ABSTRACT
Beverley has undergone many changes since 1980, changes that coloured interviewees' memories of the post-war age of affluence. The growth in the percentage of Beverley's male residents in 'middle-class' socio-economic groups exactly matched that of England and Wales as a whole between 1961 and 1991, from 13.4 per cent to 24 per cent. Nevertheless, academics continue to see the age of affluence as the period in which 'traditional' working-class community was replaced by more individualistic, privatized lifestyles. In his recent interpretation of working-class cultural change, Tony Blackshaw described how an 'Inbetweener' generation, coming of age just after the Second World War, experienced a breakdown in older patterns of life. The oeuvre of post-war social investigation can now be set in a broad historical context, and it is apparent that many of these works 'fetishised' a distinction between 'traditional' and new patterns of working-class life.
