Beatles, Bigots and Streets in the Sky: Kynaston's 1965-66

David Kynaston's latest instalment in his history of postwar Britain, Deep into the Sixties: Britain 1965-66, is, according to the Guardian's review, "a tour de force".

The book opens its account with a stark episode from February 1965. The civil rights activist Malcolm X visited Smethwick, in the Midlands, where the Conservative-run council planned to buy up houses to stop the area becoming what it called a "coloured ghetto". He wanted to see how bad the racism was, and he experienced it first-hand when a pub refused him service. White residents considered his visit a "disgusting" intrusion. Nine days later, back in the US, he was shot dead.

Britain in the mid-60s is associated with Carnaby Street, the Beatles and miniskirts, not racism. But the Guardian's reviewer argues that what Black people endured — from a colour bar on property to the abuse of Leeds United winger Albert Johanneson as a "golliwog" — is no less a period marker than Harold Wilson's pipe, Twiggy's haircut, Mary Whitehouse's clean-up TV campaign and Bob Dylan's use of an electric guitar.

Kynaston does not underplay the excitements of the period, the review notes. But he rightly emphasises, in the critic's judgement, that the rotten old 50s — patriarchal, homophobic, class-divided and bigoted — would not simply fade away.

The book's texture comes from its accumulation of small, concrete shifts in daily life, as the review's catalogue shows: "Multi-flavoured Golden Wonder crisps displacing Smith's plain; one-third of new marriages now civil marriages; pubs reluctantly installing fruit machines; Jimmy Hill's Sky-Blue revolution at Coventry City; AA patrols no longer required to salute; picture rails, seen as dust traps, removed en masse from Victorian and Edwardian houses; Boots from 1965 at last consenting to sell condoms; arrival of open-plan offices; arrival, too, of the hot drinks vending machine; no car more iconic of modernity than the Mini Cooper …"

Taken together, these details frame 1965-66 as a Britain suspended between transformation and inertia — a country modernising its crisp packets and office layouts while the bigotries of the previous decade persisted in its pubs and housing markets.