Swinging City: A Cultural Geography of London 1950-1974

by Simon Rycroft, Mark Boyle, Donald Mitchell, David Pinder

Overview

This book contrasts two imaginings of 1960s London: the excess and comic vacuousness of Swinging London, and the radical politics generated by the city's counter-culture. These disparate perspectives combine to form a shared imagination associated with a new understanding of nature, which differently positioned humanity and technology. A study of this transformation allows for a new understanding of the dynamics of post-war London's re-emergence as a cultural capital.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781409488873
Publisher:	Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	11/28/2012
Series:	Re-materialising Cultural Geography
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Simon Rycroft, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Sussex, UK

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Material and Immaterial Geographies of 1960s London; Chapter 2 The Long Front of Material and Immaterial Culture I: Beat and Angry; Chapter 3 The Long Front of Material and Immaterial Culture II: Architecture and Visual Culture; Chapter 4 Mapping Swinging London; Chapter 5 A Historical Geography of Countercultural London; Chapter 6 Rephrasing and Reimagining Dissent: Technology, Nature and Humanity; Chapter 7 Oz, London and Cosmic Consciousness; Chapter 8 Lightshows and Multi-media Environments: Cosmic Connections and the Countercultural Subject; Chapter 9 Conclusions: Post-War Vision and Representation;

Editorial Reviews

'Swinging City opens revealing geographical perspectives on a period and place that have become obscured by familiar mythologies. It maps the media worlds of Sixties London onto wide ranging networks of provincial and international counter-culture, marked with a radical use of new currents of science and technology as well as some traditional forms of dissent. This Swinging City is as much post-war as new age, more a hard place than a soft city. The Sixties will never be the same.' Stephen Daniels, University of Nottingham, UK 'Rycroft's monograph makes an important contribution towards opening up, revising and ... 're-visioning' work on urban cultures and the twentieth century... Swinging City is an invaluable starting point for further explorations into the 'long' 1960s and its many geographical imaginations.' Urban Geography Research Group '... a remarkably wide-ranging and intricate discussion of the cultural geographies of London in what we might call the ’long’ 1960s: the themes of Englishness/Britishness and Americanization, as well as the challenges to the metropolitan establishment from the provincial margins, for instance, come out in the discussion of the contribution of the ’beats’ and the ’angry young men’...' Progress in Human Geography Rycroft’s Swinging City provides not only an illuminating study of the near present, but is also very much a book for our current geographical times. It provides us with a multifaceted account of a cultural scene that offers an invaluable model for how cultural-historical geographers might usefully contribute to literature on the creative city, as well as how current theoretical agendas can be valuably situated in historical practices and places. Journal of Historical Geography

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