scholarly journals The Independent Group Looks at London’s West End

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hornsey
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Independent Group ◽  
Civic Society ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The City ◽  
British Culture

In the early 1950s, British culture was dominated by welfare-state visions of urban reconstruction. These projections of a stable civic society were premised on a particular way of looking at and reading the metropolitan environment. At odds with this project, the Independent Group’s discussions and collaborative work developed an alternative urban semiology, which found the city to be already rich in visual resources for fashioning a more profound form of social democracy. Soon, this critical engagement would develop in different directions, represented here by Lawrence Alloway’s commentary on Piccadilly Circus in his essay ‘City Notes’ and the London footage inserted by John McHale into his film for the Smithsons’ Berlin Hauptstadt project (both 1959). By the end of the 1950s, members of the erstwhile Independent Group had produced two contrasting critical accounts of how the metropolitan centre should be looked at, which challenged the strictures of post-war reconstruction in distinct and conflicting ways.

The City of London and Social Democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
International Monetary System ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-War Britain evaluates the changing relationship between the United Kingdom financial sector (colloquially referred to as ‘the City of London’) and the post-war social democratic state. The key argument made in the book is that changes to the British financial system during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key components of social democratic economic policy practised by the post-war British state. The institutionalization of investment in pension and insurance funds; the fragmentation of an oligopolistic domestic banking system; the emergence of an unregulated international capital market centred on London; the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international monetary system; and the popularization of a City-centric, anti-industrial conception of Britain’s economic identity, all served to disrupt and undermine the social democratic economic strategy that had attempted to develop and maintain Britain’s international competitiveness as an industrial economy since the Second World War. These findings assert the need to place the Thatcher governments’ subsequent economic policy revolution, in which a liberal market approach accelerated deindustrialization and saw the rapid expansion of the nation’s international financial service industry, within a broader material and institutional context previously underappreciated by historians.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Independent Group ◽  
Women's Art ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
Art And Society ◽  
The 1960S

Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) can be considered one of the founders of contemporary cultural ideals. One of the most esteemed art critics of the post-war years, Alloway was significantly involved with both the Independent Group and the Place and Situation painters in London during the 1950s. At the beginning of the 1960s, he moved to New York, where he became a leading interpreter of Pop art, ‘systemic’ abstraction, and the realist revival as well as women's art. He wrote more than 800 texts ranging from books to reviews and catalogues essays and displayed wholehearted commitment to pluralism and diversity in both art and society. In post-war London, Alloway witnessed an art scene that was impoverished but received a boost from the newly elected Socialist government's emphasis on culture. Art News and Review, a magazine launched by Richard Gainsborough in 1949, proved invaluable to Alloway as an aspiring art critic in the post-war years in London.

A jeśli nie "wrocławska piosenka", to co?

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (53) ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Jacek Grębowiec
Keyword(s):  
Wave Band ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Strongly Connected ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The City

The topic of the article is music that is strongly connected to the history of post-war, Polish again, Wroclaw — the city and its cultural, social and political landscape. This includes not only songs composed by artists from Wroclaw, but also songs dedicated to this city. In the article, songs from different timespans are analysed: the ones composed in the 1950s, in the pioneering period of restoration, as well as countercultural songs from the 1980s. The paper is complemented by an analysis of the newest songs that pretend to be hits or anthems of Wroclaw, although they have never gained the same fame as classical songs written by Maria Koterbska or new-wave band Klaus Mitffoch.

Turkish Muslims in a German city: Entrepreneurial and residential self-determination

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sarah Hackett
Keyword(s):  
Residential Patterns ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
German City ◽  
Post War ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
The City ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Term Objective

Drawing upon a collection of oral history interviews, this paper offers an insight into entrepreneurial and residential patterns and behaviour amongst Turkish Muslims in the German city of Bremen. The academic literature has traditionally argued that Turkish migrants in Germany have been pushed into self-employment, low-quality housing and segregated neighbourhoods as a result of discrimination, and poor employment and housing opportunities. Yet the interviews reveal the extent to which Bremen’s Turkish Muslims’ performances and experiences have overwhelmingly been the consequences of personal choices and ambitions. For many of the city’s Turkish Muslim entrepreneurs, self-employment had been a long-term objective, and they have succeeded in establishing and running their businesses in the manner they choose with regards to location and clientele, for example. Similarly, interviewees stressed the way in which they were able to shape their housing experiences by opting which districts of the city to live in and by purchasing property. On the whole, they perceive their entrepreneurial and residential practices as both consequences and mediums of success, integration and a loyalty to the city of Bremen. The findings are contextualised within the wider debate regarding the long-term legacy of Germany’s post-war guest-worker system and its position as a “country of immigration”.

Squatting: The Fight for Decent Shelter, 1970s–1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Housing Needs ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.

Nashville Cats

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis D. Stimeling
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Global View ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Hall Of Fame ◽  
The City

Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945–1975 is the first history of record production during country music’s so-called Nashville Sound era. This period of country music history produced some of the genre’s most celebrated recording artists, including Country Music Hall of Fame inductees Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, and Floyd Cramer, and marked the establishment of a recording industry that has come to define Nashville in the national and international consciousness. Yet, despite country music’s overwhelming popularity during this period and the continued legacy of the studios that were built in Nashville during the 1950s and 1960s, little attention has been given to the ways in which recording engineers, session musicians, and record producers shaped the sounds of country music during the time. Drawing upon a rich array of previously unexplored primary sources, Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City, 1945–1975 is the first book to take a global view of record production in Nashville during the three decades that the city’s musicians established the city as the leading center for the production and distribution of country music.

Dystopian Science Fiction and the Return of the Gothic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherryl Vint
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
British Culture

This chapter explores the connections between dystopian science fiction and gothic fiction. It links science fiction to a tradition of European utopian and surrealist writing, situating the genre equally within discourses of science and the gothic. This perspective, the chapter argues, was perhaps more possible from the vantage point of 1973 than it would have been for earlier critics: the scientific romance tradition was rooted in a Victorian culture that believed in empire, technology, and progress, even if it was not always convinced by their contemporary instantiations. The dramatic shifts in British culture during the Blitz and in the immediate post-war period looked back on such optimism with a rather jaundiced eye: British global hegemony was distinctly at an end. It is little wonder, then, that the speculative fictions of this period turned toward darker tones of dystopia and the gothic.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
International Monetary System ◽  
The State ◽  
Real Economy ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....

The Politics of Banking and Social Democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Banking System ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Demand

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document