ABSTRACT
After the austerity of the immediate post-war period class discourse, like race discourse, began to focus on Englishness as a unitary category based on a common private and domestic life. By the mid1950s home was identified as the site of a new affluence in a discourse about class which spoke of classlessness. Charles Curran, for example, writing in 1956, characterized the development of a "new estate" of affluent workers as a "classless zone, neither proletarian nor bourgeois" which had "turned its back on the first, but ... does not wish to assimilate to the second". 1 It was an estate whose affluence was associated especially with new housing estates, sometimes in new towns, and the array of television aerials decorating these estates. In Curran's view these developments were of enormous significance - "the most far-reaching change since the coming of industrialism".
