Ten Years that Changed a City – serie

Norwich in 1950 was a different place. Still scarred by war the city was coming to terms with itself. Children played in the rubble of bomb sites, and workers strove to build a prosperous peace on building sites. By the end of the decade the retail heart of the city would be reconstructed, new building programmes would be changing domestic life, and the manufacturing industries would be making world-class products with household names. Birthplace of Barclays, Aviva, Start-Rite and Colmans, the city was ready to embark on another chapter in its long history of commercial and cultural development. From post-war austerity to the threshold of the consumer society, Norwich embraced the 1950s as a decade of change.

The 1950s. The mid-point of the twentieth century. When those born in the nineteenth century met their grandchildren who would live in the twenty-first. A pivotal moment, certainly. And is it really true? Had we ‘never had it so good’, as Prime Minister Macmillan said?This book is the story of Swansea in those years, when post-war austerity moved towards the indulgence of the sixties. A period of affluence and full employment, a time of increased confidence and optimism. A time when Swansea began to rebuild itself after terrible wartime devastation and looked to a bright future, despite an exhausted valley where the trains crept slowly between the twisted slag heaps alongside a poisoned river. Everything would soon be so much better. The future was so bright…Swansea in the 1950s follows the development of Swansea through this momentous decade. The story of how Swansea played its own part in the big news of the era – the Coronation, the Atom Bomb, Rock Around the Clock, the Korean War, Sputnik, the Suez Crisis and television, – and how it managed its own triumphs and disasters.

This is the second volume in a unique and exciting series on the history of York. York in the 1960s provides an account of York life during a definitive decade. Ten years in which the city emerged from the greyness of the largely derelict 1950s into a technicolour world of personal freedom and growing disposable incomes, allowing some to spend that money on newly available labour-saving devices, televisions, cars and holidays.Crucial to York in the 1960s was the ground-breaking Esher Report and the long-overdue University of York. Esher shaped today’s city; the university’s contribution to the city’s social, cultural, educational and scientific fabric was, and remains, inestimable. York in the 1960s will please and satisfy curiosity whether you grew up here then, whether you have left and want to rekindle your childhood and teenage memories, or whether you are a child of the twenty-first century curious to know what was going on in that exuberant decade.