Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher.

• Author: Ford, Amanda

Davis, John. Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022, vii+588. Hardcover, $39.95.

Twenty-first century London is a tourist mecca--drawing visitors from all over the world to experience its culture, shopping, and historical attractions. The city boasted over 21 million visits in 2019 (pre-Covid), with millions of pounds spent by tourists. Nevertheless, modern London was built on the backs of industry--the city boomed during the Industrial Revolution, its population growing sixfold over the course of the century. As the British Empire spread so did the city's power as an international arbiter of business and manufacturing. Post-1945 the city's place on the world stage seemed in doubt. Britain lost an empire, and the city seemed to be at a loss as well. John Davis' Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher sketches out a narrative history of how the various sections of London dealt with post-war malaise. Davis argues that the city, "anticipates in various, often unrelated, ways many of the features of 'Thatcher's Britain' in the 1980s" (vii). According to Davis, London was not built by Thatcher, but the city shaped Tory policies in specific ways in the years leading up to her victory.

In many ways this expansive--and lengthy--history functions as sixteen micro-histories of various parts of the city from the mid-60s until 1979. It is a deeply researched and carefully drawn book, one which took Davis through his retirement from The Queen's College at Oxford. Each essay in this collection can be read individually, and indeed several of them work better as stand-alone chapters than they do when the reader attempts to fit them into the larger schematic of the book. Chapters are largely thematic and/or geographic in scope. Davis covers everything from the trattoria craze in the West End during the 1960s, strip clubs in Soho, motorway planning in the Greater London Council, to the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riots. The book even includes a graph of Greek and Chinese restaurants in the 1960s and 1970s on two streets in W1. Naturally such an expansive book is hard to neatly summarize, but his general approach is to pinpoint a moment of change in part of the city and then dissect the cause and consequences of that change. This leads to a narrative that is even-handed, one might say to a fault. Swinging London turns out to be much less swinging than popular culture imagined, but this...