When she visited London in 1949 as quite a young girl, Piri Halasz looked at the bomb sites, went to Madame Tussaud's, the Tower of London, Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop, and a pub where she remembers having "a dreary serving of watery mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts." Somehow that wasn't enough to discourage her. She remained a complete Anglophile, majored in English literature at Barnard, wrote her senior thesis on T. S. Eliot, and went back last year to find a better England. It was L'Etoile and Ad Lib and the trattorias in Soho -- and a place on King's Road where she could buy a pair of bell-bottom slacks by Foale & Tuffin that made her something of a trend setter back home in New York.

It wasn't necessarily planned that way, but Piri's visits to London were good preparation for writing this week's cover story on the swinging city. She drew more immediately on the work of seven staffers in our London bureau, as well as five U.S. and British photographers. They reported to the slightly jealous eyes of the editors in New York that the project involved four days of "the most concentrated swinging -- discotheques, restaurants, art gallery and private parties, gambling, pub crawling -- that any group of individuals has ever enjoyed or suffered, depending on your point of view."

It was home territory--and yet, in a way, new ground--for Artist Geoffrey Dickinson, whose work for the BBC, Punch and other publications is well known in Britain. "I know this world, this swinging London," he said, discussing the cover assignment. "I have many friends who go to Dolly's and do the whole scene. But I wouldn't say that I am in the scene myself. I wouldn't describe myself as a swinger. So I had a lot of research to do." He prowled from Carnaby Street to King's Road, slipping in and out of boutiques and coffeehouses, among other places, and summed up the scene in a collage technique that includes, as he put it, "bits of just about everything --acrylics, watercolor, chalk, pen and ink, labels."

The story was edited by Edward L. Jamieson, but before he sent it to press, all of the words and pictures came under the knowing eye of Researcher Mary McConachie, who was born just outside London, worked for the British Foreign Office before joining our New York staff in 1964. With all that going on over there, why is Mary, who is still a British citizen, living over here? '"Because," she says, "I like swinging New York."

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