Dr John Davis
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.
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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Silent Minority? British Conservative Students in the Age of Campus Protest
April 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
July 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
May 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
January 2015|Chapter|The Subversive Special Relationship: race and protest in the United Kingdom and United States in the civil rights era