Time is slippery

The funny thing about decades is that they don’t really start when they say they do. I don’t mean in the ‘actually, the millennium was at the end of 2000’ sort of way. I mean socially and culturally.

All of us who lived through the 2010s will probably agree that it wasn’t exactly fantastic. But also that things didn’t really start to bite until 2013, and that it looks like they’re going to keep on biting for the first couple of years of the 2020s.

The sixties were the same. They were swinging, economically resurgent, and increasingly liberal. But not in 1961. At least, not entirely. 1961 was a transitional time, with one foot stretching out into the future and with another firmly rooted in the past. This was true across Europe and Britain, and especially London.

The city’s skyline was starting to change as new towers grew out of the gaps left by the Second World War, though not as many as you might think. Mid-century icons like the Southbank were still in their infancy with just the Royal Festival Hall left after the Festival of Britain, and it would still be another four years before work started on the Barbican Estate in the vast Blitz crater that had destroyed almost the whole of the old Cripplegate area in the heart of the city. A lot of London still looked like the photo at the top of this blog. And actually, a lot of it still does.

Likewise, Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had famously said that Britons ‘have never had it so good’ in 1957, but even though the economy was on the up the nation’s post-war recovery hadn’t trickled all the way down to every resident of the capital - or the country - by 1961. And, while miniskirts were getting shorter and flares were getting wider, you were still likely to see Teddy Boys, top-hatted businessmen, and old veterans in demob suits walking down Carnaby Street.

Time is fluid. It slips over, round and past itself in interesting ways. Things don’t change at the same rate or in nice fixed blocks, no matter how we choose to measure them or cut them up into generalised, easy to digest chunks. There’s always a little bit of yesterday and tomorrow mixed in with today.

This makes period writing really interesting for authors, because you can infuse your writing with unexpected details that don’t just help build your narrative world but also inform and surprise your readers. But it also comes with its own challenges. Because the absolute last thing you want is to have your characters driving cars that shouldn’t be on the road yet, or riding tube lines that haven’t been dug out of the ground yet…