A detailed, informative and well-researched account of 1960s Britain. Definitely looking forward to reading more installations of Kynaston's history sequence.

I have previously read only volume 1 of Kynaston’s magisterial New Jerusalem series, Austerity Britain 1945-51, and had always planned on reading the rest, but they are intimidatingly large volumes. Whilst the earlier volumes offer a broad brush, this is a specific interlude between Vols 3 and 4, written during lockdown, which covers only June-Oct 1962, which Kynaston has identified as a watershed leading us into the real 1960s. The volume ends with the release of the first single of the Beatles and the first James Bond film. The future has begun.

The book, therefore, begins in June, still offering us a glimpse of Britain as we have seen it in the preceding volumes offered through his ability to manage a vast collection of anecdotes, journalism and the historical record. This is a Britain which to us now seems unspeakably distant - of wives busy with washing day, of husbands waiting in line for daily hire, of prizes being given for the largest vegetables, the importance of the market day, and one in five people wearing false teeth by the age of twenty.

Yet, for all that is still distant, there is also a palpable sense of change in the air. Macmillan is being seen as an Edwardian figure. A recurrent theme is that the power of television is being felt, and with it is a sense of greater individuality and the decline of the community. Alongside this is fear that the nation is becoming culturally and intellectually lessened through ‘amusements.’ Notably, with less money to spend, people are spending less time in group and communal gatherings, and more time is being spent watching television at home. Cinemas are in decline, and the films produced are considered ‘nihilistic.’ There is a continual concern at how the twice-weekly Coronation Street has gripped the nation in a way that has never been seen before. There begins the shift to a less literary popular culture. The theatre being produced is of a different kind than before, less poetic, more realistic, less comforting, more challenging. Bingo halls are becoming popular. There is concern about the long-term effect of television on the national character and on our creative abilities.

It is a time of flux. The Beeching report is being written. Families are now moving and being moved from the areas in which they grew up, and this brings a sense of liberation for some. Modern Britain makes an appearance in the very scenery, with its eclectic pylons, arterial by-passes, pre-fabricated buildings, and an increase in litter. As people moved from cities and retired and commuted to villages - now more easily done with a motor car - villages that had been dominated by a small number of families for centuries were seeing real and unsettling change. There is the sense that the division between North and South is increasing to the state that it can never be remedied. European and Scandinavian furniture and architecture are beginning to appeal to the British. Coal mining is already in decline and, with it, the Labour-Chapel culture of Wales. The Open University is being planned. The first generation educated by the 1944 Act is about to start university. There is the sense that there is a movement from patriotism to a broader, more humanitarian compassion. This period also perhaps marked the beginning of government by opinion poll, a sense that governance was merely responding to events of the day, as opposed to having a broad over-arching vision of administration.

There is also the real fear that the best days of Britain are behind her, that she was now a second-rate power, and that stagnation has set in - "The lack of a willingness to innovate and to get things changed and moved. There is a certain paralysis of the will, a certain refusal to grapple with problems and to find new solutions for them….a cult of the amateur, of the all-rounder, of the dilettante, an emphasis on character and on manners, and a strong basic hostility to professionalism and expertise and technocracy….[failure] to accommodate or analyse the vast forces of science, education or social change which (whether they like it or not) are changing the face of the country.”

The most fascinating and sizeable portion of the book is dedicated to the experience of West Indian, Indian and Pakistani migrants. Their contribution to industry is given great detail, but also their experience of a swiftly changing Britain. (The Seventh Day Adventists were one of the few churches to welcome the newcomers.) It was poignant reading of their sense of dislocation. The longer they stayed, and married, and had children, the less they had to return to their countries of origin - in some cases, not only had their parents had died, but their very homes had been demolished. “When I think of Jamaica, I sometimes feel as if I never had been young. The years in England are missing years. I cannot give an account of them…I discover that Jamaica too has changed…Yet I still want to go back home. I know that I will not be going back, but we never admit it to each other.”

In this volume, Kynaston has moved from his very broad brush approach with much material from the Mass Observation Project to offering substantial detail on a handful of particular topics across the brief period of this book. Aside from migration, these include the Pilkington Report on the limits and morals of television, the changing nature of mechanised farming (including the growth in battery chickens), the changing rural scene and the disappearance of hedgerows, woodland and various avian species. However, in these and other sections that were very specific, the author perhaps offered more detail than could hold my interest, and I felt myself yearning for the broad sweep that characterised the other volumes of his series.

He ends by illustrating how ‘on the cusp’ the nation really is, offering us a snapshot – covering many pages – of what precisely the figures who would come to influence and dominate the rest of the century were doing at this time. Almost all of them were still in school, at university, or in the earliest years of their professional lives, their life-changing ambitions and vocations still far ahead of them.

Overall, I thoroughly commend this book and eagerly look forward to the next volume.

Evocative, well researched and beautifully written, this is a thorough and eclectic overview of Britain in 1962 and provides an excellent snapshot of the social, cultural and political mores of the time.

A short but worthwhile read by an excellent historian that brought back some shadowy memories previously lost deep in the mists of time.

This is such an interesting read. It was so insightful. We see 1960's Britain and all that we love from that era. The Beatles, Coronation Street, James Bond and Steptoe and Son. We see Britain struggling to recover post war and its political changes. It was a really insightful read, one I still think about regularly.

The latest instalment in David Kynaston’s brilliant ‘A New Jerusalem’ series, an overview of British History from 1945 to 1979 arrives in 1962. Written, he says, in lockdown it was meant to sweep up to 1967 but instead turns its focus on three months between June and October with Britian on “the real cusp” of the 60’s when the first Beatles single and the first James Bond film were released on the same day.
To call Kynaston’s works history or social history or micro history or indeed to plonk any label on them would miss the point. He casts a magpie’s eye over events picking out events, characters and movements, some big, some small, some seismic and others random and by putting them together creates a portrait of an era. If Adam Curtis has helped us reimagine the documentary sphere, Kynaston has done the same for history.
Thank you NetGalley and Bloomsbury for allowing me to read this terrific book.

This is part of Kynaston’s popular, and on-going, history of postwar Britain. The summer of 1962 gets its own book because the author sees it as a turning point in many ways. It was a period in which the ‘state-of-the-nation’ debate certainly got going and in which the 1944 Education Act children were preparing for university, primed with new ideas. It was a point of equilibrium (‘On the Cusp’) between old and new, establishment deference and technocratic reformism, and with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones about to break through.

Kynaston has cobbled together a diverse mass of events from diaries and newspaper reports (from an enormous range of local papers). The breadth of his interest (and knowledge) is amazing: popular culture, (1962 saw the first outing for Steptoe and Son, Z Cars, and Dr Finlay’s Casebook) finance (the Eurobond is in the planning stages), architecture (town precincts and tower blocks are on the way), political rivalry (Macmillan’s ruthless cabinet reshuffle doesn’t prevent Labour turning the tide), farming (becoming more mechanical and industrial), sport (Bangor City beat AC Napoli 2-0), immigration (West London and West Yorkshire), and so on, …

Kynaston’s real skill is in managing the explanation of the individual episodes (like the controversial Pilkington Report that denounced commercial TV): he avoids mini-historical or interpretative lectures, instead preferring to build an explanation out of selected contemporary commentary and analysis. The result is hugely entertaining, never dull. Sandbrook’s popular history books make good use of this same method, but the level of detail in Kynaston’s book is even more diverse and fine-grained.

Perhaps the best way to characterise this book is a mix of the virtues of Peter Hennessy’s book on this period, Having it So Good (2007), which was a bit too tightly focused on Macmillan’s ‘night of the long knives’ and his plans for entry to the European Common Market, and Robert Hewison’s Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties (1986), which provided a still-worth-reading study of the intellectual and cultural currents.

A remarkably detailed account of life in Britain in 1962. The author, David Kynaston, covers an astonishingly wide range of topics from agriculture and architecture through economics, culture and education to immigration and its attendant racism, politics and urban renewal.
Along the way, there are details of TV shows and plays, sport and music - pop and folk, as well as classical. It was a time when television was impacting more and more on people's lives - from soap operas such as "Coronation Street", comedies such as the groundbreaking "Steptoe & Son" to political satire in the shape of "That Was The Week That Was".
According to Kynaston, the "real" 1960's began on Friday, October 5th 1962 when simultaneously The Beatles released their first single - "Love Me Do" - and "Dr No" - the first James Bond film - premiered in London.
Throughout there are detailed snapshots of post-war Britain with the country's politicians debating capital punishment, the legalisation of homosexuality and Britain's proposed entry to the Common Market with the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and most of his party in favour while Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and the Labour Left strongly against. As with Brexit, the country's voters were divided on the subject.
Using articles from newspapers and magazines and excerpts from diaries of the famous and not so famous, Kynaston builds up a picture of a nation seemingly set in its social conservatism, but soon to be subjected to important changes.
My thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishingfor an advance copy of this book in return for an unbiased review.

This riveting series charting the post-war history and development of the country has reached 1962, the turning point between the lingering after-effects of the war and the emergence of the modern world we recognise today.

Particularly effective is the use of the Mass Observation diaries, which give a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary people, and contribute to building a very ful and varied picture of everyday life beyond events reportd in the media.

I am a huge fan of this series, and cannot wait for the next instalment.