Stephen Brooke

Stephen Brooke, London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Stephen Brooke’s London, 1984 offers a complex and manifold social and political history of a time and place in deep tension. By varying perspectives and scales the author has written a history of a struggle that is reconstructed with eloquence and rigour.

The history of London in the first half of the 1980s could be summarily defined as a conflict between the city and the state, in other words the struggle between the Greater London Council (GLC), chaired by the Labour Party’s Ken Livingston, and the British government, led by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Was London a social city or a market city? Through a series of finely crafted case studies, written with elegance and conviction, Brooke analyses institutions, associations and populations not only in terms of their polarisations, but also, and above all, in terms of their initiatives, successes and failures in creating a society that is less unequal and more forward-looking. On the one hand, he explores efforts to forge an inclusive social democracy that recognises the rights and demands of women, homosexuals, disabled people and ethnic minorities. On the other, those promoting a neo-liberal approach that interprets all forms of social investment as an obstacle to economic prosperity. By focusing on one year the author succeeds in highlighting, at ground level and almost on a day-to-day basis, the new social actors who succeeded, at least for a while, in making themselves heard and in taking action. This is a masterly reconstruction of London politics in the 1980s, supported by an extensive bibliography and, above all, by a remarkable analysis of a wide range of testimonies, including parliamentary debates, government publications, polemical pamphlets and brochures, press reports and interviews with leading figures of the period.

Brooke’s book is particularly pertinent in these worrying times. If democracy, he reminds us, is never a definitive victory and its gains, in the end, are always fragile, in the face of Goliath, David can still stand up: a very strong power never controls all fronts, and democratic ideals can still be defended and realized by the actors themselves, no matter how small they may be.

Due to a conflict of interest, the decision of the jury was entrusted to a sub-committee.

SHORTLIST (in alphabetical order):

• Jacob Blanc, The Prestes Column: An Interior History of Modern Brazil. Duke University Press, 2024.
• Stephen Brooke, London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City. Oxford University Press, 2024.
• Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle Against Thalidomide. Oxford University Press, 2024.
• Matthew Neufeld, Early Modern Naval Health Care in England, 1650-1750. McGill Queen’s University Press, 2024.
• Phi-Van Nguyen, A Displaced Nation: The 1954 Evacuation and its Political Impact on the Vietnam Wars. Cornell University Press, 2024.