Britain in the 60s

[George 1978]

God I hope not...!

I hope not either.

[tex]

They were together for a few years before they got famous, honing their craft in Hamburg etc.

that is true but they played very few of there own compositions and had no recording contract, mainly covers of Buddy holly,Little richard etc

[Arran]

There was more to the 60s than the Beatles. In fact had the Beatles never existed then the 60s would have been 99% the same.

It was a decade when the majority of adults smoked. Smoking at work was the norm even in offices. Teachers were known to smoke in class in front of kids. There were always ashtrays and a thick haze of tobacco smoke in reception areas. You could even get on a bus and spark up a fag.

[Trickyvee]

It’s funny how nostalgia gets attached to a decade. Obviously I wasn’t around in the 60’s but my mother paints a very different picture of life then. She says it might have been swinging in places like London but it definitely wasn’t in our North Eastern town!

[tex]

It’s funny how nostalgia gets attached to a decade. Obviously I wasn’t around in the 60’s but my mother paints a very different picture of life then. She says it might have been swinging in places like London but it definitely wasn’t in our North Eastern town!

No, it was pretty grim actually but looked upon with great nostalgia by many. I was only 10 when the 60s expired so dont recall much of the hardship but as stated previously there were very few going to san-francisco with flowers in their hair.

[Richard1978]

I remember Bill Bryson mentioning in Note From a Small Island that had communism happened in Britain the lives of most people wouldn't have changed that much before 1970.

[tex]

Mmm, not sure about that but i understand the irony, true to say that trade unions were making their voices heard a lot louder in the 70s

[Arran]

It’s funny how nostalgia gets attached to a decade. Obviously I wasn’t around in the 60’s but my mother paints a very different picture of life then. She says it might have been swinging in places like London but it definitely wasn’t in our North Eastern town!

It was swinging only in London and a few other trendy towns. Tyneside was still dominated by heavy industry, smoking chimneys, and grimy pubs filled with men wearing flat caps.

Manchester was a dirty and unfashionable industrial city in the 1960s whilst Liverpool had a lot going for it. I suspect that if you factored out the Beatles then Liverpool would be little more than another declining northern city filled with urban decay. The western twin of Hull?! The strange thing is that Manchester is now a trendy city whilst Liverpool struggles in its shadow.

Most urban parts of Scotland were badly declining - and rough - in the 1960s. A trend that intensified in the 1970s.

The 1960s was the beginning of a significant population drift from the north to the south of England.

[George 1978]

There is a lot of truth as to what Arran has just said - 1960s episodes of Coronation Street is a fine example of how dirty and unfashionable Manchester was, viewing the episodes on YT - of course, the monochrome nature of the episodes obvious takes away some detail of what life was like to those who I assume actually experiences it back then. I don't think that Scargill (or his predecessors) would have been throwing too many tantrums back then.

In my neck of the woods there were inner-city areas of Nottingham such as St Ann's and the Meadows with pre-1900 Victorian housing and nothing modernised so far in the 20th century - research indicating the outdoor toilets, coal bunkers and the like, and the fact that we would have been closer to the year 2000 than the year 1900. I know that Nottingham's inner-city areas were being regenerated in around 1965, my family lived in one of the houses that was to be pulled down and was given an alternative one around a mile away where they stayed for the next 30 years. Thames did a documentary about it in around 1969 which was repeated in 1992 as part of Channel 4's Gimme Shelter strand. I suppose that Nottingham in those days was regarded as a bit more "northern" in those days as it does nowadays where it feels as if it belongs with the south in the North - South divide. And I assume that it did continue into the 1970s as well.

I did GCSE History at school in the early 1990s and the era was the 20th century that we studied - 30 years prior to that when all this happened seems in hindsight as not too long ago when one thinks of how long the original housing had stayed intact. And Macmillan said in 1959 that we never had it so good...

[Arran]

And Macmillan said in 1959 that we never had it so good...

From a vantage point of 1959 he was probably right.

One good thing about the 1960s was that there were more jobs and more respectable mid-range jobs that didn't require university degrees. It was a lot easier for a person from a poor or lower class background to attain a comfortable middle class lifestyle than it has been in more recent times. The 1960s was also a time when millions kissed goodbye to their landlord. Large scale house building and council houses eroded private renting which had been the norm for the masses during the previous part of the 20th century.

These factors were partially attributed to Keynesian economics which both Labour and Conservative governments adopted to a degree. After joining the EU, Britain was forced to abandon this style of economics and adopt a more laissez faire approach.