Carnaby Street: The Epicenter Of The Swinging London

Carnaby Street is a pedestrian precinct that lies to the south of Oxford Street and to the east of Regent Street. If you go there (and a lot of tourists do), you will find a green City of Westminster plaque that reads: “John Stephen 1934-2004. Founder of Carnaby Street as world centre for men’s fashion in the 1960s.” Carnaby Street might not have been the “world centre for men’s fashion” for very long,  but it has lived off that reputation ever since. 

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Tour guide Joanna Moncrieff runs a company called Westminster Walks, which includes Carnaby Street in its special “Christmas Lights Tour.” She says that Carnaby Street was actually “quite insignificant” until the 1960s. It was “just a grey backstreet in Soho.” Carnaby Street had existed since the late 17th century. It was named after a building called Karnaby House, although nobody knows the origin of this unusual name. Later the street had a food market, which was mentioned in Benjamin Disraeli’s “political novel” of 1845, Sybil or Two Nations. 

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In the 20th century Carnaby Street was popular with Soho’s gay community, many of whose members gathered round the corner at the Marshall Street Baths. As Joanna Marshall explains in the accompanying interview, things began to change in 1954, when photographer Bill Green opened Vince’s Man Store in Newburgh Street. An early ad featured a young male model called Sean Connery. Another Scotsman, John Stephen (who had trained at “Moss Bros” in Covent Garden) also began to work for Green. Stephen and his boyfriend and partner, Bill Franks, opened their own shop in Beak Street in 1956, but, when the premises were damaged by fire the following year, they moved to Carnaby Street. 

Stephen became “the King of Carnaby Street,” selling fashionable but affordable clothes to mods and later flower children. Young men – and later women –flocked there. John Stephen’s empire began to have financial problems in the 1970s, but by then Carnaby Street had established itself as a tourist destination.

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INTERVIEW: the birth of cool

If Brick Lane in the East End is the coolest street in London these days, then back in the 1960s the place to go was Carnaby Street in the West End. Carnaby Street was first laid out in the late 17th century, but it didn’t become famous until the 20th. It  was located in Soho and was frequented by the area’s gay community, as tour guide Joanna Moncrieff explains:

Joanna Moncrieff (Standard British/London accent): And it was in Newburgh Street, which is parallel with Carnaby Street, in 1954, that a man called Bill Green opened up a clothes shop. It was called Vince’s Clothes. He had been a photographer and he had mainly photographed muscle men-type people, you know, and he had sort of adapted men’s swimming trunks to make them a bit sort of more erotic and then people started asking him, you know, could they could buy these clothes, so he started selling them, and then after a trip to Paris in the early 1950s, he started selling black polo neck jumpers. I mean, it sounds so basic now, but this was the first time that men were able to sort of wear comfortable, casual clothes. So he opened this shop in Newburgh Street in 1954 and then he got an assistant, whose name was John Stephen, and it was John Stephen who changed the face of Carnaby Street. 

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John Stephen was a young Glaswegian who moved to London in his late teens. In 1956 he left the employment of Bill Green and set up his own shop, at 19 Beak Street:

Joanna Moncrieff: John Stephen was younger, so he was more in tune with the pop culture of the day. He gave men hipster trousers, floral shirts, and the clothes were cheap. They weren’t meant to last, they were trendy, just chuck away clothes and buy some more, and within only about a year later, he’d opened another shop round the corner at number 5 Carnaby Street, and by 1966 he had 14 shops in Carnaby Street, Regent Street and other areas – one in Brighton, for instance. And these shops attracted all the pop stars of the day, such as The Beatles, The Kinks, Cliff Richard, they would all go to Carnaby Street to buy their clothes, and John Stephen was the first person to sell collarless suits. The Beatles started wearing these suits, but he sold them first and then all the fans all went to the shops as well, so everyone was sort of wearing these same clothes and you might know The Kinks song the “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” and in that song is the line “The marching Carnabetian army.” 

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But Carnaby Street was the victim of its own success and by the late 1960s it had become a tourist trap. It fell into decline, although it has had a revival in recent years. It’s still mainly a place for tourists, but it’s more tasteful than in previous decades:

Joanna Moncrieff: I have to say Carnaby Street today, it’s a bit too full of chains, chemist’s shops, and it’s lost what it had. It’s never going to regain that, but it’s still a good destination because of the independent shops in the vicinity and they’ve always got really good art installations. They look like lightbulbs upside down. And it just gives a bit of a nice atmosphere, and they always have the best Christmas decorations there. 

For more info about Westminster Walks: http://westminsterwalks.london/