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Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society. By Frank Mort.

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/tcbh/hwr024

1477-4674

Virgínia Berridge,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

This long-awaited book is a cultural history of London from the early 1950s to the time of the Profumo affair in 1963. But it is also much more than that—informed by the history of consumerism; by the new urban history; cultural geography; by feminist and Foucauldian critics of expertise and professionalism. It is also rooted in Mort's own childhood and youth. He was born in 1953, Coronation year, growing up amid what he calls the dynamic ‘push and pull’ (p. 18) of new ideas derived from television alongside images of Britain as a traditional class-bound society. This tension between different worlds is central to the book, which starts with the Coronation and its imagery of national renewal, contrasted with emergent post-war concern about the state of London's West End. The theme of lower and upper-class encounters, the relationship between social and sexual worlds emerges through a discussion of the figure of the ‘man about town’ who occupied London's clubland. Some key events dominated these years: the Wolfenden committee on homosexuality and prostitution and its 1957 report is an obvious focus. A less obvious one are the Rillington Place murders of 1953, the serial killing of six women by one man, John Christie. These focused attention on north Kensington, an inner city zone close to Notting Hill, an area which the book sees as a west London adjunct to Soho, as another place where high and low cultural worlds intersected, but with a racial dimension. Soho is the focus of the book, with its ‘pleasure economy’ epitomised in commercial enterprises such as the Windmill Theatre and Raymond's Revuebar. All this came to a head in the Profumo affair, which threw a spotlight on the components of Mort's London identified in the preceding chapters—the relationships between high and low society, the cultural and sexual worlds of Soho and Notting Hill, and more controversially, what Mort sees as the changing power balances displayed in the Profumo case. Young independent women like Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies and West Indian men about town challenged the older Victorian tradition of causes célèbres through their conscious exploitation of their own celebrity in the media.