British post-war youth culture flourished amid jazz bars, basement clubs and coffee bars, social spaces catering to a new group of young people with small yet expendable incomes. Progenitors of the discotheques that came to define the cultural mythology of Swinging London in the 1960s, these were more than just venues for dancing and live music. Rather, they functioned as meeting places where young people could define and explore their countercultural affiliation. A number of post-war British films about youth culture portray the beat club or expresso bar as an integral feature in advancing subcultural practices. In The Tommy Steele Story (1957), Expresso Bongo (1959), Beat Girl (1959), Sapphire (1959) and The Party's Over (1965), the beat club or coffee bar provides the setting for energetic musical sequences and group expressions of generational disaffiliation, such as jiving, smoking, and intense encounters with rock ‘n’ roll music. Cinematic representations of this early youth culture often use such environments to stress the social problems of juvenile delinquency.

By the mid-1960s, jazz clubs and coffee bars were replaced by discotheques as prominent locations in films about youth culture. Preceding and then briefly overlapping with the emergence of psychedelia as a musical and aesthetic phenomenon, disco theques had, in this period, become increasingly intermedial, merging live and moving image performances such as experimental theatre and dance, light shows, and film and moving slide projections. Although many of these spaces played a tangible role in establishing and developing underground social networks closely connected to mod, rocker, beat and hippy subcultures, they also became part of the popular cultural mythology surrounding Swinging London.

‘Swinging London’ is often mobilised as a critical framework to describe the commercial explosion of youth scenes and fashion and music cultures in mid-1960s London, marking a transitional moment in which interconnected subcultures became a part of the dominant culture, at least in terms of their media exposure.