Dr John Davis

Associate Professor of Modern History

The Queen's College

01865 (2)79140

john.davis@queens.ox.ac.uk

I was the UK interviewer for the Oxford-based pan-European oral history project 'Around 1968: Activists, Networks, Trajectories', and my work in connection with this project has engendered an interest in the British radical movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have recently been interviewing Conservative student activists from the same period.

See page on The Queen's College website

Research
Publications

I am a historian of modern London. Initially I worked on the nineteenth-century metropolis, concentrating on local politics and local government, but for the last fifteen years or so I have specialised in London in the post-war period, and particularly the 1960s and 1970s. Whilst I have worked on popular culture, permissiveness and the drug scene in the 'swinging city', I am interested in all aspects of the capital in these years, and have published essays on such topics as race and housing, inner-city education, planning and local government and even London's taxi-drivers. Working on the modern history of a very large and diverse city enables the historian to study an unusually wide range of subjects and to avoid unduly restrictive specialisation. I am currently working on the outer suburbs in the 1970s and on the inner-city squatting phenomenon of that decade.

Internet publication

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Internet publication

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Central goverment and the towns

Chapter
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The Cambridge Urban History of Britain
Silent Minority? British Conservative Students in the Age of Campus Protest

2017
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Chapter
"The Most Fun I Ever Had"? : Squatting in England in the 1970s

2016
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Chapter
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Public Goods Versus Economic Interests Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting

The volume examines housing struggles and the occupation of buildings in the Global "North," but it is equally concerned with land acquisition and informal settlements in the Global "South.

Business & Economics
Community and the Labour Left in 1970s London

2013
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Chapter
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Politics and Governance in Modern British History, 1885-1997: Essays in Honour of Duncan Tanner (1958-2010)
Drop-Outs

2013
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Chapter
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Europe's 1968: Voices of Revolt

‘Drop-outs’, examines two experiments in communal living in very different political contexts—London and Leningrad. It explores the creation of intimate spaces on the margins of conventional society in which freedom could be explored in its various forms. It asks whether dropping out was purely cultural, escapist and hedonistic, or the pursuit of a new kind of politics. Within these micro-societies in the West and East it explores different and contradictory attitudes in to imperialism, capitalism, property, democracy and sexual relations, the tensions these communities faced during their short lives and their enduring legacy.
Containing Racism? The London experience, 1957-1968

2013
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Chapter
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The Subversive Special Relationship: race and protest in the United Kingdom and United States in the civil rights era
The London Cabbie and the Rise of Essex Man

2011
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Chapter
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Classes, Cultures, and Politics

This chapter focuses on London's taxi drivers who belonged to the groups epitomized by the ‘Essex man’ of the 1980s, culturally working-class but politically beyond the reach of the Labour Party during the Thatcher years. It shows that Labour never became the ‘natural party of government’ in the post-war year because the support of working-class groups proved to be conditional — in particular the working class outside blue-collar industry and outside the Labour heartlands.

History
Living Utopia: Communal Living in Denmark and Britain

2011
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Journal article
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Cultural and Social History

This article examines experiments in communal living in Britain and Denmark in the early 1970s, using life-story interviews from seventeen members of two British and two Danish communes. It examines communal living as a fusion of radical political principles with the practice of experimental collective living. It concludes that the movement's egalitarian principles of resource-sharing, gender equality and the avoidance of hierarchies were broadly achieved, even if the movement obviously did not realize its more ambitious objective of undermining the bourgeois family. Though none of the interviewees lives communally now, most remain faithful to the principles behind the movement.