I’m as social and cultural historian of modern Britain with particular interests in classed experiences and identities; urban change, place and belonging and the role of collective or social memories in shaping identities. Recent research analyses the impact of suburbanisation, slum clearance and gentrification on working class household-economies, patterns of sociability and spatial practices. It includes a pioneering account of the role of council house sales and allocations policies in the privatisation and residualisation of council housing prior to the Right-to-Buy legislation of the Thatcher years. This research will be published by Manchester University Press in early 2012 as a monograph entitled The Mid-Twentieth Century English Working Class: Identity, Community and Social Memory.

 As part of the CRESC theme Trajectories of Participation and Inequality I am developing several research projects. My current research on memory, class and belonging explores the role of affect in shaping accounts of changes in English working class communities. In particular I’m exploring the extent to which cultural feelings such as melancholy, nostalgia, loss, sadness and joy shape accounts of neighbourhoods subject to slum clearance and gentrification. With colleagues at CRESC, Sussex and Birkbeck I am setting up an interdisciplinary network on working class neighbourhoods in modern Britain. We would love to hear from researchers in any discipline who would like to be involved. Secondly, I am analysing data collected by Mass Observation to explore post-war class identifications and the degree to different models of society and inequality (dichotomous, triadic, hierarchical; pecuniary, cultural) had popular currency.  A third collaborative project analyses the British experience of modernity through the neglected post-1945 work of documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings.