Much of the scholarly study of youth culture in twentieth-century Britain has been concentrated on the decades of the 1950s and 1960s and has been conducted by experts in cultural and media studies, and by the interpreters of popular music and fashion. David Fowler is an exception in his chronological and methodological concerns, with their focus on the period between the wars and its firm historical empiricism. In his first book, The first teenagers: the lifestyle of young wage-earners in interwar Britain (1995), he very effectively demolished the idea that the youthful wage consumerism of the age of the Teddy Boy was a new social phenomenon, by showing how it had a mirror image in the prosperous parts of southern Britain among the young in work. In this volume, essentially a collection of essays spinning out of his other research projects over the last ten years, he returns to the theme of identifying how diverse and ambiguous is the concept of youth culture. Indeed, the volume would probably have been better entitled Youth and culture in modern Britain … as the essays are not closely integrated one with another, nor is any over-arching interpretation attempted. The final chapter is short and pushes some of the conclusions of the earlier essays a little too hard.

The value of the volume lies in its variety of topics and the broader questions the author suggests. Three are particularly interesting. David Fowler's most recent work on Rolf Gardiner leads him to focus on those middle-class, sometimes highly educated, youthful fraternities of the interwar period, a theme capable of wider examination within the churches and universities and among the more free-wheeling organizations like the Rover Scouts, Youth Hostellers and Ramblers. The second derives from the author's work on the history of youth in Northern Ireland and identifies the continuing importance in the sphere of youthful social life provided by church organizations such as the YMCA, again a theme that could be interestingly pursued across the United Kingdom as a whole. Thirdly, David Fowler looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the scholarship on the 1960s in relation to youth. He points out how concentrated it is on London, and how different provincial experience was likely to have been, where the prewar ‘palais’ – such as the Glen in Bristol – was more likely to have been the site of youthful exuberance than any version of the King's Road. He also shows how unconcerned were the authorities in relation to student disturbance, with that old realist, James Callaghan, as Home Secretary, seeing it largely as middle-class self-indulgence. Again more work, on a nationally comparative basis, would be worthwhile in this area. Finally, the author identifies the now unfashionable role of class in understanding the 1960s, pointing out how many of those involved in the popular-music business came from relatively prosperous and educated backgrounds, and how the Liverpool Lads may have been a uniquely talented exception to the more mundane rule.

Overall, this is an interesting and suggestive volume which, by implication at least, brings into question the book's own term ‘youth culture’ in the title, and also whether, rather than being a social reality, youth culture is more a series of relationships over space and time: often important in terms of an individual's personal development but not to be separated from the wider societies of which it is part, locally, nationally and globally.