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.

Community and the Labour Left in 1970s London

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

2013
|
Chapter
|
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
|
Chapter
|
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
|
Chapter
|
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
|
Journal article
|
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.
"Die Briten kommen”: British Beat and the Conquest of Europe in the 1960s

2010
|
Chapter
|
Europeanization in the Twentieth Century

Europeanization is a term at the centre of contemporary political debate. In this innovative study, a team of British and German historians present the findings of their research project into how the concept and content of Europeanization needs to be understood as a historical phenomenon, which has changed its meaning during the twentieth century.

History
Macmillan’s Martyr: the Pilgrim Case, the “Land Grab” and the Tory Housing Drive, 1951-9

2008
|
Journal article
|
Planning Perspectives: an international journal of history, planning and the environment

The suicide of Edward Pilgrim in 1954 prompted a public furore over the easy terms on which public authorities could compulsorily purchase privately owned land for development. This article argues that Harold Macmillan, as Conservative Housing Minister after 1951, consciously prolonged the statist purchase provisions of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act even as a reviving market in development land in the early 1950s made them unrealistic and inequitable. The Tories’ twin aims of abolishing the 1947 development charge and making good the ambitious 1951 election pledge to build 300,000 houses per year created an immensely complex set of problems which Macmillan negotiated with much skill. The result, though, was that local authorities – mostly Labour ones – eager to build houses benefited and many individual small owners like Pilgrim suffered from this policy. The Tory pledge was therefore realised in part by means of a hidden subsidy to municipal socialism and at the expense of many natural Conservative supporters.
John Lloyd (1833-1915)

2006
|
Internet publication

Lloyd, John (1833-1915), municipal reformer and antiquary, was born at Dinas, Brecon, on 3 September 1833, the youngest of the three sons of John Lloyd (1797-1875), landowner, local historian, and poet, and his first wife, Mary Anne, née Yeats. He was educated at Brecon College School-at that time practically in ... <a href=""></a>
Joseph Firth Bottomley Firth (1842-1889)

2006
|
Internet publication

Firth, Joseph Firth Bottomley [formerly Joseph Firth Bottomley] (1842-1889), politician and municipal reformer, was born Joseph Firth Bottomley at Dobroyd, Shepley, near Huddersfield, Yorkshire, on 21 February 1842, the eldest son of Joseph Bottomley, woollen manufacturer and merchant, and his wife, Ann, née Firth (the additional surname that her son ... <a href=""></a>
The Political Culture of Modern Britain

2006
|
Chapter
|
Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew

In the last twenty years one of the classical arenas for British historical writing - the politics of Victorian Britain - has ceased to be an obvious or self-evidently important subject. Facing up to this challenge, the historians who have contributed to this volume explore central aspects of that history. They continue to uphold the centrality of politics to Victorian Britain, but suggest that politics must be viewed more broadly, as a concern pervading almost all spheres of life, just as Victorians themselves would have done. In this way politics penetrates into Victorian culture. 'Politics' can lead us into the ideas governing political action itself; political ideas; international relations; the eduction of men and women; the writing of history and of literature; engagement with past political theorists; and the ideas behind professionalization. Such are some of the themes taken up here. The specific occasion for these essays was as a tribute to the memory of the late Colin Matthew, one of the most eminent recent historians of Victorian Britain, who was himself determined to uphold the contemporary relevance of Victorian political tradition, and to explore the interface between 'politics' and 'culture'. Reflection on his intellectual achievement is a second distinctive component of this book.