Introduction

I have studied, researched and taught in Oxford since first arriving there as an undergraduate in 1975. I have been a Fellow of Queen’s since 1989.

Teaching

I am a modern British History specialist, and most of my teaching focuses upon nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain, but I also enjoy teaching post-1945 international history. I am presently involved in setting up a new Special Subject on Britain in the 1970s, looking at the impact of the crises of that period upon a society under pressure.

Research

I am a historian of modern London and specialise in the 1960s and 1970s, looking not just at the ‘swinging city’ but also at the impact of economic, social and cultural change upon what was fast becoming a world city. Studying a large and diverse metropolis has enabled me to escape being typecast as a ‘political historian’ or a social or cultural one, but has allowed me to practise several different varieties of history in my work. I was also the United Kingdom researcher for the Oxford-based pan-European oral history project ‘Around 1968: Activists, Networks, Trajectories’, for which I interviewed around forty people associated with the radical movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Publications

  • ‘Macmillan’s Martyr: the Pilgrim case, the ‘land grab’ and the Tory housing drive, 1951–9’, Planning Perspectives, 23(2), 2008.
  • ‘“Die Briten kommen.” British beat music and the conquest of Europe in the 1960s’, in M.Conway and K.K.Patel, eds, Europeanization in the Twentieth Century. Historical Approaches (London, Palgrave, 2010).
  • ‘The London Cabbie and the Rise of Essex Man’, in C.V.J.Griffiths, J.J.Nott and W.Whyte, eds, Classes, Cultures and Politics. Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011).
  • ‘Communes in Britain and Denmark’ (with Anette Warring), in Cultural and Social History, 8(4), 2011.
  • ‘Containing Racism? The London Experience, 1958-1968’ in S.Tuck, ed., The Subversive Special Relationship: race and protest in the United Kingdom and United States in the civil rights era (New York, Palgrave, 2012).