Researchers at University College London have just launched a project looking at people’s memories of going to the cinema in 1960s Britain and are keen to gather views of OnTheWight readers.
Research Associate, Dr Matthew Jones, says that they are interested in the ways in which people remember cinema-going, films and the decade more generally.
Spend a moment imagining a busy street in 1960s Britain. What does it look like? What does it sound like? What are people wearing?
For many, the street will be full of women in miniskirts and men in flares. The colours will be vivid and the sound of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones will be in the air. This is how 1960s Britain is often remembered. The country was, as Time Magazine commented, ‘swinging.’
Except, of course, that it wasn’t. While London was certainly a hub for fashion, music and art, the thrills of the capital must have seemed very remote elsewhere in the country. In recent years there has been a growing awareness that much of Britain came late to the 1960s and that the 1950s, in a cultural sense at least, persisted for many years after 1959.
Share your memories
He goes on to say that the questions they want to ask can’t be answered simply by looking in books or digging through archives, so they’re keen to get in touch with people who went to the cinema in 1960s Britain and asks them to share their memories via a questionnaire that can be downloaded or completed online on the University’s Website.
If you would like to get involved and contribute to the project, the research team would be very excited to hear from you.
