by around 1963, the mod subculture had gradually accumulated the identifying symbols that later came to be associated with the scene, such as scooters, amphetamine pills and R&B music.^[14]While clothes were still important at that time they could be ready-made. Dick Hebdige wrote the term mod covered a number of styles including the emergence of Swinging London, though to him it has come to define Melly's working class clothes-conscious teenagers living in London and south England in the early to mid 1960's. Mary Anne Long argues that "first hand accounts and contemporary theorists point to the Jewish upper-working or middle-class of Londons east end and suburbs.Simon Frith asserts that the mod subculture had its roots in the 1950's beatnik coffee bar culture, which catered to art school students in the radical Bohemian scene in London.^[16] Steve Sparks, who claims to be one of the original mods, agrees that before mod became commercialized, it was essentially an extension of the beatnik culture: "It comes from ‘modernist’, it was to do with modern jazz and to do with Sartre" and existentialism.Sparks argues that "Mod has been much misunderstood ... as this working-class, scooter-riding precursor of skinheads.

Coffee bars were attractive to British youths because, in contrast to typical pubs, which closed at about 11pm, they were open until the early hours of the morning. Coffee bars had jukeboxes, which in some cases reserved space in the machines for the customers' own records. In the late 1950s, coffee bars were associated with jazz and blues, but in the early 1960s, they began playing more R&B music. Frith notes that although coffee bars were originally aimed at middle-class art school students, they began to facilitate an intermixing of youths from different backgrounds and classes. At these venues, which Frith calls the "first sign of the youth movement", young people would meet collectors of R&B and blues records, who introduced them to new types of African-American music, which the teens were attracted to for its rawness and authenticity. As the mod subculture grew in London during the early-to-mid 1960s, tensions would often arise between the mods, often riding highly decorated motor scooters, and their main rivals, the rockers, a British subculture who favored rockabilly, early rock'n'roll, café racer motorcycles and leather jackets, and considered the mods effeminate, because of their interest in fashion.^[18] Violent clashes would often ensue between the two groups.^[18] This period was later immortalized by songwriter Pete Townshend, in the Who's 1973 concept album, Quadrophenia

However, after 1964, clashes between the two groups largely subsided, as mod expanded and came to be accepted by the larger youth generation in England as a symbol of all that was new. It was during this time that London became a mecca for rock music, with popular bands such as The Who and The Small Faces appealing to a largely mod audience, as well as the preponderance of hip fashions, in a period often referred to as Swinging London.