Golden daze: 50 years on from the Summer of Love

Fifty years ago this summer there was talk of revolution. Protests against the Vietnam war were popping up all over the US, the civil rights movement had found its voice and a new vision of the world, fuelled by free love, psychedelics and rock ’n’ roll, was being embraced. It was in San Francisco, in a small neighbourhood called Haight Ashbury, where it found its perfect form.

The Haight, named after the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in north central San Francisco, became the home of alternative living in America. Born out of the Beat Generation of the 50s, with its writers like and who railed against the conventionality and materialism of their time, a new generation of bohemians – no more than a few hundred artists, activists and musicians including the and – began congregating in this small enclave of the Bay area. They put on parties and experimented, with communal living, psychological transcendence and a rejection of material values. It was, for a while, a kind of utopia, the antithesis of the war they were protesting against and the inequality they saw in the deep south. were on the airwaves, was playing guitar,