The Mod movement, without doubt, produced ripples that changed, not just fashion, but a whole way that life for a great many people from the 1950s reaching as far as the present day.
But the label ‘Mod’ is misleading for it has embraced a wide variety of styles, ideals and people over the last fifty or more years. This articles looks at the early origins of what would, in the 1960s, explode into the Mod culture from which all other subsequent adaptations and revivals take their inspiration.
Tagged beatniks, britain, british, Fashion, group, jazz, mod, modern jazz, modernist, teddy boys, the kinks, the small faces, the who, youth
The car reviews that used to appear on this website seem to have dried up? So, have they been moved or what?
We are pleased to say that because of our hard work Sixties Britain has become very popular but, pleasing as this is, it has created other problems. At present we are using virtually all the resources allocated to us, in fact sometimes access to the site is impaired for this very reason. So, in order to reduce the load on the server, the car section is being transferred to a super new website, Classic Car Digest, hosted on Blogger and the link is here.
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Posted in Classic Cars, Fashion, Lifestyle
Tagged 1960s, 60s, cars, Classic Cars, hippies, mens fashion, mods
These days no self-respecting person would buy a car without a CD player as well as a radio but back in 1967, when the heater and demister were often an optional extra, finding a car with a radio fitted was next to impossible.
However, if you had the money and the inclination the hardware to install a radio was already in the shops and ready to buy and fit.
But, before we start talking prices let me set the scene. In 1967 if a man had a good job he was earning around £20 a week (women and young people a lot less). A normal inexpensive 35mm film camera cost between £40 and £60 and a good pair of binoculars about £35. An eight day all-in holiday in Majorca could be had with BEA (British European Airways) for around £30 (and a lot of fun they were, too!).
Posted in Lifestyle
Tagged 1960s, 60s, car radio, car radio licence, cassette player, pye, radio, sixties
It all began, as do many things, in America and by the 1960s in the UK no self-respecting housewife could stop herself collecting them. Green Shield Stamps were, as far as the 60s were concerned, here to stay.
The idea was simple. The stamps were small, self-adhesive stamps like postage stamps. You were a shopkeeper and you purchased the stamps from a stamp company and then gave them to shoppers in your store. The more the shoppers purchased, the more stamps they got. They then stuck the stamps into books of stamps supplied by the stamp company and finally the shoppers exchanged the stamp books for gifts from the stamp company’s catalogue.
Posted in Lifestyle
Tagged 1960s, 60s, green shield stamps, green stamps, shopkeepers, sixties, stores, supermarkets, trading stamps
Video, cine films, home films or home movies as they are now called are all the rage and even with my little point and shoot camera I can take quite acceptable video footage. However, in a slightly more hairy-chested form, it was also there in the 1960s and used more than you might think.
This article deals with the cameras and film but I want to cover the resulting images and home videos for a later article as well.
Retro-space has on his Flickr photostream a very interesting photo of a travel advert written in Portuguese for a trip to London.
What is so interesting is the choice of imagery that the creator used and the way that it instantly typifies the late 1960s, early 70s.
Rather than stick to still images, I began looking for moving images of the 1960s since a lot of people, more than you think, had movie cameras in those days.
The BBC was a first choice and the link below is to the page shown in the photo to the right which was an attempt by the BBC to gather home movies of the 1960s together on YouTube. The idea was to use these to accompany a program put on by Andrew Marr called A History Of Modern Britain.
It’s a great idea and somewhere on YouTube there are more than the few films shown in the page referred to below but I can’t find them and neither can I find the group that was set up. However, the films are worth a look from the BBC link and if anyone knows the link to get to the YouTube group perhaps they can leave a comment below.
The page on the BBC website is here.
There is also a BBC magazine page for the 1960s which is here.
And the still photos of the period referred to in the magazine which are worth a look are here.
Fibre-glass, glass fibre or fibreglass as it was called was one of the wonder materials of the plastic age that seemed to find it’s way into all walks of life in the 1960s.
Used for the iconic 1960s egg shaped chairs, one of the less usual uses was for interior home furnishing and I found an advert for Fibre Glass curtains in an old issue of TV times recently.
This was, in fact, a 1968 TV Times special offer and the curtains. which had apparently proved so popular in the past, were being offered at 45s and 6d a pair. Looking at prices from that time I’m not sure if that was cheap but it was certainly not expensive.
The curtains were available in six different designs all featuring flowers on them and looked not unlike those shown in the above illustration (except that these are modern curtains and probably not fibre-glass).
According to the advert they ‘refuse to absorb dirt and are extremely easy to wash’. After drip drying they are ready to hang back up and the colours won’t fade.
I can vaguely remember curtains like this and it is true that you could wash them, shake them dry and put them back up.
Posted in Lifestyle
Tagged 1960s, 60s, curtains, fibre glass, furnishings, glass fibre, glassfibre, home, patterns, sixties
