ABSTRACT
The North East of England is a locale that ideally exemplifies the demise of an ordered traditional modernism and the advent of post-modernism. This chapter discusses the effect those forces have had upon the region’s once-stable cultural continuity. A great deal of cultural adaptation has occurred because of the resultant changes in employment and the labour market, notably the re-shaping of an embattled masculinity. The hedonistic strand to serious criminality reflects a division of labour that is rooted firmly in traditional practices and traditional proletarian notions of leisure and pleasure. As Berman has suggested, those who experienced an extended period of cultural modernity and all that that period of history entailed have met its passing with feelings of loss and regret. In the North East there exists a propensity, especially in the media, to view the region’s history of industrial production through rose-tinted spectacles, and to view contemporary developments negatively in relation to that history.
