Remaking Working-Class Community: Sociability, Belonging and ‘Affluence’ in a Small Town, 1930–80

Abstract

Historians' interest in the ways locality shapes and constrains working-class culture has until recently tended to end with the post-war demise of the ‘traditional working-class communities’ thought to have coalesced in British industrial localities from the 1880s to the 1950s. Such communities, it is assumed, were torn apart in the post-war decades by affluence and urban restructuring, paving the way for the privatisation of working-class life. This article reports a historical case study of the small town of Beverley, East Yorkshire, a type of context often overlooked in such narratives. Evidence gathered from extensive oral history research in the town suggests that the three post-war decades were not so much a period of declining community as one in which full employment and a thriving traditional industrial sector brought considerable social stability. Many Beverley residents reported that they been embedded in extensive local networks of family, friends, acquaintances and workmates which underpinned attachment to place. The article argues that instead of accepting contemporary sociological portrayals of this period as one in which working-class community dissolved into individualism, historians need to engage empirically with patterns of local social life in the mid- and later twentieth century and to explore a greater range of urban settings.