Everyday leisure and northernness in Mass Observation’s Worktown 1937–1939

Snape, Robert ORCID: 0000-0003-4229-0926 (2016) Everyday leisure and northernness in Mass Observation’s Worktown 1937–1939. Journal for Cultural Research, 20 (1). pp. 31-44. ISSN 1479-7585

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Abstract

Much leisure history deals with specific forms of activity or with the macro social and cultural patterns which mark leisure behaviours. However, as historians have turned to the micro-history of the everyday, individuals have become visible as producers and not only consumers of leisure. Mass Observation’s Worktown archive offers unique insight to the leisure lives of Bolton’s working class population between 1937 and 1939. Bound to the culture of the cotton industry and the spatial confines of Bolton, leisure served to form overlapping identities around work and neighbourhood. Everyday leisure accommodated mass cultural forms, while also remaining part of a local northern culture which grew from its industrial environment. The ‘up-close’ nature of the history of the everyday afforded by the Worktown archive provides new insights to leisure practices which become defined not only in terms of activity, but also involve conviviality, conversation and custom. This article argues that leisure was not so much a field of resistance but a sphere in which ordinary people were able to create their own leisure spaces through customary practice, language and an adaptation of employer-based facilities. Everyday working-class leisure was not confined to an illusory escapism of passive consumption but was active and engaged, forming social contexts, shared places and communal activities which helped form a collective consciousness and a sense of social and cultural identity.

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