“Stumbling towards something better”: memorializing the Sixties and the British underground press

Abstract

The exhibition, The British Underground Press of the Sixties, held at London’s A22 Gallery brought together some of the most important underground publications of the Sixties, such as International Times (IT), Oz, Friends/Frendz, and Black Dwarf and featured some 300 covers and around 50 posters, flyers, artworks, and related ephemera. Organized by gallery owner and curator James Birch and the prolific writer on the Sixties counterculture, Barry Miles, the exhibition set out to commemorate the British, or rather the London, underground press and its pivotal role in the emergence of the counterculture and was designed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the so-called “Summer of Love.” The exhibition was a heady visual feast with the publications forming a panorama of the counterculture, a materialization of its ideology, and record of the times. Surveying the material on display