ABSTRACT
This study consists of an empirical analysis of residents living on a recently constructed housing estate which contains its own private leisure and sports facilities – The Heath. Without wishing to pre-empt a necessary discussion of these terms it can be characterised as a case study of the new middle class. It began as an attempt to monitor the use of the sports and leisure facilities that the residents of this large, private housing estate enjoy, and to discover whether the existence of such facilities produced greater levels of participation amongst them as compared to socioeconomically similar populations whose access to sports facilities were less readily available. However, in documenting the use of these facilities it soon became apparent that there were other, much more interesting activities to document in relating the role that such facilities played on The Heath.
