Piccadilly Circus, 1959

THESE are shocking photos of London in 1959, a city without tattooed grandmothers, denim, purple hair, men with earrings in their noses and angry foreigners. Thankfully, we do not live in that age, a time when women were held in chains, children had to sit up straight at the dinner table and Britons wallowed in primitive racial homogeneity. I offer these pictures purely for documentary purposes. Please view them when children are not in the room.

— Comments —

Jane S. writes:

Possibly the most outrageous thing about these photos is that no one is wearing earphones, no one is carrying a mobile device, and no one is staring at a screen. In some of the photos, people actually appear to be interacting with each other. Is that what people did before they invented texting? How did they form these relationships to begin with? There was no social media. Did people even know the meaning of “friend” before Facebook?

Laura writes:

Good point. The people in these photos are not in contact with people who are not with them. They are stuck with the people right next to them.

Fortunately, photos like this are rarely seen in our public schools. They would give children dangerous ideas. They might wonder if they really needed that latest Tweet.

Jane writes:

A friend recently told me a story about her 30-year-old niece, who is married with three preschool age children. Whenever she and her husband take the kids out to a restaurant, they run out of things to talk about so they start texting their friends while at dinner. Apparently people now rely on their mobile devices to think of things to say. Didn’t it used to be the other way around?

The following is from Erasing America by the great Lawrence Auster, a man who can pack more profundity into a single sentence than anyone alive today:

This “liberated” self can be seen, for example, in the ubiquitous use of cell phones that has destroyed the once orderly and civil public spaces of America, turning them into a mildly deranged yet (by our incredibly loosened standards) “normal” environment where millions of “normal” men and women, regardless of where they are or what they are doing, think it perfectly “normal” to impose their private phone conversations on every stranger in their vicinity, engaging in conduct—such as talking in a loud voice to an invisible person while standing still or moving absent-mindedly back and forth in the middle of a crowded urban sidewalk—that once would have been seen as the mark of an escaped lunatic.

James McGrath writes:

What so shocks me is the pics of petticoat lane! I used to live around there and it is completely Bengali now! It is a foreign part of England. It seems exotic to think of London as it once was!

Thank you for the pics, or perhaps I shouldn’t thank you for them!

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