»All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go«?

Abstract

Based on an analysis of streets and entertainment venues, the article stresses the importance of post-war changes in the urban environment for the emergence of 1950s British youth culture. It explains how and why young people in Britian in this period developed conventions and modes of self-presentation such as "coolness" and overt enthusiasm as face-saving and socializing strategies, thus creating a distinct own social worldwhich was viewed and criticized by adults and authorities as the culture of a counterworld. The article acknowledges the creativity of young people in making up their own conventions and modes of being, but argues that their influence on wider social and cultural change was limited; rather than seeing young people of the 1950s as countercultural pioneers, the article suggests that they appear to have been inheritors of late nineteenth-century mass culture.