From utopian dreams to Soho sleaze: the naked history of British nudism

A new book details how nudism began as a movement of intellectuals, feminists and artists, only to be suppressed by the state. But our attitudes to nakedness also tell us a lot about ourselves

When Annebella Pollen was 17, she left behind her strict Catholic upbringing for the life of a new-age hippy, living in a caravan and frolicking naked among the standing stones of Devon, while earning a living by modelling for life-drawing classes. That early experience, followed by a relationship with a bric-a-brac dealer, shaped her later life as an art historian. I'm very interested in things that are culturally illegitimate," says Pollen, who now teaches at the University of Brighton. A lot of my research has been looking at objects that are despised."

Foraging trips with her partner to car-boot sales alerted her to a rich seam of 20th-century nudist literature that is still emerging from the attics of middle England: magazines whose wholesome titles - Sun Bathing Review or Health & Efficiency - concealed a complex negotiation with both public morality and the British weather. This is the subject Pollen has picked for her latest book Nudism in a Cold Climate, which tracks the movement from the spartan 1920s through the titillating 50s, when the new mass media whipped up a frenzy of moral anxiety, to the countercultural 60s and 70s, when the founding members were dying off and it all began to look a bit frowsty.