferris’s new estate in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, his indictment is pure Cyril Connolly. ‘There’s just something depressing about these estates,’ Terry says gloomily. ‘It’s the thought of you all: all getting up at the same time, all eating the same sort of low-calorie breakfast, all coming home at half-past-six and watching the same programme at the same time and having it off the same two nights of the week.’ The only way residents can ‘tell the difference’ between the individual houses, he concludes caustically, ‘is by the colour of your curtains.’⁵

But while Bob angrily defends his new suburban existence, pointing out that his new home represents a ‘little bit of modest progress’, not all sitcom characters were so content with their lot. The struggle of the individual against his suburban shackles is one of the central themes of mid-1970s comedies, encapsulated most famously in the series The Good Life (1975–8) and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–9). In the former, the Goods begin the series as a classic suburban couple: Tom a draughtsman designing toys for cereal packets, and Barbara a perky middle-class Surbiton housewife. But the real incarnations of Metro-land are their neighbours, Jerry and Margo Leadbetter (played by Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith): the former urbane, ambitious but a little henpecked; the latter one of the great fictional characters of the era, a humourless, snobbish social climber, a pillar of the Pony Club, the Music Society and the local Conservative Party. Hers is a world of manicured respectability, with everything in its place and no room for surprises – which is precisely why the Goods’ decision to become sustainable farmers horrifies her so much. And no doubt Margo would have been equally appalled by the antics of Reginald Perrin (Leonard Rossiter) in David Nobbs’s series – an ostensibly respectable middle-class executive, driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown by insecurity and impotence, by simmering rage at late-running trains, by the sheer monotony of life in Metro-land.⁶

As a bored middle-aged sales executive for a company making trifles and ice cream, Reggie Perrin was well placed to appreciate the changing world of middle-class work. When men like Reggie entered the workplace in the mid-1950s, most middle-class workers expected to follow a straight and stable career path, often spending their entire lives within the same organization, rewarded not just with progressively rising salaries, pension plans and investments, but with a sense of professionalism, status and respect. Men who worked for established institutions such as banks and insurance companies often talked of having a job for life. ‘If I worked hard, I had a really worthwhile career ahead of me,’ reflected one man, who left school in the early 1960s and joined Lloyds Bank. ‘In return for that, the bank expected loyalty from me and my colleagues, but it repaid that loyalty by the job continuity and the salary and career opportunities which were offered to us.’ Another man, who joined the Prudential, echoed his sentiments. ‘The Pru were good employers,’ he said later. ‘We always felt they liked their pound of flesh, with perhaps a drop of blood as well, but they looked after us if we were in trouble.’⁷

Although the disappearance of these cosy assumptions is often associated with Thatcherism, the signs had been there for years. For a new generation of ambitious white-collar workers, often boys from working-class homes who owed their success to a grammar-school education, the old values of deference, hierarchy and organizational loyalty held little appeal. Writing in the Radio Times in 1968, one social analyst described a typical example: a working-class boy who had passed his eleven-plus, left school to join an office equipment firm, became a travelling salesman and bought a suburban home with all the trimmings, including a pink plastic pelican on the manicured front lawn. Married at 27, he had joined the local Conservative Party and sent his children to private nursery schools, and he had no intention of resting on his laurels. Thrusting, ambitious, he was precisely the kind of man Edward Heath admired and that Reggie Perrin hated, and he was a common archetype in the popular culture of the 1970s. In John Betjeman’s poem ‘Executive’, published in 1974, he is the ‘young executive’ with clean cuffs, a Slimline briefcase, a company Cortina and a scarlet Aston Martin, as well as a ‘speed-boat which has never touched the water’, named Mandy Jane ‘after a bird I used to know’. In Alan Ayckbourn’s play Absurd Person Singular (1972), he is the socially inept, much-derided contractor Sidney Hopcroft, who claws his way up the ladder by turning himself into a local property tycoon, and ends the play a triumphant proto-Thatcherite figure, literally forcing his architect and banker friends to dance to his tune in a game of musical forfeits. And in Martin Amis’s novel Success (1978), he is the aggressively proletarian Terry Service, who goes to evening classes, works in an open-plan office in a ‘big efficient building’ fittingly called Masters House, and rapidly overtakes his arty half-brother Gregory. ‘The yobs are winning,’ Gregory says in despair – a sentiment often repeated during the following decade.⁸

For those like Terry Service, willing to work long hours and clamber over their colleagues to get up the ladder, the rewards were great. Many observers lamented the new culture of middle-class materialism: writing in Encounter in October 1974, the market-research pioneer Mark Abrams warned that ‘the value system of most people in Britain today is solidly grounded in materialism’, and that many were satisfied only by ‘the act of spending by itself … almost irrespective of what is bought’. But neither the woes of the stock market nor the cancer of inflation could check the new ‘money culture’, as some called it. By the end of the decade even the mass-market Daily Mail had a Wednesday ‘Money Mail’ page offering advice on financial affairs, while the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia opened a special Money Mail section in 1979, including stands run by the Stock Exchange and the School Fees Insurance Agency.⁹

But with greater rewards came greater pressures. In Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the ambitious Bob admits that for all the trappings of success – the secretary, the company car, the candlelit dinners and foreign holidays – he is virtually sick with worry about ‘the sheer volume of things you have to do: study, go to work, service the car, claim rebates on the rates, worry about whether I can take Thelma to Morocco’ – a far cry from his lazy friend Terry’s daily grind of betting shops and billiard halls. But Bob was far from alone: in workplaces across the country, expectations and anxieties were greater than ever. Open-plan offices replaced the old warrens of hierarchical little rooms, so that everyone could see what their colleagues were up to. Perhaps not coincidentally, even before the advent of Thatcherism and the Big Bang, City workers were giving up their long lunch breaks in favour of spending more time at their desks. Executive dining rooms began to die out, City restaurants reported falling lunchtime demand, and in 1979 Robin Birley opened the Square Mile’s first sandwich bar in Fenchurch Street. Even the beloved tea trolleys of old were disappearing, replaced by vending machines that were no good at making tea but made a better fist of providing Nescafé instant coffee – the ideal drink for a highly pressured, hard-working environment in which white-collar executives faced the real prospect of being sacked if profits fell, if they failed to meet their targets, or, even more frighteningly, if a computer could do their job more cheaply and more quickly.¹⁰

It was hardly surprising, then, that researchers in the mid-1970s found that managers and executives were spending more and more time at weekends worrying about their work. ‘When I’m in the bath or mowing the lawn, I’m often trying to figure out some problem or other,’ confessed a sales manager from Sutton. ‘If you saw me very happily sitting in the garden with a drink at my side I might be thinking over a problem,’ agreed a manager from Caterham. ‘If you came along beside me you might be talking to me for ten minutes and I wouldn’t hear you, I’d be so concentrated.’ Perhaps it was no surprise, either, that so many marriages broke up. ‘I said that I never take work home,’ said a service manager from St Albans. ‘That’s true – not paper work. But unfortunately it remains in my head. There are the usual domestic problems as a result.’ And with wives and mothers increasingly joining the workplace, the report’s conclusion was bleakly prophetic. ‘Strains will be inescapable,’ wrote Michael Young and Peter Willmott, warning that if the trends continued, ‘there will inevitably be more divorces’.¹¹

Even though more middle-class managers brought their work home at evenings and weekends, the suburban home remained an idealized refuge from the pressures of the office. Mass home ownership was a relatively recent phenomenon: in 1950, just over one in four families had owned their own home, but by 1970 half of them did so. And although intellectuals derided the mock-Tudor or mock-Georgian houses of the suburbs, with their clipped privet hedges and regimented flower beds, their garden gnomes, sundials and rockeries, the vast majority of British families held them in high esteem. Almost nine out of ten people told researchers in 1968 that a suburban house represented ‘the ideal home’. And since so many people, even relatively young couples, could remember the cramped terraced streets and crowded tenements of old, it is hardly surprising that owning their own home meant a tremendous amount to them. It was not just a question of wealth and status: it meant success, comfort, liberation. In the first episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Bob Ferris’s suburban home on the new Hillfields estate in Killingworth is not quite finished, but he and his fiancée Thelma are already entertaining themselves by looking at slides of the estate being built. ‘Oh Bob! The damp course!’ says Thelma with feeling. ‘My house!’ muses Bob. ‘You know, I can’t get used to saying that.’ ‘Our house,’ she gently corrects him. ‘I know, pet. It’s our house,’ he concedes, trying the words out for size: ‘Chez nous.’¹²

For fictional couples like Bob and Thelma or the Leadbetters in The Good Life, as well as for millions of real-life couples, the home assumed tremendous importance because it was the centre of the nuclear family. Researchers agreed that the extended family had almost entirely died out: as early as the 1940s, surveys had revealed a ubiquitous dream of marriage, two children and a quiet suburban life, unencumbered by parents-in-law and other relatives. With husbands and wives spending far more time together – playing with their children, shopping, pursuing hobbies, going on holiday – the home was not merely a place where people ate and slept, but where they relaxed, entertained and expressed their values and desires. And just as possession of the right appliances had been a crucial badge of status during the 1950s and 1960s, when millions of people had rushed to buy televisions, fridges and washing machines, so the right furniture and decorations assumed tremendous importance in the 1970s.¹³

In the early days of Metro-land, suburban semi-detached houses had preserved a kind of rustic-modern blend, as though the look and values of the English countryside had been trapped and tamed within a distinctly non-rural roadside setting. And despite the fact that most families were more remote from agriculture than ever, this nostalgic ethos still dominated suburban life in the 1970s. Both new estates and individual houses often had faux-rustic names (‘The Larches’, ‘Rose Hill’, and so on), while most families liked to decorate their homes with ornaments and knick-knacks that looked back to an idealized past: reproductions of Constable paintings and Dutch landscapes, Swiss mountain views and gypsy-girl portraits, old-fashioned clocks and barometers, plaster plaques and china models of thatched country cottages, intricate little clipper ships and galleons, china statuettes and painted plates, and of course the flight of ceramic ducks winging their way across the wall. As time went on, these were joined by mementoes of holidays in Spain or France. But the overall effect was both nostalgic and socially ambitious, like the rows of leather-bound encyclopedias that would be proudly displayed in the sitting room, or the stripped-pine furniture that became so popular in the mid-1970s.

The tragedy, of course, was that while all these things were meant to lift the household into a higher social class, they became unmistakable and faintly comic markers of suburban aspirations to gentility. In Piers Paul Read’s novel A Married Man (1979), the protagonist, a left-wing barrister, is deeply embarrassed by his mother’s collection of china statuettes because her ‘bad tastes betrayed not only her origins but also her pretensions, for she believed that her collection, although not quite equal to the treasures of Castle Howard, was a step in that direction’. Yet he is also ‘ashamed of his own embarrassment’, because he knows it is unfair to expect her to have the good taste of the upper middle classes. ‘It was the social connotations which he minded most,’ he admits, ‘as if she had spoken with a regional accent or had smelt of sweat because she never took a bath. His objections to her china ornaments were snobbish objections and he knew it.’¹⁴

But the obsession with nostalgia was not confined to ornaments. The very design of the home, its wallpapers, curtains and carpets, was often deliberately ‘period’, to use a popular term of the day, as though the right furnishings would sprinkle timeless elegance on a nondescript suburban house that might have existed for only months. Mock-Georgian tables and chairs were supposedly ‘hand-carved’ by craftsmen in the ‘traditional’ way, while a typical advert in the Sunday Times in 1977 offered the ‘Ambassador’ silver-plated ‘Georgian’ tea and coffee set, designed to be ‘displayed proudly in the home’ (rather than, say, actually used). Stripped-pine and wood furniture was enormously popular: the travel writer Jonathan Raban recorded in 1974 that London shops ‘like Habitat, Casa Pupo, and David Bagott Design sell home-made-looking tables and chairs in bulky stripped pine which are actually mass produced and mass-marketed’. In gentrifying areas like Kensington and Islington he had seen supposedly ‘ “craftsmen’s” shops selling roughly identical lines in clear-varnished wood’, while friends boasted stereos in ‘grainy deal cabinets’ and even a ‘stripped-pine fridge’.

On their walls, ambitious couples stuck highly decorated, heavily textured Laura Ashley wallpaper; on their floors, they placed fur rugs and extravagantly patterned carpets; in their bathrooms, they laid synthetic tiles imitating mosaics or marble. The effect was meant to be lush, luxurious, elegant. In fact, since many Laura Ashley or William Morris patterns had been intended for much bigger rooms, the real effect was often dark and claustrophobic, a wild collision of lurid patterns, which is why the 1970s became a byword for bad taste. But like the barrister’s mother in Piers Paul Read’s novel, most people had grown up in much more straitened circumstances, had never learned the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, and simply wanted to emulate their social superiors. To a newly affluent couple, the juxtaposition of a mock-fur rug, a gleaming stereo in a stripped-pine cabinet, a row of Toby jugs, Morris-style curtains and faux-velvet wallpaper meant elegance and class. Only later, long after the decade had become synonymous with the colour brown, did they look back and shudder.¹⁵

The popularity of home decorating was just one illustration of the increasingly domesticated, family-centred world of leisure in the Heath years. Where husbands had once gone out to the pub with their friends, they now stayed at home, perhaps pottering about the garden, mowing the lawn, weeding and planting bulbs. Gardening had long been held up as a symbol of the British character, but never had it been more popular: by 1970, four-fifths of all homes had a garden, and an estimated 29 million people regularly lavished time on their little plot of earth, tending their flower beds, building their patios and piling up their rockeries. And although gardening was widely seen as a symbol of British conservatism, individualism and domesticity, it also reflected the technological innovations and mass affluence of the day. Gardener’s World, shown on BBC2 from 1968, was one of the channel’s most popular shows, while garden centres were besieged at weekends by couples hunting for plastic tools, chemical weedkillers and Flymo’s pioneering electric hover-mowers. So popular was gardening, in fact, that it played an increasingly central role in the long-running Ideal Home Exhibition. In 1974, for the first time, gardens dominated the Grand Hall, with an enormous and rather baroque interpretation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon mounted overhead. It was revealing that some of the exhibition’s longest queues formed outside the Garden Advice Centre, set in a mock English cottage garden – and revealing too that its panel of experts included television stars such as Percy Thrower and Geoff Hamilton.¹⁶

If the popularity of gardening, which was second only to watching television as the most popular leisure activity in the country, testified to the modesty and conservatism of everyday life in Metro-land, then so did other favourite hobbies and habits, from country drives, car-cleaning and stamp-collecting to the pony clubs and music societies beloved of The Good Life’s Margo. Instead of radically recasting tastes and attitudes, in fact, the affluence of recent years often worked to reinforce them. So while Britain had long been renowned as a nation of animal-lovers and bird-fanciers, it was not until the 1970s that many middle-class families acquired a dog (which was expensive to maintain), or that membership of the RSPB rose above 100,000. Even young men supposedly at the vanguard of glamour and affluence, such as the working-class footballers interviewed by Hunter Davies during his season with Tottenham Hotspur, led markedly conservative lives, settling down in mock-Georgian homes in Enfield and Epping and spending their weekends playing golf and tennis. Britain was still George Orwell’s nation of stamp-collectors and pigeon-fanciers, wrote Anthony Sampson in his New Anatomy of Britain in 1971, a nation of ‘lawn-mowers, pets, caravans and, inevitably, do-it-yourself … the greatest nation in Europe for handymen and potterers-about’. What emerged, he thought, was ‘a broad picture … of the British living a withdrawn and inarticulate life, rather like Harold Pinter’s people, mowing lawns and painting walls, pampering pets, listening to music, knitting and watching television’.¹⁷

One obvious addition to the list of hobbies, however, was shopping. It was not long since most housewives had visited their local high street several times a day, with food kept covered in the larder rather than chilled in the fridge. Even in 1971, according to one survey, the average housewife went shopping for groceries three times a week. But at least one of those trips was now a ‘major’ trip, usually to a supermarket. By the beginning of the decade there were about 3,000 little supermarkets in Britain, and bigger versions were on their way. In September 1972, Carrefour opened the first out-of-town, 60,000-square-foot ‘hypermarket’ in Caerphilly, and a second opened in Telford a year later. Despite the warnings of environmental campaigners and consumer advocates, they proved enormously popular; so popular, indeed, that Carrefour took the unusual step of asking customers to stay away because the traffic jams were so bad. And where Carrefour led, others were quick to follow. By 1974, Asda had opened 27 ‘superstores’ of more than 25,000 square feet, while the Co-op had opened 23, Fine Fare 21, Tesco 20 and Morrisons 11. Although some protesters objected that they were bound to damage local traders, a much wider complaint was that there were not enough superstores, and press reports often suggested that, in this respect as in many others, Britain was lagging well behind its neighbours. A spokesman for Debenhams even predicted that the ‘trendy, out-of-town superstore with its cut-price shopping and easy parking will become a British institution’. The Times, however, thought this was a little unlikely. Town centres would continue to thrive, it observed, because most people would surely baulk at having ‘to travel three or four miles for shopping’.¹⁸

What The Times had overlooked was the phenomenon of shopping not as a necessity but as a pleasure, a leisure activity in itself. Although some housewives complained that they missed the local gossip of the high street, others said that they actively relished the vast choice of the hypermarket. As one explained in 1974, she loved supermarket shopping ‘if I’ve got the time and lots of money, and I know I can choose all these lovely foods’. And of course many housewives no longer went shopping alone. Even in the late 1960s, more than one in three husbands regularly accompanied their wives on shopping trips, and by 1982 one in four husbands often did the grocery shopping themselves, armed with a shopping list and stern instructions ‘what to buy where’. Children also played their part: it was estimated in 1970 that they exercised some influence over 15 per cent of family purchases, especially cakes, biscuits, confectionery and cereals, which were often packaged with toys or offers appealing to youthful consumers. Shopping, in other words, had become yet another kind of family entertainment, and canny entrepreneurs were quick to cash in. By 1976, the nation’s first major shopping centre had opened at Brent Cross, north London, and within three years it had been followed by similarly vast malls such as the Mander Centre in Wolverhampton and the Arndale Centre in Manchester, temples to the new gods of affluence, consumerism and material ambition.¹⁹

In many respects, what people bought at these new shopping centres was simply ‘more of the same’, as the historian Arthur Marwick puts it. By the late 1970s, almost all households had at least one television, 88 per cent had a fridge, 71 per cent a washing machine and 52 per cent a car. Only half, though, had a telephone, and just 3 per cent a dishwasher, which was a treat reserved for the richest or most forward-thinking. There was much talk of calculators and home computers, but not until 1980 did Spectrum release the pioneering ZX-80, which sold an unprecedented 50,000 units and paved the way for Britain to lead the world in computer ownership during the Thatcher years. Video recorders, too, were keenly anticipated, but few families owned one: by the end of 1978, just 136,000 had been sold, although in the long run home videos obviously represented the beginning of a seismic shift in broadcasting and entertainment. And there were other signs of change in what people bought in 1978: the £1 billion spent on DIY products, for example, or the surging sales of wine, soft drinks, perfumes and deodorants, or even the staggering 44 million pairs of jeans.²⁰

In terms of white goods, though, the big success story of the 1970s was the deep freezer. In 1970 only about 4 per cent of British homes had one; by 1972, 8 per cent; by 1978, 41 per cent, a tenfold increase in just eight years. Frozen food was already associated with laziness, obesity and morbid addiction to the television: during the 1950s, Elizabeth David had bitterly attacked restaurateurs and housewives alike for using frozen peas, and in 1972 the critic Barry Norman mocked ‘the average pleb, dozing in his carpet slippers in front of his set with his pre-frozen dinner congealing on his lap’. None of this, however, seemed to deter the average pleb. By the mid-1970s, even small grocery stores had brought in freezer chests to hold Birds Eye fish fingers, McCain’s oven chips and Walls ice cream, with frozen Vesta curries, coq au vin and chicken à la king for the adventurous. Meanwhile, dedicated ‘freezer centres’ had made their first appearance on the high street, the most successful, Iceland, having been opened in Oswestry in 1970 by a group of bored Woolworths employees. Woolworths promptly fired the founders from their day jobs, but, like most things from Shropshire, the venture proved a roaring success. By 1975, there were fifteen Iceland stores across the northern Midlands and North Wales, and three years later Iceland opened its first superstore in Manchester. Meanwhile, by the beginning of the 1980s Birds Eye were making almost £13 million a year from their frozen Oven Crispy Cod, £12 million from their Steakhouse Grills and £5 million from Viennetta ice cream. They had rather missed the boat, however, on that other great frozen success story, the pizza, which accounted for a staggering £60 million a year in total sales by 1983. As one marketing man explained, the pizza looked set to become ‘the beans on toast of the eighties’.²¹

Frozen food, which probably transformed the British diet more than any other innovation of the post-war years, succeeded simply because it was so convenient. With middle-class Britons working longer and more irregular hours, and with even married women flooding into the workplace, frozen food naturally appealed to harassed parents and exhausted mothers. There was even a minor genre of frozen-food cookbooks, advising women how to prepare shepherd’s pies, casseroles and goulash in bulk before parcelling them into containers for freezing, how to quick-blanch peas and carrots before freezing them too, and even how to freeze cottage cheese, pâtés and, bizarrely, sardine sandwiches. Convenience was all; even cooks who disdained frozen food often found themselves tempted by dishes like Marks & Spencer’s Chicken Kiev, launched in 1976 to become the unrivalled bestseller of the ‘ready meal’ world. Then there was Cadbury’s Smash, a packet of granules aimed at people too busy (in other words, too lazy) to make their own mashed potatoes, and famously advertised on television by a group of robotic Martians. Even the Great British Breakfast was not immune from the lust for convenience: by 1976, a study for Kellogg’s found that only 20 per cent of the working public began the day with bacon and eggs, compared with 40 per cent who ate cereal and 25 per cent who had nothing but a cup of tea or coffee. And as people became used to speed at home, so they demanded speed when they ate out: it was in 1974 that the sinister arches of McDonald’s were first raised over the streets of London.²²

The paradox is that while many people ate terribly during the 1970s – an evening meal of a boil-in-bag chicken curry followed by Angel Delight, say, or tinned chilli con carne and Neapolitan ice cream – the possibilities for eating well were greater than ever. Popular accounts of the decade often present it as a time when chillies, aubergines and courgettes were unheard of: when Sam Tyler, the detective from the future in the BBC’s twenty-first-century series Life on Mars, ponders buying olive oil and coriander, Gene Hunt warns him that in Trafford Park ‘you’ve got more chance of finding an ostrich with a plum up its arse’. But Britain in 1973 was not just a wasteland of spaghetti hoops and cheese-and-pineapple skewers. Visiting inner-city Nottingham a few years earlier, researchers had been struck by the Central European delicatessen selling Polish delicacies, the Indian shops stocking ‘sweet potatoes and yams’, the Chinese chop suey restaurants and the ‘crowded Italian corner-shop … with its baskets of aubergines and green peppers outside, and inside a passing glimpse of pasta in every shape and size’. Still, while most people were keen to try new things, their tastes remained strikingly conservative. When Piers Paul Read’s barrister protagonist takes his mistress out for lunch, they have ‘avocado pear with prawns’ followed by fillet steak; when Kingsley Amis’s Oxford don Jake Richardson makes himself a slap-up dinner, he has ‘avocado pear with prawns’ again followed by trout with almonds and Brussels sprouts; and when a policeman in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age (1977) describes the best meal of his life, it consists of pâté, prawn cocktail, steak and chips, and Black Forest gateau. And when Gallup asked people in 1973 to choose their ‘perfect meal if expense were no object and you could have absolutely anything you wanted’, the ideal menu turned out to be sherry, tomato soup, prawn cocktail, steak and chips, sherry trifle and cheese and biscuits, a line-up almost identical to the one people had chosen twenty-five years previously.²³

One thing that had changed, though, was that more and more middle-class couples liked to entertain friends and colleagues to dinner in their own homes, partly as a way of showing off their perfect lawns, three-piece suites and collections of china figurines, but also as a chance for the (almost always female) cook to demonstrate her mastery of the new culinary trends. Previously a habit reserved for the rich, the dinner party was the supreme suburban ritual of the 1970s and the ultimate test of a wife’s organizational skills, which is why women’s magazines spent so much time advising on everything from the best pre-dinner drinks – Campari and soda, say, or Bacardi and coke – to the ideal books to leave on the coffee table. As for the food, many cooks turned for inspiration to the highly elaborate recipes of writers like the Anglo-American television chef Robert Carrier, presenting a waist-expanding selection of pastry crescents, heavy cream sauces, stuffed vegetables, lobster soufflés, sweet and sour meatballs or veal goulash, served with a chilled bottle or two of Mateus Rosé. Contrary to popular belief, however, there is no evidence of people swapping partners on these occasions; in any case, the average housewife would have been far too worried about the state of her sherry trifle to contemplate a quick tumble with Terry from Accounts.²⁴

By far the biggest influence on the suburban cook was a pretty young woman who first appeared on television in September 1973, presenting simple ten-minute recipes in a converted BBC weather studio and coming across, in the words of the Telegraph’s reviewer, as ‘a friendly, unaffected young housewife at home in the kitchen’. The daughter of a Bexleyheath ironmonger, Delia Smith had left school in the late 1950s without a single qualification, and spent the 1960s working as a hairdresser, shop assistant, washer-up and waitress. After becoming interested in cooking at her workplace, a little Paddington restaurant, she began taking notes on popular dishes, and even visited the British Museum’s Reading Room to bone up on recipes from the past. In 1969, she landed a job writing recipes for the Daily Mirror’s new lifestyle magazine, and three years later she moved to the Evening Standard, where she stayed for twelve years. By this point her first book, How to Cheat at Cooking (1971), had already done well, and she was on her way to becoming a publishing phenomenon. The Evening Standard Cookbook, Frugal Food and Cakes, Bakes and Steaks soon followed, but her biggest success was Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, published in three annual volumes from 1978 onwards to accompany her BBC series. Often lampooned, not least for her deep Catholic faith and vociferous support for Norwich City, she could not, however, be dismissed. No other British cook, not Elizabeth David, not Fanny Cradock, not Marguerite Patten, had more influence over what ordinary people had for dinner.²⁵

The key to Delia’s success was that her recipes, unlike those of other cooks, were designed for real people too busy to worry about elaborate sauces and time-consuming marinades. Her very first cookbook, the aptly titled How to Cheat at Cooking, encouraged readers to use packet sauces and Smash, and not to be afraid of ‘tarting up … tinned, packet, frozen or dehydrated goods’. Frozen Findus ratatouille or Birds Eye baby onions in cream sauce, Delia advised, could be ‘poured over chops or steak to give them an edge’. And she even suggested that busy hostesses serve ‘Baked Fish Fingers’, a concoction of tinned tomatoes, mushrooms and grated cheese poured over fish fingers, which would be unlikely to fool even the least observant guest, even if, as Delia recommended, there were ‘plenty of top-drawer cook-books placed on full view’. Later, of course, she played down the cheating element, and by the mid-1970s Findus ratatouille had disappeared from her repertoire. But her recipes always catered for nervous, insecure and busy cooks – in other words, the great majority of the population. She was a ‘down to earth sort of cook’, reported The Times before her first television appearance, adding that she called herself ‘the poor woman’s Elizabeth David’, was not ashamed of never having studied at cookery school, and practised at home in ‘a pair of old jeans that I can get dirty’. As Joan Bakewell remarked seven years later, Delia was in the vanguard of the changes brought by ‘the fast-food revolution, freezers and working wives’, but ‘not so far ahead as to be freaky’. Her recipes were simple and reliable, always a little behind the latest trend, reassuring viewers that ‘nowadays’ olive oil was quite acceptable instead of salad cream, or introducing them to such novelties as ‘cream, bacon and onion tart’ (actually quiche Lorraine) or crusty brown bread as an accompaniment to main courses. Her sets were semi-rustic and suburban, her style democratic without being patronizing. ‘We live in homes like Delia Smith’s, among people like Delia Smith,’ Bakewell wrote, ‘… or so she persuades us.’²⁶

While Delia Smith presented an image of the perfect suburban housewife, polite, pretty and endlessly competent, there were other, rather more caustic visions of the domestic hostess. No suburban social event of the 1970s has been more celebrated than Abigail’s party, even though in Mike Leigh’s Play for Today we never meet the teenage Abigail or hear anything but rumours of her notorious gathering. Instead we are confronted by the ghastly Beverly Moss (Alison Steadman), whose suburban drinks party, complete with faux-brown leather sofas, beige wallpaper, bowls of nibbles, plenty of Bacardi and coke and Demis Roussos on the record player, turns domestic entertaining into excruciating black comedy. Beverly is of course a monster: a middle-class social climber, a sexual vulture, a snob obsessed with liking, having and saying the right things. She is the prisoner not only of her insecurities but also of her ambitions: we are meant to laugh at her suburban pretensions (‘Is it real silver?’ ‘Silver plate, yes’), just as we are meant to laugh at Laurence, her overworked estate-agent husband, with his leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare (‘Not something you can actually read, of course’), his L. S. Lowry prints and his efforts to impress guests with Beethoven’s Ninth. This is a vision not merely of social climbers desperately trying to impress their neighbours, or even of families falling apart in an age of cultural change, but of all the vices of Metro-land, combined and exaggerated: its materialistic one-upmanship, its sexual voraciousness, its lack of community and feeling, its aggressive individualism. As Bernard Levin wrote at the time, it is ‘a study of the mores, attitude, conduct and speech of Affluent-Yobbonia’, of people without roots, ‘torn loose from history, faith, spirit, even language, because they are torn loose from themselves.’²⁷

Mike Leigh was not, of course, the only dramatist of the day to unearth what he saw as the insecurity, loneliness and sheer misery behind the façade of contented middle-class affluence. Although Alan Ayckbourn’s plays invariably made audiences howl with laughter, the bard of Scarborough was a master at picking apart the seams of marriages and families, uncovering the gruesome hypocrisy beneath the ritualistic Sunday lunches and housewarming parties of suburban life. There is surely no better scene of the decade, for example, than the famous Sunday evening dinner in Table Manners, part of his trilogy The Norman Conquests, in which the anxieties and unhappiness of Ayckbourn’s characters – the fussy, pedantic Reg, the angrily buttoned-up Sarah, the dowdy, frustrated Annie, the bumbling, awkward Tom, the dryly waspish Ruth and the outrageously needy, predatory Norman – are mercilessly but hilariously laid bare. ‘Come on now, don’t cry,’ Norman tells Annie at the end of a disastrous family weekend. ‘I’ll make you happy. Don’t worry. I’ll make you happy.’ But happiness seems impossibly distant. For all their obvious affluence, their Home Counties lifestyle and their protestations of contentment, all six characters end the trilogy as they began: deeply lonely, frustrated, resentful people, victims of their own expectations, and of each other.²⁸

And yet, for all their comic brilliance, The Norman Conquests and Abigail’s Party were misleading guides to suburban life. For although writers liked to imagine that suburbanites were selfish, unhappy, lonely people, forever teetering on the brink of some terrible Reggie Perrin-style breakdown, the fact is that most people found life in Metro-land warm, sociable and thoroughly enjoyable. As early as 1960, researchers had comprehensively debunked the caricature of joyless, atomized social climbers (a cliché first coined by sneering upper-class intellectuals at the turn of the century), reporting that suburban couples were ‘friendly, neighbourly and helpful to each other’ and enjoyed a rich life of clubs and societies. In the much-mocked New Towns, too, friendliness and contentment tended to be the rule, not the exception. To the working-class couples with small children who moved to the New Towns, they represented privacy, security and comfort: one Hemel Hempstead woman, for instance, burst into tears on her first day there because she was so happy. ‘We had a garden for the children to run in,’ she recalled, ‘we had a house, a home of our own and we could shut the front door and we didn’t have to worry about anybody.’ And even the most derided new settlements had their fans. When researchers visited the forbidding concrete blocks of Cumbernauld in 1968, they found that eight out of ten people (most of whom had come from the Glasgow slums) were pleased with their new homes, while nine out of ten liked their neighbours. Cumbernauld was ‘a happy town’, reported The Times. ‘The people are friendly, more of them have cars and telephones than Glaswegians do, there is no teenage problem and there are more than 100 clubs and societies in the community … So much for “new town blues”.’²⁹

Despite all the travails of the economy in the next few years, the bloodshed in Northern Ireland, the battles between governments and unions, the headlines about crime and decadence, the talk of crisis and national breakdown, there is no reason to believe that this picture changed. Of course many families were deeply affected by the major events of the day, from soaring food prices and petrol shortages to public spending cuts and job losses. For those lucky enough to be in steady, well-paid jobs, however, life was good, especially as they watched their mortgages disappear thanks to inflation. Provided that they could ignore the newspaper stories about British decline, there was much to enjoy: a brand-new company car, next year’s foreign holiday, a trip to the new shopping centre or even a lazy afternoon tending the garden and watching The Big Match. Even the terrorism expert Richard Clutterbuck, writing in a book entitled Britain in Agony: The Rise of Political Violence (1978), reflected that in late 1974, one of the lowest moments in the country’s modern history, a Labour activist had reminded him that ‘despite the almost permanent atmosphere of economic crisis, Britain was at that moment more prosperous in real terms than at any point in our history and that the majority of us, especially at working level, had the highest standard of living we had ever had’. Despite all the problems, indeed, most people still enjoyed affluence, mobility and opportunities of which their parents could never have dreamed. Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that in 1977 a major survey found that a staggering 82 per cent of people were satisfied with life in Britain, compared with only 68 per cent in France and 59 per cent in Italy. For many people, in short, life was good.³⁰

For one social group in particular, the political and economic shocks of the seventies hardly registered even as distant rumbling on the horizon. Unless their parents were unusually political, most children were barely affected by the major news stories of the day, which is perhaps one reason they later remembered the 1970s so fondly. As one schoolboy of 1973 later put it, while the news programmes were ‘crammed with bombings, mass strikes, unemployment and financial ruin’, he ‘happily sat … swinging my legs, enjoying the candles’ intimate light, reading comics [and] picking my nose’. And although a 12-year-old Essex girl recorded on New Year’s Day 1974 that ‘as the power & energy crisis is still on, it looks as if we’ll soon be using candles and riding bikes everywhere’, her other diary entries during the national crisis were taken up with camping expeditions, trips to sweet shops and Chinese takeaways, the purchases of records and bubble bath, and the compilation of David Cassidy scrapbooks. Only the weekly editions of Top of the Pops (‘Dear Me, It’s been a good day today. Top of the Pops was on at 7.55pm. Suzi Quatro was on and Bay City Rollers, Barry White, Alvin Stardust, Gilbert O’Sullivan, Hollies, David Bowie, Queen. I can’t think of any others’) marked the passing of the seasons – as well as the inevitable but never less than sensational transfer of her affections from one spotty youth to the next.³¹

Children in the 1970s were obviously fortunate to be growing up in an age of free state education and national health care, but they were also lucky to be growing up at a time when, thanks to the boom in living standards since the 1950s, affluence had gently trickled down the generations. Very few had to put up with the outside toilets, cold running water and shared tin baths that their parents had known, and many took for granted the space hoppers and chopper bikes that later became clichéd emblems of the decade. Even working-class children could expect to get pocket money from their parents: a survey of sixth-formers at a very mixed north London comprehensive in 1974 found that most got about £2 a week, while many took part-time jobs at the weekends, earning between £2 and £6 for a day’s work. The working-class Essex girl we met earlier was too young to have a job, but her older sister earned £3 every Saturday at Littlewoods in Romford, while the 12-year-old diarist regularly bought new clothes, records and make-up. And although class inequalities meant that children from very rich and very poor backgrounds had very different life chances, British children in the 1970s arguably had more of a common culture than any generation before them. Rich or poor, all but a tiny minority had a stake in the world of Action Man, Star Wars and Scalextrix, yo-yos, roller-skates and Sindy dolls, Uno, Mastermind and the Magna Doodle.³²

What dominated children’s cultural lives above all, however, was the small screen. While Blue Peter, Jackanory and the excruciating Why Don’t You? aimed to educate and uplift, most children preferred the colourful adventures of Mr Benn, Ivor the Engine, The Wombles and the gloriously melancholy Bagpuss. For slightly older children, meanwhile, Doctor Who was at its peak in the 1970s, pitting Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker against an imaginative if rather unconvincing range of foes from Daleks and Cybermen to man-eating plants, giant slugs and a giant rat – the latter one of the worst-realized monsters not merely in the show’s history, but in the history of human entertainment. Moral campaigners fretted that the Time Lord’s adventures were too frightening for children: his encounter with plastic policemen in ‘Terror of the Autons’ (1971) was discussed in the House of Lords, while the Church of England’s consultant psychiatrist blamed Pertwee’s swansong ‘Planet of the Spiders’ (1974) for ‘an epidemic of spider phobia among young children’. An internal BBC report even claimed that Doctor Who was the single most violent programme on television, although, as The Times pointed out, comparing Doctor Who’s violence with real violence was ‘like comparing Monopoly with the property market in London: both are fantasies, but one is meant to be taken seriously’.

In any case, children clearly liked to be frightened, and viewing figures regularly topped 10 million. It is telling that after one particularly violent adventure, ‘The Seeds of Doom’ (1976), children wrote in to express their appreciation. ‘I think it was one of the scariest ones of all, I liked the bit when the plants were taking over, and I also liked the monster,’ was a typical comment, while another young correspondent commended the producers on their ingenious ways of killing people (strangled by tendril, crushed in compost machine, and so on). Sadly and foolishly, however, the BBC eventually yielded to parental criticism: in 1977 the programme’s horror content was toned down and the production team, which soon included Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, struck a more comic note. But by that stage the moral campaigners had a new target, for the fuss about Doctor Who was as nothing compared with that surrounding Grange Hill, which began in 1978 and horrified many parents with its boisterously realistic portrait of comprehensive school life.³³

One reason that children’s television aroused such alarm was that even the producers themselves thought youngsters watched far too much of it. A typical weekday afternoon schedule in February 1978, on the day Grange Hill’s first episode appeared, began at 1.45 with Mr Men, with the pleasures of Play School, Jackanory, Screen Test and Grange Hill to come before Paddington rounded things off at 5.35. Even Shaun Sutton, the BBC’s head of drama, worried that parents were allowing their children ‘to watch too much and so denying them much of the rich diversity which should be enlarging their developing years’, when there were ‘books to be read, arts and crafts to be learnt, and games to be played’. And yet there is no evidence that television destroyed children’s appetite for reading. The Puffin Book Club, founded in 1967, had 50,000 diminutive members by the early 1970s, each receiving a copy of the quarterly Puffin Post (or The Egg for very young readers), and membership eventually peaked at a staggering 200,000 in the early 1980s. By this point, Puffin were selling well over 3 million children’s paperbacks a year, while more than 3,000 new books flooded annually into the marketplace. Many of these broke new ground in children’s fiction: writing in 1980, the critic Elaine Moss predicted that a twenty-first-century historian would be interested in novels that were ‘beginning to reflect the multicultural nation … [and] contemporary situations that cut across class and colour’, such as Jan Needle’s story of an immigrant Pakistani family in Bradford, My Mate Shofiq (1978). There were deliberately anti-sexist books, such as Gene Kemp’s celebrated The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977), in which naughty, athletic Tyke turns out, in a surprise twist, to be a girl; there were also ‘social realist’ stories revising the cherished myths of the Second World War, such as Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (1973) or Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners (1975). And there was even a revisionist account of the most cherished childhood fantasy of all, thanks to Raymond Briggs’s grumpy, working-class Father Christmas (1973) – who still has an outside toilet.³⁴

Revealingly, however, most children seem to have had similar tastes to their parents; while they liked novelty and appreciated realism, they were reluctant to dispense with old favourites, much to the despair of progressive teachers. A survey in 1972 found that Enid Blyton was still ‘easily the most popular’ writer among children from 6 to 11, followed by C. S. Lewis and Beatrix Potter. And while Captain W. E. Johns, the creator of Biggles, was clearly in decline, Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbit and A. A. Milne were still far more popular than most of their modern competitors; in fact, only Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear, came close. At the time, critics insisted that the survey must be biased towards middle-class children, and could not possibly represent the tastes of the nation. But when the Schools Council carried out a wider poll in 1977, it turned out that the three most widely read children’s books in Britain were C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven and Five on a Treasure Island – published in 1950, 1949 and 1942 respectively, and unashamedly old-fashioned even when they were written. Old values died hard – as the success of J. K. Rowling, who spent the 1970s as a Gloucestershire schoolgirl writing fantasy stories to entertain her younger sister, would later confirm.³⁵

In the 1970s, as in other decades, teenagers were the focus of considerable social anxiety, blamed for everything from street crime and promiscuous sexuality to the decline of patriotism and the plight of the economy. Young people, wrote J. B. Priestley in his survey of The English (1973), were ‘inept, shiftless, slovenly, messy’, because ‘unlike their fathers and grandfathers, they have not been disciplined by grim circumstances’. This last bit was true, but there was no evidence that they were any more shiftless or slovenly than previous generations; only that attitudes and discipline had softened, which meant that they wore their hair longer and more scruffily, or refused to give their elders the automatic respect they demanded. There was certainly little evidence of a yawning cultural generation gap: when Jeremy Seabrook visited Blackburn, he found that local teenagers were just as suspicious of immigrants and keen on hanging as their parents. Like teenagers everywhere, they worried that they were missing out on some wildly debauched metropolitan party to which everyone else had been invited: life in Blackburn, they complained, was ‘bloody boring’. They were ‘sensual, acquisitive and fundamentally quiescent’, Seabrook thought, and, despite their flared jeans and long hair, they differed from their parents only in their ‘commitment to enjoyment and consumption’, for which he puritanically blamed the affluent society.³⁶

Actually, Seabrook’s verdict was not much fairer than Priestley’s. It is hard to accept that young people were greedier and more selfish, given that this was a decade in which more teenagers than ever gave their time to charity, in which membership of the Cubs, Brownies, Scouts and Guides reached record levels, in which the number of Community Service volunteers increased by six times, and in which tens of thousands worked for their voluntary Duke of Edinburgh awards. And despite the stereotype that sees young people in the 1970s evolve from hairy hippies into spittle-flecked punks, a glance at photographs from the decade confirms that most were neither. They might make half-hearted gestures towards rebellion – growing their hair, perhaps, or buying an ill-advised pair of leather trousers – but most stayed on the straight and narrow. As a survey of 16-year-old girls found in 1975, the vast majority dreamed of getting married and having children, just like their parents before them, with only a minority worrying about getting good jobs, and none of them mentioning rebelling or dropping out. And it is worth bearing in mind that of all age groups, the biggest swing to Mrs Thatcher in 1979 came among voters aged between 18 and 24 – in other words, precisely those people who a few years earlier had been chewing their pens in O-level physics classes, dreaming of Marc Bolan or Olivia Newton-John, and trying to ignore the headlines that condemned them as feckless wastrels.³⁷

What dominated teenagers’ cultural lives, just as in the 1950s and 1960s, was pop music. Some things had changed: most independent labels had died out, and almost all major British artists had signed with the big multinational conglomerates: EMI, Decca, Polydor, RCA and CBS. Many independent record shops, too, were struggling: by 1977, 34 per cent of all singles and 30 per cent of albums were bought in Boots, Woolworths and WH Smith, which had moved in to dominate the music market. Television, meanwhile, wielded enormous influence over teenage tastes. Every Thursday, some 15 million people tuned in to watch Top of the Pops, which meant that invitations to appear were highly prized. When groups could not make it (or more rarely, refused to come), they were replaced with nubile dance troupes like Pan’s People, conceived as a treat for the dads. But most weekly line-ups were both impressively star-studded and bizarrely eclectic. On 18 April 1974, for example, the Essex teenager recorded her delight at seeing ‘the Wombles, Glitter Band, Mott the Hoople, Sunny, Limmie & Family Cooking, Jimmy Osmond, Terry Jacks, Abba, Bay City Rollers, Wizzard’. A week later, to her horror, she missed it, having been forced to help her parents tow their caravan to Chelmsford. But she made sure to catch the next edition, in which Abba, the Wombles and the Bay City Rollers returned and were joined by Peters and Lee, Status Quo and the crooner Vince Hill, whose lustre had faded since his heyday in the early 1960s – an indication of how quickly teenage tastes had changed. ‘I feel sorry for him,’ she confided, ‘coz he appeared and he’s not really appreciated.’³⁸

The other obvious difference from the teenage culture of the 1960s was the extraordinary tribalism of musical tastes. Of course this had always been there in embryo, in the division between Mods and Rockers for instance, or between hippies and skinheads. But as the critic Ian MacDonald points out, pop music in the 1960s was a ‘half-invented art form’. Artists as different as, say, Cilla Black and the Rolling Stones were still seen as part of the same world, while the Beatles and the Kinks experimented wildly with different instruments, lyrical styles and even musical genres, so that their admirers ‘never knew from bar to bar what was coming next’. Between about 1967 and 1969, however, a gulf opened up between pop on the one hand, and rock on the other, reflecting not just the difference between singles and albums, but between younger and older listeners, the latter now demanding more self-consciously serious and stimulating material. To people who loathed all popular music, the difference between Slade and the Bay City Rollers, or between Nick Drake and Leo Sayer, must have seemed footling and arbitrary; but to teenagers in the early 1970s, it loomed very large indeed. Pop music was catchy and commercial, designed for the radio and the singles charts; rock songs were meant to be authentic and artistic, and often lasted for what seemed hours. Rock was worthy but difficult; pop was cheerful but trite. Rock appealed to adults, pop to teenagers. ‘Rock was not only a thousand watts louder,’ writes Philip Norman; ‘it was also a thousand times more serious.’³⁹

With artists under such pressure to conform to established, market-friendly stereotypes – the fresh-faced young balladeer, the dreamy-eyed singer-songwriter, the badly behaved long-haired rockers – it is not surprising that magazines like Melody Maker and the New Musical Express lamented the death of creativity. In February 1972 the NME’s assistant editor Nick Logan dismissed what he called ‘mini-phenomena’ like the Faces, Slade, and T.Rex, and complained that he had spent ‘three or four years waiting in a post-Beatles limbo for a new real phenomenon to present itself’. Even David Bowie, perhaps the only chart star of the early 1970s who preserved the old spirit of permanent reinvention, came in for criticism: to the NME’s Roy Carr, for example, he was a triumph of ‘hype and hoax’, a ‘singing boutique who appeals only to freaks’. Revealingly, both Logan and Carr had started writing for the magazine in the late 1960s, and while they may have been only ten years older than their readers, ten years is an enormously long time to a teenager. But then generational battles are as much a part of teenage culture as surliness, spots and self-loathing. When T.Rex released ‘Children of the Revolution’ in September 1972, the NME’s reviewer Danny Holloway dismissed its ‘nursery-school lyrics’ before mournfully predicting that ‘the soldiers of Teenage Wasteland will send this one straight to Number One’. (In fact, it peaked at number two, breaking T.Rex’s sequence of four consecutive chart-topping singles.) And the magazine’s letters pages often smouldered with teenage fury at the snobbery of its 25-year-old critics. ‘I’m sick and tired of letters from people who say yesterday’s music has a higher standard than today,’ wrote an angry B. Randall of London SE9. They must be ‘deaf or daft or both to think that the oldies can be compared with today’s music. Can’t they see the music scene has changed? Or are they all locked away in dark rooms, listening to wind-up gramophones?’⁴⁰

What really defined pop and rock music in the early 1970s, though, was its sheer fragmentation. No group dominated the charts, the media or the imagination of the young in the same way that the Beatles and Rolling Stones had done a few years before. At the end of 1971, it seemed possible that Marc Bolan’s group T.Rex, whose theatrical style epitomized the new craze for ‘glam rock’, might establish themselves as an enduring force. Their singles ‘Get It On’, ‘Ride a White Swan’ and ‘Hot Love’ accounted for almost 4 per cent of all British record sales that year, both Paul McCartney and John Lennon anointed them as their successors, and ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, host of the BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, announced that they had ‘got to be the next Beatles, if they’re not already’. By early 1972, with the band’s album The Slider boasting 100,000 advance orders, the press was talking excitedly of ‘T.Rexstasy’ and Bolan’s self-satisfied features seemed likely to become a defining image of the decade. However, he then lost his way, partly because of his own narcissism and fondness for the bottle, but also because it was extremely difficult to combine artistic ambitions with making chart-topping records for 14-year-old girls.⁴¹

By 1975 Bolan had almost vanished from sight; now the great phenomenon was the Bay City Rollers, a clean-cut, tartan-clad group from Edinburgh, whose single ‘Bye Bye Baby’ held the number one spot for six weeks and sold almost a million copies. Like T.Rex, the Rollers’ public appearances inspired scenes of hysteria reminiscent of the Beatles at their peak. ‘Their audience is aged between 10 and 15, and their enthusiasm can realistically be compared with Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies,’ reported Melody Maker after one concert in Edinburgh. ‘Girls were being trodden underfoot in the melee and the front row of seats became dislodged from the floor and smashed as more and more surged into the crowd. There were at least a dozen cases of fainting, and twice girls pretended to be overcome in order to be lifted up stagewards.’⁴²

But while the band’s domineering manager Tam Paton (later convicted of gross indecency with teenage boys) boasted that they would be ‘as big as the Beatles’, nobody took him seriously. The market was now far too sophisticated and the audience far too fragmented – by age, class and region, as well as by taste and temperament – for any group to repeat the Liverpool quartet’s extraordinary commercial and critical success. Between, for example, Slade and Genesis, two emblematic bands of the early 1970s, there yawned a vast cultural chasm. Both enjoyed dressing up: Slade’s Noddy Holder usually sported a top hat decorated with silver discs, while Genesis’s Peter Gabriel wore costumes so ludicrous – fluorescent bat-wings, a flower-petal mask, a diamond helmet – that he would have made a first-class monster on Doctor Who. Beyond that, however, they had almost nothing in common. Holder was the son of a Wolverhampton window-cleaner, whose skinhead band had become the epitome of cheerful, unpretentious glam rock. Gabriel, on the other hand, was a former Charterhouse boy who claimed inspiration from J. R. R. Tolkien and Arthur C. Clarke and said that his twenty-three-minute epic ‘Supper’s Ready’ (1972) described ‘the ultimate cosmic battle for Armageddon between good and evil in which man is destroyed, but the deaths of countless thousands atone for mankind, reborn no longer as Homo Sapiens’. Never less than ambitious, Gabriel once remarked that his band’s ‘role as musicians … may well be providing bourgeois escapism’. What Noddy Holder would have thought of this can only be guessed at: he was content, he said, to be a ‘Black Country yobbo’.⁴³

By this stage, pop music had already lost the exaggerated subversive, utopian associations of Swinging London and the Summer of Love. If anything, it had reverted to something very similar to the picture before the Beatles’ breakthrough in 1963: a bewildering kaleidoscope of singers and bands, competing for attention in a highly crowded but socially fractured market, with the singles charts often dominated by one-hit wonders and novelty records like Middle of the Road’s ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ (1971), or the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards’ version of ‘Amazing Grace’, the biggest-selling single of 1972. And although bands like the prototypical heavy metal outfit Led Zeppelin – who refused to release singles, let alone appear on Top of the Pops – continued to make headlines for outlandishly bad behaviour, pop music in the age of Pink Floyd and Elton John seemed to have lost much of its ability to shock. By the end of 1973, the days when John Lennon and Mick Jagger had been media folk devils, hailed as champions of a new generation and voices of protest against the established moral order, seemed long gone. Looking back on a year that had produced Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Genesis’s Selling England by the Pound and, hilariously, Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, not even the most defiantly countercultural critic could deny that rock had become distinctly respectable. And when The Times was hailing Tales from Topographic Oceans as ‘the ultimate bridging of the gap between the music of the academy and the tunes of the discotheque’, and predicting that its ‘third movement’ would be ‘studied 25 years hence as a significant turning point in modern music’, then the Mods and Rockers really did seem like ancient history.⁴⁴

In January 1974, when the glam-rockers the Sweet released their new single ‘Teenage Rampage’, its co-writer Nicky Chinn told Melody Maker that he was ‘trying to convey the changing behaviour of kids, who now more than ever before are going rampant’. Teenagers, he said, were ‘having a bigger effect on life than ever’ and ‘to ask whatever happened to the teenage dream is a load of cock’. The band’s guitarist Andy Scott, however, was rather less bullish. ‘We’ve only released the song for the sake of having a hit,’ he said bluntly, adding that he didn’t even like it himself. And when Melody Maker asked young music fans for their reaction to ‘Teenage Rampage’, it turned out that very few agreed with the 28-year-old Chinn. Many hated the teenage label. ‘I think of myself as a person, not as part of an anonymous horde,’ said Christine Harrison, 15, from Manchester. People like Chinn ‘put teenagers in a bad light’, said 16-year-old Ada McMahon from Edinburgh, adding that ‘parents are too easily influenced.’ Pop records were a ‘gross exploitation of teenagers’ views and feelings’, agreed Tim Potts from Newcastle, while Oldham’s Kevin Lee thought that adults who ‘use the word [teenage] for song titles should be treated with contempt’. It should be ‘a criminal offence,’ he added, ‘to cash in on the idiot hordes of 13 to 16-year olds who are brainwashed into thinking they’re the same just because their age group is mentioned’.

But the last word belongs to 15-year-old Steven Knight of Crouch Hill, London. The very mention of the word ‘teenager’, he said scornfully, merely made him think of surfboards and 1950s rock and roll. ‘I visualise a useless, worthless struggle of kids arguing with their parents as to how late they can stay out,’ he went on, ‘a struggle which they would soon grow out of and be ashamed of when reminded.’ Given that so many of the teenagers of 1974 would vote for Mrs Thatcher five years later, perhaps he was not far wrong.⁴⁵

For a small minority of children and teenagers, life was very different from middle-class fantasies of suburban bliss. In 1970, when the Child Poverty Action Group claimed that 3 million children were growing up in poverty, many people objected that it had included families able to afford washing machines and televisions. But while no definition of poverty won universal agreement, other studies published that same year showed that many children were clearly blighted by their poor upbringing. An LSE study showed that one in five large families in London was living below the government’s official poverty level, some children even having to make do with coats instead of blankets in winter. A conference organized by the housing group Shelter produced the claim that 7 to 10 million Britons were ‘camped on, or down beyond, the boglands of poverty’, being shut out from the delights of the affluent society, deprived of luxuries and leisure, and forced to make do with welfare handouts, poor diets and damp, dilapidated council accommodation. And in January 1971, the chairman of the Child Poverty Action Group, the future Labour maverick Frank Field, issued a revised estimate that one million children grew up in families beneath an income level of £16 a week, which was the poverty line agreed by the government’s Supplementary Benefits Commission. More likely to be smacked by their exhausted parents, to suffer from illnesses, to have bad diets and bad teeth, they were also less likely to have help with their school work, to go on holidays and outings, and even to be read to at night. And for the unluckiest children, falling through the welfare net, disadvantage could turn into abuse. In 1973 the nation was horrified by the case of Maria Colwell, a 7-year-old girl battered to death by her stepfather after social services ignored more than thirty complaints from her Brighton council-house neighbours – and not the last tragedy of its kind.⁴⁶

In the autumn of 1972, two young researchers arrived on the Monmouth council estate in Islington, north London, to begin a project on working-class youth culture. What they found could hardly have been more remote from the leafy suburbs of Betjeman’s Metro-Land: a low-rise GLC housing complex trapped between two busy main roads, first occupied in 1960 but never properly finished, a ‘twilight zone with high rates of delinquency, mental breakdown and suicide’. Just a short bus ride from the West End, the estate’s 1,200 maisonettes offered a ‘familiar contrast between the private trappings of affluence – colour TVs, kitchen units, and fitted carpets – and public squalor – halls and stairways strewn with garbage and covered with graffiti, lifts that don’t work and telephone boxes smashed up’. Many children were drawn into criminality before they had even reached double figures; led by a manic 13-year-old, one gang had occupied a disused local pub, using it to store their booty from robberies and raids, but reserving one room for ‘shitting and pissing’. Between the Monmouth youngsters and their neighbours on the Denby council estate, which was dominated by widowed pensioners and black immigrant families, there was a long history of tension. In particular, Irish and black teenagers hated each other; the Irish often complained that the ‘jungle bunnies’ would ‘turn you over’ for money if they caught a white boy on his own. And when a group of well-meaning social workers and squatters tried to turn the pub into a youth centre, with a disco as the centrepiece, their dreams were quickly shattered. The disco soon succumbed to endemic racial violence, and when a kaftan-wearing hippy tried to organize hand-holding ‘encounter sessions’ to dissipate the tension, the teenagers beat him up so badly he ended up in hospital. It would have been funny if it were not so sad: by the time the researchers left in 1974, all they could foresee for the children of the estate was violence, racism and unemployment.⁴⁷

Like so many of the council estates planned and built in the 1940s and 1950s, the Monmouth estate had originally been a symbol of modernity and opportunity, the embodiment of the reforming spirit that was going to turn Britain into the New Jerusalem. The transformation in the estates’ image, however, was astonishingly quick: by the early 1970s, writes one historian, they had already become symbols of ‘dependence on state benefits, of a morass of indebtedness to the council and the moneylender, of isolation from neighbour and kin and society at large’. Once they had been praised for their bold appearance and modern amenities; now they were ‘feared for their violence, their vandalism, their inhuman scale and their dog-eat-dog collective life’. Visiting Blackburn in the summer of 1969, Jeremy Seabrook found ‘empty sweeping vistas of disfigured concrete, neglected grass verges and uncontrolled privet hedges … crumbling kerbstones, blocked drainpipes that stain the walls with a rust-coloured overflow … extinguished street lights, overflowing dented dustbins’. They were as ‘impermanent as refugee camps’, he thought, inviting ‘violence and negation’. The mood of their inhabitants was a ‘sullen and passive indifference’: in the ill-stocked, threadbare shops, he watched women queuing with ‘dirty aprons and draggled dresses’ poking out from beneath their coats, their children dressed in outsize Fair Isle sweaters and cracked plastic jackets, ‘the uniform of jumble sales and charity’.⁴⁸

This picture, of course, was far from universal. Even in the early 1980s, when the estates seemed to have reached rock bottom, there were pockets of success, from grass-roots youth associations, day-care centres, summer festivals and food cooperatives to surveys showing that some estates were genuinely happy, welcoming places. On one Hammersmith estate in the late 1970s, for example, kinship and community had not disappeared; indeed, 77 per cent of tenants had relatives living nearby and 62 per cent felt they could rely on their neighbours in the event of an emergency. Yet other London estates were deeply miserable and troubled places, the inevitable problems of poverty, welfare dependency and lack of opportunities exacerbated by their grim concrete architecture. And as working-class white families moved out to suburbs and New Towns, so the poverty of the estates acquired a racial dimension. By the mid-1970s, black and Asian families were beginning to dominate crumbling pre-war estates like White City, Kingsmead, Kennington Park and Kingslake. Even on the new system-built concrete Holly Street estate in Dalston, more than 75 per cent of new arrivals were black by 1977. Only six years old, Holly Street had once been a symbol of the technological optimism of the late 1960s, its four twenty-storey towers housing more than 1,000 families. Yet by the end of the decade it was a byword for water leaks, vermin infestation, vandalism, muggings and racial violence. In a single week in 1980, there were twenty-one separate break-ins. The corridors were a ‘thieves’ highway’, one visitor wrote, while at the corners of the blocks were ‘dark passages, blind alleys, gloomy staircases’. By now the fear of mugging was so great that if people went out at night they ‘stick to the lit areas and walk hurriedly’. Many compared it with the worst estates of New York or Chicago; it was certainly a long way from the New Jerusalem.⁴⁹

The plight of Holly Street makes an appropriate metaphor for what happened to much of inner-city London in the 1970s. With the capital’s decline as a working port – thanks not only to changing trade and export patterns, but also to the extraordinary intransigence of London’s dockers, whose introverted, clannish politics were notorious even among other trade unions, and made modernization impossible – its manufacturing base collapsed. In everything from the car and engineering industries to furniture-making, vehicle parts and even sweet-making, factories closed and jobs were wiped off the map. Between 1966 and 1974 alone, the capital’s manufacturing workforce fell from 1.29 million to 940,000, and it fell even further and faster during the late 1970s and 1980s. As an industrial city, London was ceasing to exist. And as middle-class and skilled working-class workers moved out to the New Towns and suburbs of Hertfordshire, Essex, Surrey and Kent, so the city’s character radically changed. By 1981, the population of inner London had fallen by a staggering 26 per cent in just twenty years; at 2.35 million, it was barely half the figure in 1901. The turnover was astonishing: two-thirds of the people living in Islington in 1961 had moved out by 1971, and more followed in the next ten years. Formerly respectable working-class districts were increasingly dominated by immigrants, tower blocks and unskilled poor workers, as well as a smattering of young middle-class bohemians in the vanguard of the gentrification craze. And in areas like Islington, the contours of the city’s future were already being sketched in draft: on the one hand, the affluent young, well-educated and well-paid, with an insatiable appetite for commerce and entertainment; on the other, the people of the towers, often shut out from jobs and opportunities, and condemned to lives of crime and dependency.⁵⁰

As early as the mid-1970s, therefore, there was already a sense of two Londons emerging, side-by-side: the city of the gentrifiers, and the city of the council estates. But what struck most visitors at the time was the capital’s sheer seediness: the dirty, run-down, dilapidated streets, the sense of mistrust and disappointment that hung in the air like a fog. The terrible Moorgate tube disaster of February 1975, when a Northern Line commuter train smashed into a bricked-up tunnel, killing forty-three passengers, was a freak accident blamed on driver error; but the very fact that it was never properly explained somehow seemed a symbol of the deteriorating quality of life in the capital. ‘You feel in this city that despair is washing the walls and is eating into hearts of people,’ recorded Kenneth Williams in 1971, ‘and so the music gets noisier, the dancing more frenetic & fragmented, the conversations more wry and ruefully cynical … and the confrontations more & more stalemate’. Six years later, a Thames Television survey found that ‘more than half the people living in London would like to move out because they do not like the neighbourhood’. The heart of the West End, the journalist Clive Irving told American readers, had become ‘a semiderelict slum’, blighted by ‘tacky porno shops, skin movies, pinball arcades, and toxic hamburger joints’, while ‘behind neon façades the buildings are flaking and unkempt’. Even the 30-year-old writer Jonathan Raban, a newcomer to the capital, was struck by the physical decay of his Notting Hill neighbourhood. With its transient population of West Indian youngsters, unkempt hippies and struggling young mothers, it might be picturesque in the sun, he wrote, but ‘on dull days one notices the litter, the scabby paint, the stretches of torn wire netting, and the faint smell of joss-sticks competing with the sickly sweet odour of rising damp and rotting plaster’.⁵¹

London’s fictional image reflected a similar sense of decay and decline. ‘Rat City’, the Art Attacks called it in their punk-rock single of 1979; ‘It’s so shitty.’ Perhaps they were inspired by one of the most successful contemporary visions of London, James Herbert’s bestseller The Rats (1974), the book that effectively reinvented the British horror genre. Here, London is a city eaten away from within by giant, feral rats, which hunt down people in packs, becoming so bold that they take over a tube station, a school, a cinema. And the book’s teacher hero knows who to blame: ‘the councils that took the working class from their slums and put them in tall, remote concrete towers,’ the ‘same councils’ that tolerated ‘the filth that could produce vermin such as the black rats’. This was an extreme example, admittedly, but few other depictions of the city would have gone down well with its tourist board. As early as July 1971, when John Schlesinger’s film Sunday, Bloody Sunday reached the cinemas, it was clear that the carefree fantasies of Swinging London, supposedly ‘the most exciting city in the world’, had long since evaporated. Here, London is a sad, haunted city of drug addicts, harassed homosexuals and looming economic collapse, setting the tone for the decade to come. ‘Up-ended dustbins and capsized vegetable barrows are being sick all over the pavement; rubbish bags slump like tramps against shop windows; rabid pigeons, too fat to fly, squawk among the filth,’ the narrator observes in Martin Amis’s novel Success, published seven years later. Turning into Queensway, past the ‘great continents of Middle-Eastern immigrant workers’ and the ‘shock-haired nig-nog’ selling orange juice from a fridge, he looks in vain for a sign saying ‘English Spoken Here’. And when the heroine revisits her old respectable working-class neighbourhood in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Middle Ground (1980), she finds it ‘derelict, abandoned’, its unfinished tower blocks ‘raw, ugly, gigantic in scale’, a ‘wilderness of flyovers and underpasses and unfinished supports’, a ‘no man’s land’ in the aftermath of war.⁵²

What happened to London in the 1970s was by no means unusual. As skilled working-class and lower-middle-class families moved out of Birmingham inner-city districts like Sparkbrook and Small Heath, the brick terraced streets attracted a new population of students, squatters and immigrants. In Whalley Range, Manchester, where middle-class families were disappearing to the Cheshire suburbs, their old Victorian villas were converted into single-occupancy flats, often becoming shabby student bedsits. And then there was Liverpool, which the planner Lionel Brett, Viscount Esher, called ‘the locus classicus of the collapse of the inner city: the loss of the go-ahead young; the consequent shrinking of the tax base, yet no diminution of the number of under-privileged needing multiple support, of young children, of the impoverished old; the loss of jobs within reach of the centre; and above all the failed, frightening environment’. Only the success of the city’s leading football team, twice European champions in the 1970s, represented a point of pride. But when, just weeks after Liverpool’s second European Cup victory, the city’s industrial development officer reported that it had suffered ‘an unprecedented level of plant closures and redundancies’, it was a reminder of what really mattered.

Later, the Thatcher governments would take much of the blame for Liverpool’s woes. But, as in so many other areas, the rot had set in well before then. There was already a sense, a reporter wrote in June 1978, that ‘Britain had decided simply to write Liverpool off’. Crippled by strikes, the docks were in deep decline, while the new Kirkby housing estates were a ‘planning catastrophe on a very large scale’, with mugging, vandalism and arson endemic, and their inhabitants mocked as ‘drunken, semi-literate idlers who beat their wives’ and ‘marauding mobs of mini-muggers’. And across the city, the rule for calculating unemployment was simple: take the national figure, and double it. To get the figure for Kirkby, double the figure for Liverpool; to get the figure for Toxteth, the inner-city district where most black immigrants lived, treble it. The unemployment rate among young black men, The Times reported sadly, was ‘getting on for 50 percent, four times the city average, and eight times the national’.⁵³

What was really strangling Liverpool was not union militancy or government indifference, but the inexorable logic of economic history, the same thing that afflicted once-prosperous Northern mill towns like Bradford, Oldham and Nelson, or West Midlands engineering towns like Dudley and Wolverhampton. In Bradford, for example, some 50,000 people had been working in textiles in 1964, a third of the town’s workforce; by 1974, however, the equivalent figure was almost down to 25,000, and it continued to fall afterwards. Bradford’s Manningham district, where the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe used to drink in the early 1970s, had once been a handsome middle-class Victorian neighbourhood; by Sutcliffe’s time, however, it was fast becoming one of the worst inner-city slums in the North of England, a wilderness of sex shops, betting shops, seedy drinking clubs and decrepit workers’ cafés. Customers who followed the ‘Toilet’ signs in the Lahore restaurant would ‘find themselves stumbling across a piece of waste ground where half a dozen cats were fighting each other over a hen’s head’, while at the corner, prostitutes solicited in the darkness. ‘Chapels and mills are suddenly exposed by demolition, marooned in a tangle of convolvulus and mallow like the carcasses of huge extinct saurians,’ wrote Jeremy Seabrook of Blackburn, though he could have been talking about any one of dozens of Northern industrial towns. The well-to-do had long since moved out to what he dismissively called their ‘joyless Arcadia of inflated Wendy-houses’; meanwhile, ‘the centre of the town is left increasingly to the poor, the old and the immigrants’.⁵⁴

‘Left-over people’, the former Animals keyboardist Alan Price called them in his album Between Today and Yesterday (1974), a collection of songs built around the experience of growing up in working-class Jarrow. The institutions that had once given texture and meaning to industrial working-class life – the factory, the chapel, the council estate, even the pub and the football club – seemed to be in deep, unstoppable decline. The very landscape was changing: terraced streets ripped down and replaced with monolithic concrete blocks; mill chimneys and colliery engine houses crashing down in clouds of dust; pubs and chapels converted into carpet showrooms or flats for ambitious gentrifiers. When Terry Collier, back from five years in West Germany, tours his old haunts in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, he is horrified by the transformation of the Newcastle he loved. Standing on top of a new multi-storey car park, he reels in shock when his friend Bob tells him that this was the site of the old Go-Go rock club. ‘The Go-Go?’ he exclaims. ‘Gone?’ The Roxy, too, where he used to sink the pints and ogle the girls, has disappeared, demolished to make way for a new civic centre. Only Eric’s fish-and-chip shop remains, a forlorn relic of the old world, alone in a wasteland of building sites and tower blocks. ‘None of our memories is intact,’ Terry says sadly.⁵⁵

Even working-class political culture, which had given life to the Labour Party and still found expression in strikes, marches and local meetings, seemed ‘narrower, more introverted and more brittle’, as local branches fell under the sway of middle-class teachers, lecturers and social workers – who in turn adopted what the Labour MP and political historian David Marquand called ‘an explosive mixture of pseudo-proletarianism, insular populism and mostly shallow neo-marxism’, like some grotesque parody of genuine working-class values. Behind the misleading arithmetic of the electoral system, Labour’s vote was steadily shrinking: from 48 per cent in 1966, it fell to 43 per cent in 1970, 37 per cent in both February 1974 and 1979, and a mere 28 per cent in 1983, when its anti-modernization, even reactionary rhetoric was shrillest. Marquand thought it was trapped in the past, ‘a product of the age of steam, hobbling arthritically into the age of the computer’, appealing above all to ‘the casualties of change rather than to the pacemakers, to declining areas rather than to advancing ones’. When the BBC made a documentary on Harold Wilson and his senior colleagues in 1971 and called it Yesterday’s Men, they provoked the biggest row between the Corporation and the Labour Party that anybody could remember. In the long run, however, the title was more fitting than any of them realized.⁵⁶

But it would be a misleading portrait of Britain that focused entirely on decline, decay and disappointment. Change brought prosperity as well as poverty: in East Anglia, for example, the growth of agri-business, the opening of the M11 motorway and the development of a new economy based on technology and computers brought unparalleled growth to old market towns such as Norwich and Ipswich. In Cambridge, the nation’s first science park opened in 1970 and proved a sensational success, hosting 25 technology firms by 1980 and more than 1,000 by the end of the century. Further east was an even more compelling success story: Felixstowe, already on its way to becoming the nation’s busiest container port, its workforce drawn from former agricultural labourers, its rapid growth a deterrent to the labour disputes that crippled London and Liverpool. And even the capital had its boom areas, most notably Croydon, the epicentre of the new vogue for suburban office blocks. By 1970, it was already the tenth biggest town in the country, with a big new shopping centre, a multi-storey car park and more than fifty office buildings taller than nine storeys. ‘Mini-Manhattan’, observers called it, and its rise seemed relentless; by the end of the decade, East Croydon station was reckoned the busiest outside central London.⁵⁷

It was another, even more derided outpost of Greater Metro-land, however, that most clearly pointed the way to the future. In March 1970, developers unveiled the plans for the last of the New Towns, a ‘city of the future’ in rural north Buckinghamshire, based on an American-style road grid, ‘landscaped parks’, a ‘health campus’ and a spanking new shopping mall to mark the town centre. ‘Los Angeles, Bucks’, wags called it, but its ethos was pure Metro-land, its advertisements showing off the projected landscape of lakes, fields and bridleways, an expanse of manicured green dotted with new homes. The planners had big ambitions: 70,000 people by 1981 and more than 250,000 by the 1990s, with ‘Mr and Mrs 1990’ at the forefront of their thinking. Even in 1972 they were anticipating a brave new world of fibre-optics and computers: homes were fitted with cable to allow Mrs 1990 ‘to stay at home, dial her shopkeeper on her audio-visual telephone, and choose the Sunday lunch as the camera scans the shelves’. Talk of a monorail, that emblematic transport dream of the 1960s, had already been abandoned; instead, this was to be a town centred on the car, although the developers had plans for a ‘dial-a-bus’ scheme, in which a passenger would dial his destination into the nearest bus stop, and a ‘central computer’ would send ‘the nearest bus’ to pick him up. There were plans for golf courses, water-skiing, a ‘water bus’ zipping to London along the Grand Union Canal, even ‘an orchestra floating on a lake with the audience listening from the banks’.⁵⁸

Like all New Towns, Milton Keynes was the subject of criticism and mockery from the very beginning. Newspapers eagerly reported the developers’ problems in securing enough labour and materials to build tens of thousands of homes, while inflation and government cuts meant that the budget was endlessly revised. When the first families began to arrive in the mid-1970s, there were the usual unrepresentative reports of disappointment and loneliness, as well as genuine complaints about poor sound insulation and draughty windows. And when the Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Booker went to inspect the site in July 1974, he made no effort to disguise his horror and contempt. Unlike the ‘leafy, affluent’ suburbs of Los Angeles, he found ‘hundreds of grim little misshapen boxes, in brick or corrugated metal, turned out by machine’. Milton Keynes, he thought, was the ‘ultimate monument’ to ‘the utterly depersonalized nightmare which haunted Aldous Huxley in Brave New World just forty short years ago’. It was with something approaching glee that he predicted that ‘in the present economic climate … the chances must be high that over the next decade Milton Keynes will simply become a pathetic national joke, falling ever further behind its ambitious schedule, and finally grinding to a stop in a sea of mud and rusting contractors’ equipment, unsold houses and half-finished factories’. And ‘in the name of the poor people who will actually have to live there’, he said, ‘such a horrible mistake must never be made again’.⁵⁹

But he was wrong. Milton Keynes was neither a horrible mistake nor a pathetic joke; it was, in fact, a great success. By May 1973, Tesco, British Oxygen, Legal & General and the Abbey National had already committed themselves to opening offices or warehouses in the new town, and by the end of the 1970s more new jobs had been created in Milton Keynes than in any other city in Britain, with the exception of the North Sea oil boomtown of Aberdeen. And although housing completions had fallen behind demand, that was simply because industry and jobs were coming to Milton Keynes much faster than anybody had expected. By the end of 1973, the developers had finished more than 5,000 homes, and by 1976 the town’s population already stood at 76,000 people. The majority of these people, defying the stereotypes of suburban fragmentation and New Town blues, were very happy with their lot. As the town’s chief architect later proudly put it, they had ‘voted with their feet’. And in 1975, even before the shopping centre and other amenities had been opened, a survey found that between 83 and 95 per cent of the residents were pleased with life, while only four families out of 290 questioned said that they wanted to go back to their old homes.⁶⁰

Milton Keynes thrived because it matched the ordinary ambitions of hundreds of thousands of British families: a steady middle-class job, a neat suburban home, a little garden and a safe environment to bring up children. The editor of the Architectural Association Quarterly was probably going a bit far when he said in 1975 that it represented ‘the nearest thing we shall get to Utopia’. But in its mundane, understated way, Milton Keynes was the apotheosis of Metro-land, the ultimate blend of social mobility, material ambition and conservative cultural values. It was ‘not much of a place to look at’, another visiting journalist reported in 1976, but there was ‘much to admire’ in the gentle, low-level design of the housing estates and ‘the absence of graffiti and vandalism’.

It lacked grandeur or romance; it was ‘low-profiled, commodious, efficient, unpretentious’. But that was exactly what people wanted – people like Henry and Lilian Foulds, a retired couple who had left their two-bedroom maisonette in Hackney for a neat bungalow in Milton Keynes. Instead of staring at a skyline of tower blocks and chimneys from a ‘four-walled prison’, they now spent their days in the garden, ‘growing nasturtiums, roses, peas and beans’. They took walks down to the canal; they caught the bus to Wolverton for a ‘hot plate of chips’ or to Bletchley for a ‘nice cup of tea’. They were surrounded by children, but unlike in London, they had no fears of harassment or vandalism. And with informal support from a ‘good neighbour’ paid by the Development Corporation, Henry and Lilian had made plenty of friends in the area, including a neighbour who grew strawberries and cheerfully swapped his surplus produce for their lettuce and beans. Some might mock, but after a lifetime working in the capital, this to them seemed a taste of paradise, their own private version of Betjeman’s Metro-Land. It was ‘like a holiday’, they told an interviewer in 1980. And what about London? ‘We don’t long to go back, not even for a visit.’⁶¹