London's Working-Class Youth and the Making of Post-Victorian Britain, 1958–1971

Abstract

This is an ambitious, heavily researched, frustratingly undercooked book. Its purpose is to examine the extent to which the much-mythologized youth culture of sixties London was truly new. Did it signal the final death of Victorian Britain, or was it a slightly reconfigured version of older cultural formations? Setting up a dichotomy between historians who emphasize the period's continuities and those who, aligning with prevailing popular memory, emphasize change, Fuhg splits the difference, arguing that the 1960s were “a liminal period in which both the continuity of and dissociation from Victorian Britain were tangible . . . the old and new under the umbrella of the future” (7). It is a claim that is hard to refute. All ages, after all, are ages of transition. Nevertheless, unpicking the old from the new is a legitimate task for the historian, and this, in essence, is what Fuhg sets out to do.Fuhg's method is to peer beneath the breezy generalizations of contemporary commentators and the lofty claims of academic researchers by conducting a fine-grained analysis of everyday teenage life in London's urban spaces. Most historians would do this via one or several detailed case studies, but Fuhg's approach is more synthetic—or, perhaps more accurately, composite. Through prodigious research, principally in popular media, social science publications, and local government reports, he ranges freely across London's neighborhoods and entertainment districts, constructing a variegated picture of the thirteen-year period between 1958 and 1971 through the eyes of contemporaries and historians. The strongest parts of the book are those that explore how changes in the built environment facilitated cultural changes and the formation of youth subcultures. Coffee bars, suburbs, seaside resorts, council houses, youth clubs, and other locales allowed teenagers—newly affluent and mobile—to imagine a future that drew from, but wasn't limited by, Britain's past. While elements of Victorian culture such as class divisions, gender norms, imperial mindsets (especially racism), and outdoor associational life came under pressure in such venues, they didn't disappear. Thus, for example, Fuhg challenges the conventional wisdom that slum clearance, suburbanization, and the rise of television created a hopelessly fragmented and privatized working-class culture. Though he is not the first to say this (Mark Clapson, for one, has been making similar arguments since the 1990s), this careful attention to the lived experience of individuals and nicely evokes London's youth cultures in all their richness and gradations.Unfortunately, the book's insights are too often buried in a confusing mass of data that the author fails to guide us through. Each chapter is so filled with contemporary commentary and reminiscences—one chapter has over seven hundred endnotes—that reading them is a bit like trying to drink from a firehose. Often this data is contradictory, and sometimes it is factually incorrect. The historian's task is not only to collect such material but also to shape it into a narrative or interpretive framework that can help us draw meaning from it. Too often, Fuhg neglects to do this.An example of contradictory data that needs expert adjudication is that having to do with race relations. On the one hand, Fuhg deserves praise for the way he weaves the experiences of nonwhite migrant and migrant-descended youths into most of the chapters, instead of setting them apart as a separate topic. On the other hand, it is difficult to know how to make sense of much of the data he presents. Writing of Soho nightclubs, he notes that some clubs became “contact zones” bringing together youth of different races. He then quotes people who say that these clubs fostered good relations between Black and white youth (356). These positive assessments are followed by several pages of contradictory evidence about color bars and racial tensions in nightclubs, and these, in turn, are followed by assertions that white skinheads and mods often got along quite well. All of these things can be true, but it requires some authorial guidance to explain how they can be true. In this case, as in many others, such guidance is lacking.At times, Fuhg is admirably skeptical of his sources, particularly when they are academic researchers, but when dealing with the popular press he can be curiously credulous. This leads to some unfortunate errors, as when he cites a 1968 NME article to the effect that the Monkees were “at least half British”—they were, in fact, exactly one-quarter British (214). Elsewhere, he claims that after the 1970s “the Beatles hid behind Latin-American combos on stage, in an effort to reduce their own visibility,” which is erroneous on two counts: first, because the Beatles broke up in 1970, and, second, because they never performed with such combos (229).Many errors are of a compositional nature. Hardly a page goes by without a distracting typographical or grammatical error. Some of this may stem from the fact that the author is a German speaker writing in English, in which case the failure is an editorial one, that is, a failure by the publisher to help the author produce the best text possible. In a book retailing for $150, one expects, at a minimum, that facts will be correct and prose will be competently edited—particularly if, as is often the case with such titles, the goal is to have it adopted as a text for university courses.Alas, I can't recommend this book for such a purpose. Certain chapters, particularly those on space and place, will prove useful to scholars looking to ground their understanding of postwar British youth culture in the built environment (although the absence of maps is an unfortunate oversight). But most other topics have been handled more effectively by others, including the series editors of Palgrave's History of Subcultures and Popular Music, of which this book forms a part. Robust editorial intervention might have molded this into a more focused, accurate, and readable book. It is a shame that a historian of such energy and promise should be so ill served by a publisher that seems more interested in producing expensive content for libraries and databases than in producing superior scholarship.