The short life and swinging times of London Life Magazine

Fifty years ago this month, a magazine called London Life burst on to the scene and burned brightly for the briefest of moments. The magazine rose from the ashes of Tatler, which had been a flagship for six decades but by 1965 was considered stiff, starched and passe. Lucinda Gosling, from the Mary Evans Picture Library, looks back on London Life's time on the newsstands.

Today, all that is left of this unique slice of the 60s is five volumes bound in unassuming pale blue on a shelf in the Mary Evans Picture Library, part of the Illustrated London News archive. Yet even the briefest flick through any one of these volumes is an invitation to enter a world so quintessentially "60s" it would be cliched if it were not so cool.

Four pages of photographs of the London Life party, held in the newly opened Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower) in May 1966, is visual evidence of a guest list - David Bailey, Jane Asher, Nubar Gulbenkian, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Mick Jagger - that reads like a Who's Who of the Swinging '60s.

Image copyrightIllustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library

Image captionDavid Bailey, Chrissie Shrimpton (sister of model Jean Shrimpton), and Mick Jagger at the 1966 office party

The magazine's editor was Mark Boxer, cartoonist, social commentator and founding editor of the Sunday Times magazine, with a young man called David Puttnam as managing editor. Photographic contributions came from Terence Donovan, Ron Traeger and Brian Duffy, while Gerald Scarfe caricatured The Beatles in one issue and Bailey in another.

The main fashion editor was Peggy Roche, who was hired from Elle magazine in Paris, though Jean Shrimpton was an occasional guest fashion editor with her male counterpart, Terence Stamp, and a young artist by the name of Ian Dury drew a picture of Tony Bennett for one of the front covers.

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