Celebrate 50 years of fashion and music with a unique exhibition ‘Carnaby Street: 1960 – 2010′.  Carnaby Street is one of the best know fashion streets in London and is a short 10 minute walk from UIC. It’s a great area to explore – on the edge of Soho and next to Oxford Street and Regent Street – the shopping centre of London! Minutes from Libertys and the London Palladium too! This year Carnaby Street is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition and photographs to celebrate its contribution to London life – and to some of the people who have played their part in making it famous – Beatles, Rolling Stones, Hendrix, Sex Pistols and so on! Carnaby Street was built in the mid 1650s but really became famous as the centre of the swinging sixties 300 years later! You can see the exhibition anytime – check out details on their website. . The exhibition can also help you get a sense of its past – when it was the fashion centre of swinging London in the 1960s. It was one of the first places to have fashion shops for men (boutiques!) in the 1960s – the first boutique being opened by John Stephen in 1958 – and you can see a plaque outside his first shop. Carnaby Street is now the home to dozens of fashion shops, cafes and bars – a really vibrant and interesting area. Although most of the original 60s shops have gone now  you can still find shops to remind you of its past – alongside more modern fashion chains.  A little more obscure and perhaps a little more interesting – for example Sherry’s where you can buy genuine 1960s fashion – one of the few places still selling these kinds of clothes. It really is a great place to spend a few hours wandering around – looking at the shops and small boutiques and having a drink! Soho is only a few streets away and still one of the most interesting and original places in London – still pretty unspoiled compared to other areas which have been re-developed a lot more. So just make sure you add this into your tip to London.

Watch this interview about the history of Carnaby Street and the exhibition.

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