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A Londoner living at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties would have been very conscious of the forest of television aerials which were springing up, seemingly overnight. It seemed that every suburban roof sported its own letter ‘H’. It’s unlikely that this Londoner, who might have heard of a new Liverpool group, The Beatles, or might have seen a writer called Jack Kerouac on the bookshelves, or might even have come across a duplicated amateur magazine called Private Eye, would have realised that he was seeing the first rivulets in a flood which would totally change his city.

Suddenly everybody started wearing colourful and extravagant clothes, an air of hedonism and pleasure became apparent, and London began to ‘swing’. Carnaby Street, unknown before the sixties, became one of the most famous streets in London, along with King’s Road, in Chelsea. The Portobello Road street market became a centre of music and fashion, and it was in this area that the first Notting Hill Carnivals began.

London in the sixties had its own unique atmosphere, a heady hallucinogenic gas that induced a feeling of well-being and sensitivity to colour. People flooded in and the tourist industry prospered. The sixties saw people crowding with equal enthusiasm to both open-air rock concerts and political demonstrations.

At the beginning of this decade, the architecture of the city began to change; and there was a brutalism which was out of keeping with the general social atmosphere of the time. Tower blocks were erected all over the city; St Paul’s became concealed in a concrete copse and this tendency came to fruition with the infamous Centre Point.

Since then many of the tower blocks have mercifully been pulled down, and a more imaginative approach has been taken with new buildings. London today has many examples of interesting and pleasing modern buildings, and the puritan aesthetic of the 60s architects is now not so plainly in evidence. With the decline of the docks, much building has been going on in the East End of London, and whole complexes of housing and commercial buildings have appeared on those sites which had been virtually unchanged since the days of Victoria. The most significant of these is the Canary Wharf development, with its own light elevated railway.

It is perhaps significant that the Millennium Dome is built at Greenwich; sitting it in an area of London which is changing rapidly perhaps symbolises the forward-looking view which prevails as the century draws to a close.

London is changing rapidly, is becoming a more vital, a cleaner, a more prosperous place. But there are still aspects of London which would not seem all that unfamiliar to someone who lived here at the beginning of the century.