Dr John Davis
Associate Professor of Modern History
The Queen's College
01865 (2)79140
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.
Research
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.
Publications
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Reshaping the Welfare State? Voluntary Action and Community in London, 1960-1975
2019|Chapter|Welfare and Social Policy in Britain since 1870. Essays in Honour of Jose Harris -
Silent Minority? British Conservative Students in the Age of Campus Protest
2017|Chapter|Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United StatesFor historians of social movements, this text explores 1960s and 1970s conservative political activism in the US and Western Europe.History -
"The Most Fun I Ever Had"? : Squatting in England in the 1970s
2016|Chapter|Public Goods Versus Economic Interests Global Perspectives on the History of SquattingThe 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
2015|Chapter|Politics and Governance in Modern British History, 1885-1997: Essays in Honour of Duncan Tanner (1958-2010) -
Containing Racism? The London experience, 1957-1968
2015|Chapter|The Subversive Special Relationship: race and protest in the United Kingdom and United States in the civil rights era -
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. -
The London Cabbie and the Rise of Essex Man
2011|Chapter|Classes, Cultures, and PoliticsThis 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 HistoryThis 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 CenturyEuropeanization 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 environmentThe 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.
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