Summertime in Britain. There’s a wave of street riots; the Labour government’s led by a grey man who nobody seems to like; the Tories’ new female leader is trying on the far right’s clothes; the chancellor says we’ve run out of money; the trade unions aren’t happy; the right-wing media’s in a lather about gay rights; the Israelis are biting back after a Palestinian terrorist attack; America’s gearing up for an election; soul boys are gathering down in Margate; there’s an ultra-right British politician getting far too much coverage for ranting on about immigration; the England cricket team’s in turmoil; and down the pub, someone’s having a party and they’re playing Abba’s Dancing Queen.
Sounds like 2026, right? Yes, but it’s also what was happening during the long, hot summer of 1976. That summer has gone down in the popular memory as an idealised season in an idealised nation. Months of unbroken sunshine, the hottest one ever: all Fab ice lollies by the seaside, or swimming in the lido, or lying on towels in the back garden; kids drawing their names in the melting tarmac and trying not to step on the crazy plague of ladybirds; jolly families queuing up to get their water from a standpipe. And no killjoys banging on about climate change.
Well, that’s all true, as far as it goes. But sustained hot weather has a way of turning high spirits into anger. Violence starts to spike – whether it be the domestic sort behind closed doors, or the public sort in street riots. As my book points out, that perfect summer was studded with violence. And that’s because Britain, then as now, was a country desperately in need of change but with little idea as to which direction it was going to come from.
Britain in the summer of 1976 was dry kindling waiting for a match. There were any number of people with reason to rebel: black people, Asian people, gay people, women. All of them were used to being discriminated against in ways great and small. That summer they would all reach breaking point – be they gay men sick of being harassed by police; Asian youths unwilling to stand by while another of their number was murdered; women refusing to accept being paid less than their male counterparts; or black youths exhausted by being continually stopped and searched.
So in Southall, after Sikh teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar was stabbed to death by a gang of white youths in a racist attack, the supposedly meek and mild local Asian youth rioted for the first time. So on a hot summer night outside a pub in Earl’s Court, gay men decided to defend their turf against police harassment. So in Brentford, the women who worked at the Trico factory stayed out on strike all summer long till they finally won equal pay with the men. So at the Notting Hill Carnival, on the last weekend of this unforgettable summer, black youths fought a pitched battle with the riot police. So in a basement in Soho, London, a band called the Sex Pistols rehearsed, preparing to revolutionise the British music scene.
At the time such incidents seemed to be isolated events – but seen from half a century later, the summer of 1976 emerges as a pivot point in modern British history. It was during those months of drought and 30°C heat that the old Britain of the postwar era – the all-white country with its monolithic class system and its imperial history – began the transformation to a genuinely multicultural Britain, if also an uncertain and divided one. And this change was not one that took place in parliament, but rather on the cricket pitch and in the record shops, in the sun-baked parks and on the overheated streets. That’s why this summer, which began with hippies playing frisbee in the park, would end four months later in blazing riots.
