Street life: The leisure spaces and places of working-class youth in Britain, c.1870-1960

Harrison, Laura

Abstract

One Sunday in early January 1954, the Rev. Peter Stanley, senior curate of St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church in Darlington, County Durham, pronounced in his weekly sermon that the young people parading in the Darlington main streets on the ‘monkey walk’ had turned the town into a ‘flaming jungle’. Father Stanley described to his congregation how ‘every night, and Sundays in particular, the parade starts – with young men and women, mostly teenagers, walking up and down’, going on to proclaim: ‘if you know of a more hybrid collection of spivs, bohunks and yahoos; listless, shifty-eyed, tailor-dummied youths and painted trollops – you would surprise me’. Out and about in the streets, young people moved around and across the urban environment in search of sociability, fun and relationships, and used central streets and public spaces to meet with friends and potential partners. Informal street-based leisure continued to play a central role in the social lives of many of the young working class, and offered an alternative to an evening at the cinema or a night of dancing. Focusing on the importance of the street as a site of youthful working-class social interaction, this chapter takes one particular social activity, the monkey walk, to examine how the young working class were able to carve out a space of their own in the face of ongoing hostility from other residents and observers.

• Online Publication Date: Nov 4, 2024
• Publication Date: Nov 4, 2024
• Deposit Date: May 30, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: May 5, 2026
• Publisher: Routledge
• Book Title: Doing Working-Class History: Research, Heritage, and Engagement
• Chapter Number: 16
• ISBN: 9780367361341
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11837641
• Publisher URL: https://www.routledge.com/Doing-Working-Class-History-Research-Heritage-and-Engagement/Betts-Harrison-Price/p/book/9781032882963
• Contract Date: May 16, 2024