Place and Belonging

Question 1

Place and Belonging Primary Literature

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969) introduction and chapter 4, ‘To be a farmer’s boy?’

Answer 1

Provenance: Chapter from a book published in 1969, which focused on a Suffolk Village - a picture of a rural life in turmoil. Akenfield is a made-up placename based partly upon Akenham (a small village just north of Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk) and probably partly on Charsfield, a village just outside the small town of Wickham Market, Suffolk, about ten miles north-east of Akenham. Was seen to stoke ‘exceptional social interest’, and had ‘unforgettable pathos’ in handling ‘ordinary lives’. Became strongly sentimental.

Blythe was a novelist, responsible for editing Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy for the Penguin Classics series. He spent the winter of 1966–67 in what he called “a kind of natural conversation with all three generations” of his neighbors, capturing their thoughts on “farming, education, welfare, class, religion and indeed life and death.” The book was a bestseller and remained in constant print as a Penguin Modern Classic. Originally classified as ‘sociology/anthropology’, due to its blending of ethnography.

Blythe wrote it in the style of an eyewitness reporter, as traveler with a fresh eye and a great ear for language.

Source Legacy: Extremely impactful. Later became a film directed by Peter Hall, known simply as “Akenfield”, in 1974. Described as a work of rural realism.

Broader Historical Context: In the late 1960s, Akenfield was struggling to cope with the effects of the most dramatic changes to have affected agricultural communities for generations. Farming suffered first and foremost - the village was impacted by an influx of new arrivals not performing an agricultural function.

Key Contentions Around Subject: The role of nostalgia in the crafting of the narrative, the changing face of the economy,

Silences: The representativeness of Suffolk compared to the nation.

Stylistics: Nostalgia, first-person perspective, pastoral imagery.

Summary of Source Content: Provides an overview for the declining role of the farmer in the region, looking toward union statistics, the role of mechanisation, and the draw factor of higher wages in industry.

Question 2

Place and Belonging Primary Literature

Lynsey Hanley - Estates Extract

Answer 2

• Provenance: Writer from the Guardian, self-consciously socially mobile critique of class division. Grew up near the M6 in Birmingham, known as “The Wood”. Hanley herself was lucky and escaped the grim estate she grew up on, which she describes (memorably) in passages that read more like Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood or Andrea Ashworth’s Once in a House on Fire than as a work of sociology.
• Broader Historical Context: By 1979, nearly half the British population lived in local authority housing; then came Thatcherism and the Right to Buy, and now only 12 per cent of us do.

Less nostalgic, more objective - Hanley grew up in the 80s - themes of displacement. Mentions several times that she does not have a nostalgic tie to the place where she lived and learned. Harks back to a time which she does not feel nostalgic to. Hanley mentions the feeling of going mad in the estate. Inner city estate, she is now suburban. Homogeneity was disruptive to the population. Hanley’s focus on security and the police-state, forms of insecurity are important.

• Key Contentions Around Subject: Homogeneity of living conditions.
• Stylistics: Hanley inspired by Hoggart - wanting to update Hoggart. Hanley is extremely performative, and dramatic - ‘escape’, ‘I’m atypical’ etc. Both in Hanley’s and Hoggart’s - people are static. Very influenced by Lorna Sage.
• Summary of Source Content: Starts with overview of houses in The Wood, describes the interior of a kitchen (mocking IKEA), the general council estate, and then the winds from the motorway. This proceeds into discussion of transport, incl. Ford Focuses and KAs, the labyrinthine nature of the estate, including suspect alleyways. Looks towards the houses, jumps back to the 1960s, and touches on the role of Birmingham in the housing shortfall. This proceeds to look at Crossman’s perspective on rehousing of inner-city poor. Outlines that allocation in Birmingham (being easy), and the trouble of people integrating into their new environment. Discusses fish and chips, slates for not being healthy. Moves onto discuss local police officers, the local amenities, education, shopping centres, bingo halls. Progresses to a discussion of being depressed aged 17
• Quotes: “designed by a cyborg”; “How can you fight something as concrete, as concretey, as this?”; “this is no longer a society in which you can be proud, still less be seen to be proud, that your home has been provided by the state”;

Question 3

Place and Belonging Secondary Literature

What does Brooke argue in Space, Emotions and the Everyday?

Answer 3

• Examines two case studies -> Wandsworth childcare grant in 1982 and racism in Tower Hamlets, 1984. Argues that an intersection of emotion and space. The acquisition of property was central to the aims of the nursery in Wandsworth. On the Lincoln estate, physical space was the point of conflict between tenants of different ethnicities and the catalyst for deeply felt fears and anger.
• “An affective ecology surrounded such moments. Emotions such as fear, anger, hatred, empathy and love circulated and accumulated around particular spaces such as childcare centres and housing estates and everyday experiences such as looking after children and dwelling.”
• In this way, ‘emotions’, as Thomas C. Buchanan has written recently, ‘were basic to claims for enhanced rights’.
• The report noted an ‘alarming level of harassment in London’ as ‘an increasingly serious problem’ and drew parallels between the current situation and late nineteenth-century anti-semitism in the East End and what was called the ‘‘‘paki bashing’’ epidemic of the winter 1969-70’
• The experience of physical violence and fear underscored the collective identity of Asian Britons. Given the statistics showing that Asian Britons were nearly fifty times more likely to experience this than white Britons, this was, therefore, an experience that defined their identity. It reshaped the contours of ordinary life, if we think of the account of men shopping together in taxis to protect themselves, children afraid to play outside, and women afraid to leave their flats.

Question 4

Place and Belonging Secondary Literature

What does Joe Moran argue in Early Cultures of Gentrification?

Answer 4

• Details how the ‘frontier middle class’ gentrifiers reshaped working class environments, picking up on silent power struggles between residents and incomers. The new middle class brought with it new cuisine and social practice. Knockers through redesigned the interior to integrate the kitchen into the eating area - liberating the housewives, but denigrating the likes of the au pair. The middle class also sought what Thorstein Veblen called ‘conspicuous thrift’.

Question 5

Place and Belonging Secondary Literature

What does Selina Todd argue in Phoenix Rising

Answer 5

• Coventry’s people experienced heavy wartime aerial bombing but subsequently benefited from near full employment and rapid rebuilding. Liverpool’s residents remained heavily reliant on casual and low-paid work on the docks and experienced slow urban redevelopment.
• Historians have pointed out that postwar social reconstruction plans embodied suspicion of certain groups outside the white, nuclear family. New technologies and reconstruction plans embodied a prewar suspicion of working-class teenagers, whose activities within city centers were strictly policed.
• The town and city plans of the 1940s were never more than partially enacted. The government quickly reneged on promises of extensive financial support, in part because the need to build new housing took money away from the city centers.
• Local government failed to offer a strong commitment to civic reconstruction, and many working-class people in Liverpool felt no strong sense of entitlement either to the civic and cultural life of the city center’s theaters and political arenas or to its rundown public spaces.
• The destruction of people’s homes during the war—and later during slum clearance —was often experienced as traumatic, because bombing and clearance destroyed settings possessing intimate significance.
• ““Phoenix-like, [Birmingham] has risen from the wartime blitz,” wrote E. Jukes to the Daily Mirror in 1967.”
• Popular discontent focused on the inefficiencies of public transportation. Historians suggest that enhanced mobility was a key feature of the modern city. Joe Moran states that the expansion of the road network and car production in postwar Britain granted a new social freedom to ordinary people: “[C]heap family saloons . . . made even the working classes more mobile” during the 1950s
• “My city is supersonic,” wrote Mr. McHugh of Coventry. His home was in Wyken, a predominantly working-class suburb with a large development of new council housing. “New precincts to shop in. New art galleries . . . New flats and flowers. . . . We are a city with new ideas.”
• The late 1960s and 1970s witnessed the exposure of corruption among certain high-profile architects and municipal politicians. This tarnished the reputation of urban redevelopment, raising suspicions that planning was motivated by the self-interest of private investors and their political cronies, rather than community concerns.
• The rebuilding of the civic centres was widely recognized as an achievement of ordinary working-class people, and the rebuilt centres were understood as places that should and could provide for their needs.
• That vision of an alternative city, and the understanding of social justice that underpins it, endured long after the “boom cities” of 1967 had become bywords for urban decline.