Working-Class Community in the Age of Affluence

Utilising an oral history case study of sociability and identity in the Yorkshire town of Beverley between the end of the Second World War and the election of Margaret Thatcher’s government, this book challenges this influential narrative. An introductory essay outlines how sociologists and historians understood the complex social, cultural and economic changes of the post-war decades through the prism of affluence, and traces how these changes came to be seen as deleterious to the ‘traditional’ working-class community. The book then proceeds thematically, exploring change across areas of social life including family, neighbourhood, workplace and associational life. _x005F_x000D_