ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the social and cultural impact of commercial leisure on the voluntary sector. Leisure interest groups have existed for many centuries. It was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, that there was a proliferation of clubs and societies concerned with recreation. By the inter-war period the attempt to inculcate the working class with notions of controlled leisure had faded into the background. Working men’s clubs and miners’ institutes show that the working class could organize leisure for themselves without having to depend upon the middle class or Capitalist leisure forms. Working- class cultural forms were varied, diverse and plentiful. However, although many leisure activities were organized by workers for workers, they were not exactly isolated from the Capitalist leisure industry. The tendency for commercialized forms to replace associational forms, if true, should not be reduced to the level of overt Capitalist ideological penetration of working-class leisure time.