Getting back to posting about this year’s observance of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I’m interested in another take on the season that announced the rise of the hippie. While the phrase Summer of Love conjures images of willowy hippy girls and long haired hippie dudes frolicking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, at the same time there was another kind of revolution happening on the other side of the world. While America’s West Coast was getting blazed on peace and love, London was in a full swing cultural upheaval of their own as a generation of young people rejected post-war austerity for their own take on American sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Here’s the word from the Daily Beast…
There came a moment when London first shook off the coils of hidebound British society, the sobriety of convention, the obedience of norms that had made it a funless place in its post-war years. As no other city has ever done, London suddenly owned a whole decade and became synonymous with the culture of that decade—the 1960s.
So much of what makes London what it is now is came from that time. There was a cultural and social insurrection that transformed every idea of what was permissible in society and in the arts.
Here’s a BBC doc about London’s version of that most psychedelic season…
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.
