SWINGING IN TOWN
The Mini is seen as shorthand for Swinging Sixties London, right? We explore the truth of its iconic status with the help of fashion pioneer Mary Quant and an Austin Cooper S
On a dusty corner at the end of a row of Georgian mews houses in West London, a weary tabloidnewspaper photographer sits in his old Ford Consul. It’s five in the morning. His bleary eyes remain fixed on one of the upper-floor front doors mid-way down the cobbled lane.
Suddenly, there’s activity. A light flicks on, the door creaks open, and a young couple, barely into their twenties, emerge. They’re not in traditional Holland Park attire – him unshaven, with shaggy hair and a purple shirt open to his navel, her in a skimpy acid-green dress that ends way above her knees. Hangovers hide behind bug-eyed white plastic-framed sunglasses. The photographer’s long-range lens emerges from the Consul’s open window. They look nervously around before getting into a baked-beanorange Mini Cooper S, and tearing off into the backstreets at a rate the snapper’s Consul can’t hope to match. No matter. The rock star’s affair with the actress and the drug-fuelled party will be all over the front page by the late edition. And BMC dealers will smile because their baby car is the backdrop to every shot.
Did this sort of thing really happen, or was it just in our imaginations? In our collective social memory, the Mini is followed around by a parade of clichés like screaming teenage girls after a Beatle. But there’s no avoiding the fact that the Mini has an image most manufacturers couldn’t hope to invent even if they tried. Anyone in the market for a small British car could just as easily have contemplated a Ford Anglia or a Hillman Imp, yet you never see old photos of pop stars getting into them.
Today, I’m in West London in search of the cultural and social factors that made the Mini so much more special than its rivals. My transport for the day is a 1966 Cooper 1275S. Its rare Surf Blue paintwork dazzles beneath the deciduous fronds of Battersea Park like the carapace of an exotic beetle, belying the instant familiarity
of its shape. Climbing aboard, I’m struck by how much room there is for heads, knees and elbows – every bit of interior space is usable and unintrusive. It’s airy in here, a sense elevated by the bright, reflective interior fabrics.
The starter motor whirrs noisily before the A-series engine splutters and snarls into life. Barely silenced, it might as well be in my lap. Instantly, I know this is going to be no motorway wafter, but it will be fun, and endlessly communicative. The Hydrolastic suspension bobs over the speed humps like an eager spaniel puppy as I turn to cross the Thames.
We’re not headed for the hackneyed cliché-zones of Carnaby Street and Soho, but rather the King’s Road, Chelsea. It was here, in 1955, that fashion designer Mary Quant set up Bazaar, her first boutique. In 1962, following a style trend that began with Fifties American science-fiction costume-designers, and having observed young career women running for buses on the street outside Bazaar, Quant introduced a new range of above-the-knee skirts and dresses that also neatly avoided purchase-tax by using sufficiently little fabric as to qualify them as childrens’ clothes. For the name, Quant turned to her new car for inspiration. The miniskirt was thus named after her Mini Cooper. By niftily miniaturising the word ‘miniature’, a car had influenced the English language itself.
Recalls Quant today, ‘There are many, similar characteristics between the fun, run-around small car – ideal for the young to whizz between work and evening activities – and the ever-shorter skirts that provided freedom of movement and reflected the exuberance and joy that young people were experiencing in the Sixties. Both were part of that exciting and vibrant period where anything seemed possible.’
This combination of inner-suburban locations, youthful entrepreneurship and consumerism provides greater clues to the cultural significance of the Mini than anything its creator, Alec Issigonis, might have intended. With its design process accelerated in response to the 1956 Suez Crisis, this was supposed to be an economy car for economy-minded buyers, but Issigonis’ thinking ran deeper than that. With its compact dimensions, this was a car for a new, modernist era of city living; of concrete tower-blocks in places like Harlow and Bow with their Le Corbusier-inspired ‘streets in the sky’, and equally concrete flyovers, interchanges, bypasses and gyratories soaring around urban areas connecting home with work and leisure. The deliberately basic nature of the Mini’s design betrayed another of the Issigonis’ intentions – it was supposed to be an ultra-affordable car for a new generation of working-class drivers who’d perhaps previously have chosen a bubble-car or motorcycleand-sidecar combination. It wasn’t supposed to be a lifestyle accessory for the chattering classes.
With the Suez Crisis over but still influencing buying habits, Harold Macmillan’s government encouraged the population to go on a spending spree. The 1959 ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ election campaign reduced purchase tax on new cars from 60 to 50 per cent and hire-purchase-restricting credit-controls were scrapped. People who couldn’t previously have justified buying
‘For the name of her new range of above-the-knee skirts, Quant turned to her car for inspiration’
a new car felt free to do so, but to Issigonis’ – and BMC’S – horror, they didn’t opt for Minis. Issigonis, it seemed, had misjudged the working-class market – budget-conscious motorists more likely to do their own maintenance wanted dependable rear-drive mechanicals, not a complicated gearbox-in-sump arrangement. They also wanted something more impressive-looking to show for their toil, and the downsized-thunderbird flash of a Ford Anglia or Michelotti-designed Italianate coffee-bar cool of a Triumph Herald made a far greater statement than BMC’S little bare-boned modernist cube, even if it did undercut the Anglia by £100.
I dart the little Cooper S onto the Embankment, revelling in the way its compact dimensions mean you can take racing lines on urban streets at what feels like breakneck speed. Much negative comment has been made about the Mini’s driving position, with its upright steering column forcing a hunch over the wheel. However, with a tyre at each corner, dodging round urban street furniture in the Cooper puts me in mind of indoor go-karting. With not much weight to halt and pin-sharp brakes with which to do it, every corner can be taken as though you’re outbraking a rival into a sharp bend, with a stab of brakes, an armful of steering lock and a throttle that responds with an instant frothy gurgle to carry the car speeding out through the other side.
I’m reminded of something rally ace Paddy Hopkirk told me, ‘In 1963, the BMC marketing people asked me why I thought they were selling more Minis in France than they were in Britain. I replied “Well, I did just win a little thing called the Tour de France Auto!” – the racetrack stages were televised every evening for a week, and this cheap little car was seen beating Alpines and Porsches. French dealers went from selling two per week to 22.’
The new media backdrop helped secure the Mini’s image. In 1959 just over 58 per cent of UK households owned a television set. By 1964 it was 84 per cent and still rocketing. ‘In response, after we won the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally, BMC flew us and the car straight
back to London to appear live on Sunday Night at the London
Palladium with Bruce Forsyth,’ Hopkirk added. With just two television channels, The Mini had a 50 per cent TV audience share.
By 1965, the Mini had vaulted past the Anglia to take third place in the UK sales charts and a peak market share of 9.51 per cent. But tearing round circuits and rally stages only motivates a particular kind of customer. Turning off Ladbroke Grove and onto the antiques-shop timewarp of Portobello Road, my mind goes back to our imaginary A-listers making their dawn escape, the Sixties’ media creation of the modern celebrity, and something former Speedwell chairman John Sprinzel told me.
‘The Walker Brothers were the first,’ he said. Reflecting the London music scene’s growing international power, this American pop trio relocated from LA to London just as the Beatles were jetting off in the opposite direction. Arriving in Chelsea, the band needed small, practical wheels, but still fancied American-style opulence. ‘They each bought Mini Vans, and had them trimmed by Wood & Pickett, with big sound systems installed in the back,’ Sprinzel continued. ‘Mick Jagger was the next to have one.’
Mini enthusiasm among A-listers spread like wildfire. Beatles manager Brian Epstein even set up a Hounslow-based dealership, Brydor Cars, in conjunction with Terry Doran – the ‘Man from the motor trade’ referenced in the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home – to buy cars on behalf of celebrities keen to keep a low profile and avoid visiting main dealers. In 1966, Brydor Cars furnished each Beatle with a De Ville, the luxury-trimmed, custom-painted Cooper S conversion offered by Rolls-royce coachbuilder Harold Radford for £1080 – that was Alfa Giulia Spider money.
In the early Sixties, Mini sales share success was hard to quantify because many buyers hadn’t owned a car before. However, in London a pattern of ownership could be noticed. In 1961, Sprinzel, whose Speedwell concern was based in Finchley, found himself quizzed by BMC’S Birmingham-based overlords, curious as to why West London dealerships were selling so many more Minis than elsewhere in the country. A picture emerged of middle-class early-adopters, who appreciated the car’s practical compactness, and didn’t mind spending a bit more in search of greater luxury and performance. BMC’S response was the Riley Elf and Wolseley Hornet – failures in comparison to the standard Mini.
Mary Quant was quick to recognise the marketing potential of the Mini, but BMC was slow to respond. ‘Jill Kennington, one of my favourite models in the early Sixties, had a Mini specially sprayed purple to go with a Mary Quant suit – she loved both so much!’ Quant recalls. ‘I started talking to BMC early on, and we bounced various ideas around, but it wasn’t actually until 1988 that the Mary Quant Limited Edition Mini was launched.’
However, this desire to chase comfortably-off customers with a small economy car paints a vital picture of London’s population back then. I power the Cooper, induction roar booming around the
barely-trimmed interior, through Notting Hill backstreets towards Holland Park. Scott Walker lived here back when he buzzed to the recording studio blasting Jacques Brel from his customised Van.
A handful of celebrities couldn’t create a culture around a car on their own. The Mini enjoys the cultural resonance it does precisely because, unlike more jet-setting aspects of the Sixties, a lot of ordinary people could buy into it.
Old aristocratic estates were in decline post-world War Two, unable to support themselves financially, and mews that once housed servants tending to the aristocracy’s imposing town addresses were sold off cheaply. They made ideal starter-homes, artists’ studios and workshops for young middle-class couples making a start in London. Small stables designed for horses suited the Mini’s dimensions perfectly. Areas like Portobello, Notting Hill and the King’s Road, with their cheaply-rented Victorian shop units just a 10-minute blast away in a Mini Cooper, were an ideal place to set up a business in step with this new modernist lifestyle, like affordable fashion, unconventional furniture and accessorising cars. It was the uniting of culture with consumerism that truly made the Sixties swing, and with war-babies and early baby-boomers coming of age in a great glut, London inhaled them.
But it didn’t last. No sooner had many of these businesses and young cultural connoisseurs established themselves, London exhaled. Between 1961 and 1991, the city’s population fell by 2.6 million, with the biggest drop coming during the Seventies. Inflation, strikes and industrial decline made inner-city areas undesirable as unemployment climbed towards 3.3 million. The bright young things who’d started businesses in Sixties West London upsized to purpose-built premises on industrial estates or sold up and moved to leafier outer suburbs to bring up families. Car colour choices migrated from vibrant pop-art hues to rural autumnal shades more acceptable on treelined avenues. After Mini sales peaked at 318,000 in 1971, BMC ceded its market position to Ford, with its bigger Cortinas, Capris and Granadas offering a world of slick faux-jet-setting glamour and luxury to these city-fleeing suburbanites, and taking up surprisingly high sales-chart figures given their heft and price. The happy-golucky Mini heyday would seem to be over, especially because the new Ford Escort offered more space and just as much by way of rally-cred and personalisation options for the same kind of price.
And yet, although it later bounced back as a fashion accessory, it would be in that suburbanising high-tar de-luxe era that the Mini fulfilled the purpose Issigonis originally intended for it.
In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, with the Mini the cheapest car you could run, it held fourth place in the UK sales charts for the rest of the Seventies. Development of the Metro at the end of the decade had the effect of amortising production costs, meaning BL no longer had to rely solely on export sales to turn a profit, and by 1982 cut the cost of a basic Mini dramatically, putting it in the sub-£4k bracket along with the likes of the Lada Riva, Skoda Estelle and Yugo 45.
And yet, even with its range stripped of the Cooper’s halo and pared back to Issigonisite austerity, Mini ownership defied stigma. No-one made Mini jokes the way they made Lada jokes. The aura of cool that made the Mini stand apart from its contemporaries when it was new managed to lift budget motoring out of stigmatised misery in the Eighties. Starting with the Renault 5, the rivals who created the supermini sector in the Seventies self-consciously embraced modernist design principles and incorporated showroom personalisation options to give their cars character. The fact that every small, cheap supermini also has to project fun and youthfulness in order to succeed nowadays is testament to the Mini’s lasting cultural legacy.