Modernity Britain: A Shake of the Dice review – how the 60s revolution was a long time starting

David Kynaston’s engaging study shows early 1960s Britain to have been far more reactionary than radical

• Lara Feigel - The Observer, Sunday 14 September 2014

Leicester Square, London, November 1960. Lady Chatterley’s Lover sold 2m copies in its first year. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

“To Luton falls the honour of knowing it was in on the start of a revolution,” announced the Luton News proudly in October 1959. The new decade was drawing nigh and soon there would be talk of revolution in homes and newspapers throughout Britain. But in Luton’s case the transformation was neither sexual nor political. Instead the journalist was celebrating the opening of 55 miles of the country’s first motorway, the M1. The swinging 60s were heralded here as in many other parts of the country by bulldozers, concrete and tarmac.

This revolution of the roads seems to have been one of the few aspects of progress that was greeted enthusiastically by the majority of British citizens. The country that emerges in this sixth instalment of David Kynaston’s mammoth, immersive history of postwar Britain is strikingly reactionary, rendering the “modernity” of Kynaston’s title almost ironic.
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