How the Telegraph predicted Swinging London

Telegraph

16-04-2025

On April 16 1965, The Daily Telegraph's Weekend magazine had a cover feature by John Crosby entitled 'London: The Most Exciting City', which declared: 'Suddenly, the young own the town', and claimed that it was now the place 'where the action is, the gayest, most uninhibited – and in a wholly new, very modern sense – the most coolly elegant city in the world.'
Crosby, a well-known American journalist and television critic, was the London correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, living on the King's Road in Chelsea at the heart of much that was newly fashionable. What makes his piece especially significant is that it appeared an entire year before the article that is often credited with having prompted the whole mid-1960s ' Swinging London ' legend, Time magazine's famous April 1966 US cover, 'London: The Swinging City'.
These two high-profile features reflected a shift in popular culture that had been building up since the middle of the previous decade, exemplified by the recent American success of multiple 'British Invasion' bands, notably The Beatles.
The initial stirrings had begun around 1955, when the UK's home-grown skiffle craze led many young people to pick up guitars and try to make music of their own, and Mary Quant opened her first boutique on the King's Road. In those days, pop music was supposed to only come from America, and ground-breaking new fashions solely from the Paris catwalks, yet during the early part of the following decade, British bands gradually began showing up on music charts worldwide, and Quant's innovative styles were breaking through internationally, as she explained when I interviewed her in 2004:
'From 1962 I started to design clothes and underwear for [American department store chain] JC Penney – as well as my own Mary Quant collection. I was commuting to New York once a month, which I loved.'
The year 1962 also saw the release of the first James Bond film, Dr No, based on Ian Fleming's million-selling novels. Fleming grew up in Chelsea, and the fictional spy in his books lives in an un-named square off the King's Road. Sean Connery, star of the new film series, had cheap lodgings in the area in the late 1950s, and John Barry composed most of his classic Bond themes such as Goldfinger at his home on nearby Cadogan Square. This irreverent, wisecracking and stylish movie star appeared on the scene just as the first flush of more gritty, 'kitchen sink' films was drawing to a close.
Many of the latter were the work of directors who had started out in 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square, at the eastern end of the King's Road, empowered by the shock waves created by John Osborne's debut play for the resident company there, Look Back in Anger. Moving decidedly away from middle- or upper-class drawing-room locations, and placing working-class characters at the heart of the action, such plays and films – together with the anti-heroes depicted in the so-called Angry Young Men novels of the late 1950s – helped prepare the ground for the kind of 1960s figures on-screen, in the pop charts and elsewhere in the wider culture who talked back and didn't play by the old rules.
A prime example of the latter would be a group of scruffs in 1962 who were living at the cheaper reaches of the King's Road in a squalid flat and gigging around town at any venue that would let them play their own interpretation of US rhythm and blues. John Gunnell, who together with his brother Rik ran the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street, once told me he booked the band for a month of Monday night shows during that era, but sacked them after the first one after they failed to pull a crowd. Nevertheless, The Rolling Stones did not let this deter them, and within two years they had progressed from Chelsea to the US charts.
John Crosby originally considered calling his 1965 Telegraph feature 'Swinging London', and a year earlier had already informed readers of his New York Herald Tribune column that Britain was a 'swinging' nation. Now, in the wake of the 1966 Time magazine cover article, the US media descended in force on London looking for stories, and at one point that year, as Mary Quant told me, 'American news magazines and TV were often filming both sides of the King's Road at the same time'.
Time declared that 'in a once sedate world of faded splendour, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life', and the King's Road seemed to be the epicentre of all that had been declared groovy.
'Saturday afternoon in Chelsea, at La Rêve restaurant. Wolfing down a quick lunch are some of the most switched-on young men in town: Actor Terence Stamp, 26, star of The Collector and steady date of model Jean Shrimpton; actor Michael Caine, 33, the Mozart-loving spy in The Ipcress File; hairdresser Sassoon, 38, whose cut can be seen both at Courrèges in Paris and on Princess Meg; Ace photographer David Bailey, 27, professional associate of Antony Armstrong-Jones; and Doug Hayward, 28, Chelsea's 'innest' private tailor.'
Much of the attention on the modish capital was met with predictable derision by Londoners themselves, and by the satirists at Private Eye, who printed a 'Swinging England All-Purpose Titillation Supplement' to assist the 'very small number of American periodicals which have not yet produced their 24-page survey of the Swinging, Vibrant, Thrusting New England Where Even the Hovercraft Wear Mini-Skirts etc etc'. Time's own letters column also received some scathing responses from British readers, including one that said: 'For the year's most ridiculous generalisations, you deserve to swing indeed. All of you. And not in London either.'
Despite all this, the image of the capital as a wellspring of the emerging 1960s pop culture would continue to be disseminated as the decade progressed by numerous fashion articles worldwide, books such as Len Deighton's London Dossier, Karl Dallas's Swinging London – A Guide to Where the Action Is or the self-consciously trendy pulp novels of Adam Diment such as The Dolly Dolly Spy, scores of famous rock stars including Chelsea resident Keith Richards in his artfully tattered velvet jackets and scarves from hip King's Road boutique Granny Takes a Trip, by films such as Alfie or Blow-Up and stylish London-based TV shows like The Avengers (now shot in colour for the benefit of the American market), and by a blizzard of magazine articles either celebrating or decrying the myth of Swinging London.
As for the man whose Telegraph feature helped unleash the hysteria, the Liverpool Echo reported in June 1966 that 'Crosby today nervously acknowledges paternity of the swinging movement but says he was only trying to be funny about one minor aspect of English life', and faced with the prospect of being interviewed by Paris Match for yet another article about the subject, Crosby himself observed: 'When Frenchmen come to England to ask an American questions about London's sex, you know the millennium has arrived.'