A CAPITAL IDEA Marking the 60th birthday of the mighty Mini with a tour of swinging London
The Mini was born for the congested streets of the capital, so where better to celebrate its 60th birthday?
Join us for a magical – albeit not so mysterious – tour of 1960s London. This is no open-top double-decker bus ride to famous tourist sights such as Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London; instead, we’ll be searching out the places that were at the forefront of ‘Swinging Sixties’ culture. Oh, and we won’t be going by bus. Small is beautiful when it comes to driving around London: it was in the ’60s, and it most certainly is in 2019.
A small vehicle? Then it has to be a Mini. And what better time to celebrate the influence of Alec Issigonis’ groundbreaking tiddler’s contribution to the decade than the year in which it turns 60 itself? Owned by fellow motoring journalist Richard Bremner, ‘our’ car is a 1963 Austin Mini – its original ‘Se7en’ tag having been dropped the year before – bought new by the lady whose name is on the logbook ahead of his. It is totally original: the Bluemel’s numberplates have been on it from new, the Champion sparkplug caps were factory-fitted and the wiring is as it was when the car left the Cowley works. Only the slightly worn carpets, beginning to lift at the edges, betray its 56 years and 26,000 miles.
Coincidentally, I am the same age – albeit born the year before in the summer of ’62, eight weeks before the Cuban missile crisis kicked off. Climb aboard, and there’s a surprising amount of room in the back – not for nothing was the British Motor Corporation baby’s technically advanced packaging seen as a new benchmark, its engine-over-transmission, front-wheel-drive layout freeing a remarkable quantity of space inside for a car with such a tiny footprint.
We’re starting our tour in Chelsea. I’m not a big fan of the Big Mac, but the Mcdonald’s on the King’s Road is the site of the famous Chelsea Drugstore. Inspired by Le Drugstore on the Boulevard St Germain in Paris, The Chelsea Drugstore was designed by architect Antony Cloughly and designer Colin Golding, its exterior clad with Travertine and brushed steel. The Golden Arches bring it into the noughties, but otherwise the façade is the same as it was when the store opened in 1968.
An emporium of record shops, coffee bars and various other outlets, the Drugstore even had a service called ‘The Flying Squad’ that enabled customers to place an order by telephone and have their purchases delivered by purple-catsuitclad girls riding motorbikes… Rather more glamorous than today’s Deliveroo. The Drugstore also features in The Kinks’ song Did Ya and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Just a few hundred metres further, on the corner of the King’s Road and Markham Square, is another fast-food outlet. It’s called Joe & The Juice and today serves up smoothies and other right-on beverages. In the 1960s, however, you would have come here to buy clothes from Bazaar, the shop owned and run by fashion icon
Mary Quant. It’s debatable whether Quant actually invented the miniskirt, but she certainly named it, inspired by her favourite car.
People didn’t own and drive Minis in London because style leaders such as Quant had them, but because they fitted so well into tight streets and mews. Unlike the Bentley Bentayga behemoths that are a dime a dozen in Chelsea today – the gas guzzler providing a stark contrast to the compact car whose design was inspired by the Suez Crisis and the ensuing fuel shortage.
In 1966, an old friend of mine called Vic was studying aeronautical engineering at the Chelsea College of Science and Technology on the King’s Road. Like many who hung out in Chelsea at the time, Vic was from a comfortable background. At home he had a new AC Cobra, but for London and college he had a Radford-converted Mini. His wife, Anne, a top ’60s model, owned a standard example.
Back aboard our 848cc example we’re off towards the West End. The Mini is remarkably easy to drive. For such a small engine, the longserving A-series has an impressive amount of torque – albeit with peak power of just 33bhp. It’s not difficult to pull away in second gear, which is a relief because there’s no synchromesh on first and minimising the ‘wand’-operated gearchanges can only be a good thing. The steering is light and the turning circle tight, the latter making the Mini such a perfect town car – as well as contributing to the nimble nature that made it a surprise star of both track and rally stage. If we were making this tour in another ’60s icon, a Jaguar E-type, it would be a much more tiring and worrying drive, especially in the colourful congestion of the West End.
En route we cruise past The Chelsea Arts Club in Old Church Street. Founded in 1891, the club was – and still is – a hangout for free-thinkers, eccentrics and creative outsiders. Sir Peter Blake, Pop Artist and creator of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, is a member, and the exterior of the building is covered in graffiti created by regulars.
The next stop is a very special place indeed: 263-267 Old Brompton Road, better known as the Troubadour. This coffee house and live music venue was founded in ’54 and is still going strong. It was the first place in the UK where Bob Dylan performed, while Led Zeppelin, Paul Simon and Jimi Hendrix have all jammed on its stage. But the most wonderful thing about the Troubadour is that, despite its baroque style, it is constantly moving forward, far from being a ‘themed restaurant’ such as the Hard Rock Café franchise. Today you can eat, drink and watch new bands in one of London’s jewels.
The traffic gets thicker as we turn towards Mayfair and the shoppers’ havens of Regent and Oxford Streets. On our way we take a detour to loop around Belgrave Square, home to many foreign embassies, as a tribute to C&SC contributor, racer and bon viveur (not to mention very much a partaker in the Swinging Sixties) Alain de Cadenet, who reputedly established the Belgrave Square lap record at the wheel of his 1970 Brabham BT33 Formula One car.
Our destination is the street that is famous around the world for tailoring, Savile Row. My dad worked in number 20 throughout the 1950s and ’60s, as a sales representative for a textile mill in Devon. Born in 1915, he was one of the last bowler hat-wearing, rolled umbrella,
‘The steering is light and the turning circle tight, making the Mini a perfect town car and surprise star of track and rally stage’
pinstripe-suited businessmen in London. It’s not unlikely that he’d have been a figure of some amusement to the occupants of 3, Savile Row, just a few doors down. Number 3 was the headquarters of Apple Corps, The Beatles’ music publishing company, and on its roof the Fab Four played their final concert on 30 January 1969 – though I don’t recall dad mentioning it when he got home from work that night.
Our Mini is attracting an enormous amount of attention, all of it positive. A gentleman who appears to be temporarily lacking in permanent accommodation, judging by the impromptu shelter in a doorway behind him, rushes up. “Sixty years of the Mini,” he shouts with glee. “I only told you to blow the bloody doors off!”
If the Mini made sense for 1960s London traffic, it doubly does so today. We can park in tiny spaces, we can open its doors without them being knocked off by passing SUVS, and we can make our own lanes through the traffic. The ride, on Alex Moulton’s rubber-cone suspension (replaced by the long-serving Hydrolastic a year after this car was built), is bouncy but supple enough to deal with the capital’s pothole-scarred surface – as long as you avoid its tiny 10in wheels being swallowed up by the larger ones.
Around the corner from Savile Row is Clifford Street. Today, no 17 is home to an art dealer specialising in oriental antiquities, but in the ’60s it was the home of Mr Fish. If you were after a serving of cod and chips, you would have been out of luck. If you wanted some cutting-edge fashion, however, you were in the right place. Here, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Lord Snowdon and other fashion leaders would come to fill their wardrobes and consult with proprietor Michael Fish.
From Mayfair we point the Mini’s stubby snout north, crossing Regent Street and entering Soho. This is the heart of 1950s and ’60s bohemia; of coffee bars, drinking clubs and music venues; of vice, too, but not then the seedy strip clubs of the ’70s. We cruise past Ronnie Scott’s jazz club at 47 Frith Street. It opened in nearby Gerard Street in 1959, but moved to the current site in ’65 and remains a top night out.
We’re not allowed to drive along Oxford Street, but at 165 the famous Marquee Club was founded. By 1964 it had moved to 90 Wardour Street, where it became one of the hottest venues in London. Pink Floyd – whose drummer Nick Mason drove a Cooper – had a Sunday afternoon residency in their early years; the Stones, Fleetwood Mac, The Who and virtually every member of British rock royalty played here.
Just before we leave Soho we pass the famous London Palladium. Coincidentally, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat is currently playing – this was the first successful musical from the creative fountain of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, opening in 1968. More pertinent to our tour, however, is the fact that
Paddy Hopkirk, Henry Liddon and their Mini Cooper ‘S’, EJB 33, appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium with Bruce Forsyth and Tommy Cooper just days after their giant-killing win on the 1964 Rallye Monte-carlo.
A year earlier, on 13 October ’63, The Beatles headlined the same show; 18 million people watched, putting the band on the radar of Britain’s broadsheet press. Yet it was a journalist at the tabloid Daily Mirror who a few days after the show coined the word ‘Beatlemania’.
Every member of the Fab Four owned a Mini at one point or another, but their much-modified examples – customised by Radford and Hooper – were a far cry from this fantastic survivor. Inside, there’s a floor-mounted starter, sliding side windows, a simple pull-cord for the doorhandle and the trademark central speedometer above a usefully long shelf. Today it can hold a mobile phone, but it would once have housed the obligatory cigarettes. The simple dial features fuel, oil pressure and temperature gauges, the latter occasionally flickering ominously towards ‘H’. There’s plenty of heat coming into the cabin, too, but those sliding windows let in a good breeze to prevent it from becoming uncomfortably hot inside.
Back south of Regent Street and into Mayfair we pass the blue plaque on the wall of 23 Upper Brook Street. George Frideric Handel resided at number 25 in the 18th century, but another musical genius lived in the upstairs flat at no 23: Johnny Allen Hendrix, better known as Jimi.
It’s tucked away and not easy to find, but off King Street in St James we find Masons Yard and in a corner no 13, The Scotch of St James. Still a nightclub following a 2012 relaunch after 25 years of closure, The Scotch was opened on 14 July 1965 and swiftly became the go-to venue for London’s most swinging occupants. On 24 September 1966, fresh from arrival at Heathrow airport, a young Hendrix played live here for the first time in the UK. That evening he met Kathy Etchingham, who became his girlfriend and secured that flat in Upper Brook Street.
It’s getting warmer in the Mini, but the car itself is performing flawlessly. It wasn’t designed for traffic this dense, or sitting stationary for so long, but despite the temperature gauge’s needle doing a Mexican wave, the A-series engine is not overheating.
We have one final place to visit on our tour, and it’s the best-known of all London’s ’60s cultural landmarks: a pedestrian crossing. Not just any crossing, of course, but the one outside Abbey Road studios, as featured on The Beatles’ album cover by the same name. If you want to be pedantic (and disappoint the dozens of tourists taking selfies outside the famous EMI studio), the crossing is not in exactly the same place as it was when John, Paul, George and Ringo were photographed by Iain Macmillan on 8 August 1969, but it’s near enough.
We’ve only scratched the surface of the capital’s ’60s sites on our tour, but perhaps more important is the fact that London is still a great centre for music, culture, food and entertainment. And our little Austin Mini makes an even more efficient means of transport in 2019 than it did in the ’60s. It feels an injustice to have had to pay the Congestion Charge for a vehicle that takes up so little space.
‘There’s plenty of heat coming in, but the sliding windows let in a good breeze to prevent it from becoming uncomfortable’