Biba set the pattern for the era, and its influence was to last deep into the Seventies. It was more prophetic than countercultural, but those who came to be associated with its bedizened, opulent style stood defiantly against the prevailing culture. From 1967, the more troubled current of youth found a tributary that ran into tree-tangled Middle-earth. Their proclaimed values were those of peace, brotherhood (and sisterhood), universal (and free) love, and recreational use of the softer drugs. The hippy trend was without obvious precedent. The Mods and the Teds could boast of an inheritance of bloodiness, but the hippies turned away from it. The cult had many limitations and absurdities, but its devotees forswore the fist or the broken bottle; the object was peace.
At first, they were instantly recognizable. The body was swathed in scarves, beads, kaftans, voluminous trousers. The word ‘hippy’ is of uncertain provenance, but it seems to have had its origins in black American ‘jive’ in the early twentieth century. It signified ‘with it’, or ‘cool’. Neatly inverting the circumstances of the pop invasion, here was a largely American stem grafted onto English roots. The 400,000 who gathered for the Isle of Wight Festival in 1967 were imitating American models, yet they were at one with their sisters and brothers in the United States in invoking English masters: Gerrard Winstanley, the English interregnum anarchist, Aleister Crowley, the early-twentieth-century mage and visionary, William Blake and J. R. R. Tolkien were held to be the prophets of the movement. Later, the hippies began to assimilate the influences of the East, and the ‘hippy trail’ from Istanbul to India became a fixture of their lifestyle. In this practical orientalism, they took their lead from the Beatles.
On 1 June 1967, the Beatles’ long-awaited album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released. The cover alone was a feast. The Beatles, dressed as Edwardian bandsmen, stood against a vast collage of famous or esoteric figures, while to their right stood the effigies made in their honour by Madame Tussauds. The album was arranged as to give the impression of a concert in the grand old style of the village pavilion. In some of the songs, like ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, this impression was reinforced. Over others, like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, a silken, starry cape of psychedelia spread. Paul McCartney sang of workingclass parting in ‘She’s Leaving Home’, and of the unsuccessful wooing of a meter maid in ‘Lovely Rita’. No one song resembled another. Sgt. Pepper was not perhaps the Beatles’ best album, but like the Beatles themselves it was greater than the sum of its parts. Its example inspired musicians of the later Sixties both to further heights of creativity and to further depths of pretension.
The expression ‘British architecture’ had become almost oxymoronic by the mid-Sixties. The eager acolytes of Le Corbusier dominated the Royal Institute of British Architects, and were austere in their attitude to anything that smacked of native sentimentality. Le Corbusier himself had declared that cities were ‘far too important to be left to their citizens’; to the English, this was not so much heresy as blasphemy. The lawn, the flower bed, the garage and the tumbledown house stood for the spirit of homely self-reliance that the English have always imagined to be their birthright.
There could be no denying the impact of brutalism, on individual lives and on the English skyline. The Sixties marked the apogee of the ‘high-rise’ building. Its benefits seemed obvious. Unlike the new towns, which ate into the countryside at a rate that appalled many in the countryside and suburbs, tower blocks trespassed only on the territory of birds. Considerations of safety and even practicality counted for little. Ian Nairn, one of the most far-sighted of architectural writers, made the point baldly: ‘The outstanding and appalling fact about modern British architecture is that it is just not good enough. It is not standing up to use or climate, either in single buildings or the whole environment.’ British brutalists were trying to ape continental models while ignoring continental standards.
The poet John Betjeman showed himself the true heir of Chesterton in his fulminations against soulless modernity. He was to save St Pancras station and countless other examples of Victorian architecture from demolition. But it was the proposed abolition of nature that angered him most. We will never know the extent to which Betjeman and others saved the English landscape from being ‘improved’ beyond recognition, but it is unlikely that the mass supplanting of families from their homes could have long continued. The tower block and the new town were both going the way of all fashions by the end of the Sixties, although the latter was to have a brief and undistinguished revival in the Eighties. The compound failures of the brutalist experiment had led by the late Sixties to a resurgence in softer, older traditions. After a long enchanted sleep, art nouveau had begun to stir, in housing as much as in fashion. Wallpaper in the William Morris style was pasted on walls; the beams on Tudor houses were uncovered.
In October 1967, a private member’s bill by the Liberal MP David Steel became law. Although it concerned the contentious matter of abortion, it was proposed in the same spirit as the Sexual Offences Act as a compassionate means of ending distress. The bill enjoyed broad cross-party support, allowing trained doctors to perform what had hitherto been the preserve of unscrupulous and often unqualified backstreet practitioners. In the Sixties film Alfie, the eponymous workingclass lothario, played by Michael Caine, gives a girl he has seduced some ‘help’, as it was termed, in the form of a shifty doctor. When Alfie later goes into the room where the abortion has taken place, his face contorts in a daze of horror. Many such films dealt with the question, few so powerfully; the image must have swayed many to the belief that no woman should have to suffer such conditions or such shame.
On 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell, the honourable member for Wolverhampton, gave a speech in the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. His audience was the West Midlands Conservative Political Centre and his subject was immigration. The audience was expecting edification and even entertainment; what they witnessed was an eruption of lava from a suburban lawn. With his jaw clenched, his voice caught between a bark and a snarl, and eyes which, in the words of Kingsley Amis, suggested someone ‘about to go for your throat’, Enoch Powell was never biddable and seldom diplomatic. Ever willing to hector, to argue, he could not steel himself to woo or placate. This quality brought him to high office but rendered negligible any chance of his retaining it.
Powell had been a brilliant classicist at university, a superb organizer during the war, a fiercely meticulous minister, and a conscientious MP, his ear ever open to the concerns of his constituents – whatever their origins. He had a command of fourteen languages and was able to canvass in six of them. If he had shown concern over the rate of Commonwealth immigration in the early Sixties, he was scarcely alone. And it should be noted that when the more extreme elements of the anti-immigration lobby asked for his support in the late Fifties, they were met by cold reproof or icy silence. He was thus a plausible demagogue, but an improbable racist. As the speech gathered in pace and hyperbole, the moustachioed, methodical public servant became a bearded John Knox. ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily heaping up its own funeral pyre … Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’