Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
created the
welfare state
, and initiated a radical programme of
nationalization
,
which brought the gas, electricity, coal, steel and iron industries under state control,
along with the inland transport services. London itself was left with a severe
accommodation crisis, with some eighty percent of the housing stock damaged to
some degree. In response, prefabricated houses were erected all over the city, some
of which were to remain occupied for well over forty years. The LCC also began
building huge housing estates on many of the city's numerous bombsites, an often
misconceived strategy which ran in tandem with the equally disastrous New Towns
policy of central government.
To lift the country out of its gloom, the
Festival of Britain
was staged in 1951 on
derelict land on the south bank of the Thames, a site that was eventually transformed
into the Southbank Arts Centre. Londoners turned up at this technological funfair in
their thousands, but at the same time many were abandoning the city for good, starting
a slow process of population decline that has continued ever since. The consequent
labour shortage was made good by mass
immigration
from the former colonies, in
particular the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies. The first large group to arrive
was the 492 West Indians aboard the SS
Empire Windrush
, which docked at Tilbury in
June 1948. The newcomers, a large percentage of whom settled in London, were given
small welcome, and within ten years were subjected to
race riots
, which broke out in
Notting Hill in 1958.
The riots are thought to have been carried out, for the most part, by “Teddy Boys”,
working-class lads from London's slum areas and new housing estates, who formed the
city's first postwar youth cult. Subsequent cults, and their accompanying music, helped
turn London into the epicentre of the so-called
Swinging Sixties
, the Teddy Boys being
usurped in the early 1960s by the “Mods”, whose sharp suits came from London's
Carnaby Street. Fashion hit the capital in a big way, and, thanks to the likes of The
Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Twiggy, London was proclaimed hippest city on the
planet on the front pages of
Time
magazine.
Life for most Londoners, however, was rather less groovy. In the middle of the decade
London's local government was reorganized, the LCC being supplanted by the
Greater
London Council
(
GLC
), whose jurisdiction covered a much wider area, including many
Tory-dominated suburbs. As a result, the Conservatives gained power in the capital for
the first time since 1934, and one of their first acts was to support a huge urban
motorway scheme that would have displaced as many people as did the railway boom
of the Victorian period. Luckily for London, Labour won control of the GLC in 1973
and halted the plans. The Labour victory also ensured that the Covent Garden Market
building was saved for posterity, but this ran against the grain. Elsewhere, whole areas
of the city were pulled down and redeveloped, and many of London's worst tower
blocks were built.
Thatcherite London
In 1979
Margaret Thatcher
won the general election for the Conservatives, and the
country and the capital would never be quite the same again. Thatcher went on to win
three general elections, steering Britain into a period of ever greater social polarization.
While taxation policies and easy credit fuelled a consumer boom for the professional
1951
1952
1953
1948
Festival of Britain held on
the South Bank
London's tram system is
abandoned
Coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II
London hosts the
Olympic Games
