RSA - The Way We Were: Britain at the Start of the Seventies

The Way We Were: Britain at the Start of the Seventies

23rd Sep 2010; 13:00

(full recording including audience Q&A)
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RSA Thursday

At the beginning of the 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss. Under Edward Heath, the optimism and prosperity of the Sixties had become a distant memory. Now the headlines were dominated by strikes and blackouts, unemployment and inflation, mugging and car bombs.

As the world looked on in horrified fascination, Britain seemed to be tearing itself apart. And yet, amid all the gloom, glittered a startling creativity and cultural dynamism that would continue to influence our lives long after the nightmares of the Seventies had been forgotten.

Join celebrated historian Dominic Sandbrook at the RSA as he recreates the gaudy, schizophrenic atmosphere of the early Seventies: the world of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, David Bowie and Brian Clough, Germaine Greer and Mary Whitehouse.

He takes us back to an age when the unions were on the march and the socialist revolution seemed at hand, but also when feminism, permissiveness, pornography and environmentalism were transforming the lives of millions. It was an age of miners' strikes, tower blocks and IRA atrocities, but it also gave us celebrity footballers and high-street curry houses, organic foods and package holidays, gay rights and glam rock - a colourful past landscape that profoundly shaped our present, from the suburban bedroom to the financial boardroom.

Speaker: Dominic Sandbrook, historian, fellow of the Rothermere Institute at Oxford and author of State of Emergency (Allen Lane, Sept 2010)

Chair: Emily Campbell, director of design, RSA

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsa70s