It’s a myth still perpetuated by lazy BBC producers and bourgeois Guardianista’s that the 1960s in Britain was a golden decade of freedom, wealth, happiness and health. This may have been so if you were young, white, male, middle class and living in London, but for the majority of Brits, the swinging sixties was a decidedly average decade, where very little changed.

Sex meant marriage. Money was debt. Drugs came from the pharmacy. And revolution was the ticking of the second hand around the clock face towards aged obsolescence. As for housing, this was the small concrete blocks built indifferently up towards the sky.

This short documentary, No One Cares , on the destruction of Liverpool’s working class communities, gives a good idea of what the Swinging Sixties was like for those living beyond the suburbs of north London.
 

Just fascinating.  The greedy, subhuman Councils and Developers managed to accomplish the destruction of entire communities - something even the Luftwaffe and the Wermacht were unable to achieve - and hoarded the working class into grotesque, sickly gleaming, substandard towers which were as cold as mausoleums and every bit as insulated and isolating.  This was the Developer’s grand design for the working class: Eliminate their neighborhoods en masse and force them into criminally dehumanizing conditions into which they were meant permanently, to disappear.

The postscript is, given the cynicism of all of this hideous recentralization of the working class, the Developers and the Councils got nice and rich, while the working poor were left with utter garbage which fell swiftly into disrepair.  But where was the working class supposed to go from there?  The Moon?

Think Pruitt Igoe.

I’ve lived in various council or ex-local authority housing over the years, as a private tenant, and they’ve ranged from brilliant to diabolical… Thatcher sold so much council housing stock off, it was awful…

This BBC4 doc, The Great Estate, is a good look at social housing in the UK:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVGMyo40SyE

...talking of Liverpool, there’s a fantastic JD/exploitations movie from ‘58 called Violent Playground set on a council estate there… Stanley Baker plays a social worker and David McCallum a local hood who ends up going berserk in a school with a sten gun – the estate used in the film appears in the BBC doc…

There was another documentary about those sub-standard housing units on “Inquiry”. Terrifying stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RonRO4yK98U

Thank you, lolotehe!  I will watch this right away.

I for once have to take issue with the statements made on this site and against this topic.  I came from a place called Basingstoke, a town that epitomised 60’s New Town UK, it and its surrounding communities of Reading, Southampton, Reading, Newbury and many other towns in Southern England were absolutely nothing like the description given here, I believe the same was true of the north.  Everything that was happening in London was happening in those towns, sex, drugs and rock and roll, it may not have been happening for the author but it was happening for the rest of us.  The club I frequented weekly in this small insignificant new town, had John Mayall with Eric Clapton as the resident group, Fleetwood Mac along with the likes of Rod Stewart, the Animals, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Sonny Boy Williamson, Long John Baldrey, Peter Green, Zoot Money, The Rolling Stones etc. etc. etc. were just taken for granted and the norm.  My life and all that I knew changed completely as we gravitated towards the London scene and the realisation that life is not all black and white, drugs and selfish self fulfilment and perhaps those with left leaning’s were not always acting in the best interests of the working man.