Girl About Town (1967) advises I ‘glorify my glory hole’ with staple-gunned felt. Good Girl Guide (1968), a somewhat different proposition, enjoins me to skulk around at Heathrow airport’s arrival boards, select the nationality of women I most lust after, and ‘follow my quarry’ down to an airport bus (cost 7s 6d). Nicholas Saunders, author of the psychedelic Alternative London (1970), directs me to a Druid Order Workshop run by a septuagenarian homeopath in SE21 where ‘teachings and astral projections’ will ‘help to develop my third eye’.
Bishopsgate Institute occupies a venerable Victorian townhouse near Liverpool Street – all pale green tiles and cornicing – yet it’s chock-a-block with abject filth. Or, rather, the documentation of a London always considered liminal and ‘dirty’: the suffragists and co-op members, pacifists, foot-fetishists and disco femmes that have always given this city life. There are leather whips, for example, from prominent London dominatrixes preserved here for posterity (a nightmare to maintain) and there are delicate embossed suffragist tea sets (a terribly polite means of fundraising) as well as letters written to Women’s Co-op Society members by the great Mahatma Gandhi, who bunked down on the hard floor of their community hall in the 1930s.
The Institute is also home to the most complete collection of historical tourist guides to making merry and getting by in London past and present; a collection that Stefan Dickers, the Institute’s Special Collections and Archives Manager, refers to as ‘the TripAdvisors of their time, and with loads to tell us about the preoccupations of each of these eras’. If they’re not an accurate portrayal of how it might have felt to live in upright Edwardian or silky 60s London, they serve as a fine social history of the fantasies projected onto these smog-choked and rain-lashed city streets.
The collection begins in the Victorian era, when travel guides are a novel category of literature, aimed squarely at the well-to-do incomer, keen to avoid cholera, an undue dose of the clap, or dirtying his frock-coat. Ward, Lock and Co., a publishing company launched in 1864, were category leaders well into the early 20th century, with a series of pompous hard-backed city directories. Of a trip to the football, the 1908 guide opines: ‘It is not so long since “football fever’’ was confined to the north of England, but the epidemic has now taken a firm hold in the south’ and, ‘There is much to see in the “whirlpool” of Charing Cross and its neighbourhood and by adopting some pre-arranged and methodical plan, the visitor can greatly lighten his task.’ (Compass and peasant baton at the ready.) The iterations from 1888 to 1891 are the guides most visitors come to Bishopsgate for, for the descriptions of a ‘teeming, stinky’ Whitechapel in the years Jack the Ripper terrorised east London’s tenements.
Indeed, the 1912 Ward Lock guide schools the reader in venturing anywhere south of the river or east of Bow Bells, and to consider these adventures as charming and fringe poverty porn. ‘In four to six days the diligent visitor will be able to arrange programmes of both the first and second-rate sights, and to spare a morning for a glimpse of south London, including Dickens’ dark Borough.’
It’s in the 60s, however, when paperback guides to London begin to proliferate. Swinging London (1967) hopes to lift the hemline on the city: ‘we can’t promise that you’ll frug with Jean Shrimpton or be personally fitted for your bell bottoms by Mary Quant,’ the guide laments, before launching into a description of the ‘faces’ of swinging London and their favourite brands of snouts. Colin Woodhead, Stetson-wearing shopkeeper and fashion designer Angela Cash are characters apparently lost to posterity, but have no fear, there’s much to be learned if you neck scotch. ‘Most faces smoke Rothmans. In general they prefer hard stuff to long drinks (after whisky the order is vodka, then rum, with gin left to the advertising salesmen to drink, with their tonic), though some of the men drink bitter (usually keg) and some of the girls like wine,’ notes author Karl Dallas.
It’s as a document of rapidly shifting 20th-century gender politics, however, that the guides are at their most illuminating. Betty James penned a series of survival guides in quick succession for women new to the city. 1967’s London and the Single Girl (billed as being ‘for the young girl from 17 upwards plunged suddenly into the icy metropolis after a turbulent upbringing in Pontypridd’) advises how to meet ‘sensitive types’ in Greenwich and how to feed them up on stewed minced beef, as well as offering such timeless wisdoms as, ‘Bottom Men are most virile, Leg Men are the easiest to understand and Bosom Men are just Bosom Men.’
Girl About Town (1968), comes with treats such as the ‘bedsitter slimming diet’ (don’t buy thick soups, breakfast only on kidneys and black coffee). ‘I wish for a start, the magazines would stop centering their romantic fiction around ultra-glamorous girls with top jobs in advertising agencies, who taxi home after work to cute two-bedroom flats, change into dizzy little pure silk-chiffon dresses and wait to be picked up by dreamy men called Garth in E-type Jaguars,’ James writes, exasperatedly. ‘At the other end of the scale, I intend to do something physically dangerous to those men who produce film after film about how “nice girls” get reduced to “little scrubbers” after two months of London debauchery.’
