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.

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