Student life in London in the 1970s

On the last day of September 1971 I loaded my few belongings into the family car and my father drove me to Streatham, south London, where I took up lodgings with eight other university students. Before my father left, he shook my hand. It was the first time he had ever done it and I was dumbfounded: it was a symbolic parting. Although in the following months I went back to my parents for one weekend in two, on that September day I was ceremoniously pushed out of the nest. Now I was supposed to live like an adult. It was a peculiar sensation, neither pleasurable nor distasteful, merely something I was unaccustomed to, like walking on a pond covered in ice.
On the one hand, the delights of London were on my doorstep, and I had a season ticket from Streatham to Waterloo, right in the centre. On the other, I had a student stipend of £485 on which to live for the whole academic year. Nowadays such a sum would hardly last a week, but I made it last the full nine months. I had no choice: I was a full-time student.
For the first time I was sharing a room (it halved the rent: £3 a week) and living with other people my age. I had recently taken up the flute and was making steady progress with the aid of a book of exercises and a few pieces of easy sheet music. After a few days, progress was halted when the other eight members of the household solemnly presented me with a petition asking me to stop making such a hideous noise, or at least to go somewhere else to make it. There was nowhere else, and that effectively ended my career in woodwind.
London in the early 1970s was a dynamic city: obsessive, driving, self-absorbed, all-embracing, varied, noisy, dusty, cluttered, colourful, cosmopolitan. It is still all of these things, but it is now also prohibitively expensive, and less safe than it was nearly 40 years ago. Yet it remains more a collection of villages than a single city, and this is an important aspect of its charm. It has many different aspects, hidden corners, unexpected delights, astounding contrasts; indeed, it probably offers more than any other city in the world. But not all that it offers is salubrious.
I soon learned to move with the rhythm of the city. In the streets, on the underground, people move around quickly and efficiently. They waste no time. Faster, more agile people adeptly weave their way between those who tarry. Yet there was still time for student pranks. At school many of us had had to learn long quotations from Shakespeare's plays by heart, and late in the evening we would wander around the streets and shout them menacingly at passers by--soliloquies from the Tempest or the Merchant of Venice, or rousing speeches from the historical dramas. Once, at midnight I ran all the way up the down escalators of Warren Street tube station, a long distance from the Victoria Line to the surface, 40 metres vertically. Fortunately there were no passengers coming the other way. It was all part of being a student, like keeping one's neck wrapped in the purple, yellow and black scarf of the College. How we despised those who adopted the red, white and blue colours of the University, the federal structure which encompassed ours and 32 other colleges! Better the colours of the 'enemy' from King's, Birkbeck or Queen Mary (I was studying at the London School of Economics).
Occasionally, the College would put on a social event to which students were invited. The 1970s were less prohibitionist than current times, and there would sometimes be beer. It would be served by robust ladies in white uniforms, whose brawny arms would dish it out in quarter pint rations, an amount that any self-respecting student would find embarrassingly small. So we queued up for it drinking as we queued, and by diligently waiting our turn managed to sup the regulation couple of pints and regain our self-esteem.
After a term in Streatham I became disaffected with the southern suburbs. I come from north of the River (the Thames, that is, which in London is merely called 'the River') and have inherited that sense of superiority to the benighted neighbourhoods on the southern side. In simple terms, I did not feel at home there. So I moved back to my parents' house for six months and did long-distance commuting. Then I moved into halls of residence and remained in them for a three years. They were noisy places, beery and leery, but they had the advantage of being very central. Carr-Saunders Hall was at the time all male (and a real temple of testosterone it was, too). One night the fire-alarm went off and more women than men came out of the dormitory rooms.
The first two halls I lived in were situated on the long road that starts off as Charlotte Street and ends under the Post Office Tower (later renamed the Telecom Tower) as Fitzroy Street. In its time it was the restaurant street par excellence of London, with a remarkable variety of ethnic eating places, none of which I could afford to patronise. There were first-class Indian restaurants, from which the smell of oriental spices wafted in clouds. There were also excellent Indian sweet shops, which sold brilliantly coloured gelatinous concoctions and dollops of spicy batter that looked like fried toads. Every year there was an ethnic festival, a street-long carnival, called Fitzrovia. Caribbean steel bands danced up and down the road, Jews played animated klezma on strings and accordion, Brazilian dancers waved their feathers and threw paper streamers, and Anemos, the local Greek restaurant, brought out all its crockery and invited passers-by to smash it (they did, with much gusto).
And then there was the Provisional Irish Republican Army. I studied in London from 1971 until 1980, which encompassed virtually the whole span of the bombing campaign that followed 'Bloody Sunday', the day in 1971 when British troops opened fire on peaceful Catholic demonstrators in Northern Ireland. As a first-year student I marched on Parliament in a protest demonstration against this episode of history. It was the first and last time I have done such a thing. I was particularly impressed by the aggressive hostility of middle-aged and old people, who seemed to be objecting to the very act of demonstrating--the folly of youth--and paying little attention to the issues that were being contested. I was also much impressed by the solid line of policemen who cordoned off the approaches to Parliament. There were scuffles and one of my companions, Elizabeth Fish, was arrested and bundled into a police van. She was quite proud of this achievement. Being rather timid and accustomed to showing respect for anyone in uniform, I kept a low profile and came out unscathed.
But then there were the bombs. Sitting in my dormitory room one night listening to music we heard one go off. It maimed two sorters in the local post-office. On another occasion, I was ushered away from a section of Oxford Street by the police. A bomb disposal artificer drew up and proceeded into a restaurant. After a brief interval there was a massive explosion. He left a widow and three young children. Finally, towards the end of my time as a resident in central London I was living in a dormitory above the stores at the western end of Oxford Street, which is London's busiest shopping street. Just before Christmas 1975 the Provos parked a car packed with explosives outside it. Miraculously, the resulting blast killed no one, but it blew in very many windows. Fortunately, my room did not face Oxford Street and hence was undamaged. The cut-price clothing store underneath opened up the next day with no glass in its frontage and a large hand-painted sign that said "Save a Bomb!"
More than the bombs themselves, the unpredictability of the attacks caused a pervasive psychosis. Everyone was on edge. I took to walking rather than using the buses or underground trains. I walked along back-streets rather than the main thoroughfares, as that seemed the safest thing to do. When I went back to my parents I hurried through the concourse of Victoria Station looking about me apprehensively. Everywhere, people were on the alert for suspicious behaviour, unattended packages; indeed, anything that was out of the ordinary. During one journey a passenger got off the train and left his briefcase behind. A porter came and took it away to a secluded spot at the end of the platform. As he picked it up he shook with fear. Fortunately, the briefcase did not contain anything noxious.
Despite these anxieties, and the pressure of studying to get good qualifications at a top university, there were many compensations for having chosen to go to university in the capital city. The parks, gardens and stately homes of London are marvellously relaxing. There are many galleries and museums. When I could afford them, there were concerts and plays (fortunately I had a good friend who was a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and he had plenty of free tickets to good West End theatre productions).
The years passed quickly. Twice I attended the University of London graduation ceremony, held in the Royal Albert Hall. As a BSc graduate I wore black, but as a PhD graduate I wore a claret-coloured gown with yellow silk facings. I have one in my wardrobe at home, made by Ede and Ravenscroft of Chancery Lane, where the same company has been selling such gear, in the same shop, since the 1600s (Ede was a tailor and Ravenscroft a wig-maker: their descendants made the coronation robes of Queen Victoria, which are conserved in the shop).
Aristocrats and commanders of the armed forces attended the graduation ceremonies, and so did 5000 graduates, all of whom were individually presented to the Chancellor of the University of London, who was then the Queen Mother. The student newspaper commented rather uncharitably that "the pink of her dress contrasted with the yellow of her teeth", but someone had written her a suitably witty academic speech, which she delivered with reasonable aplomb, and so everyone was happy. Like thousands of others I was photographed in my robes in front of the Albert Memorial.
All that was merely the start of a long association with universities. It was, in the American sense, truly a Commencement.