ABSTRACT
Bermondsey, a riverside neighbourhood in South-East London, has often been identified as an unusually cohesive district characterised by a strong sense of place and ‘community’; a popular local history pamphlet talks of ‘the Bermondsey spirit’. 1 This strong sense of Bermondsey’s distinctiveness is usually portrayed as arising from the district’s relative isolation within the metropolis, supposedly reinforced by demographic stability, strong kinship networks and the homogeneity of its overwhelmingly working-class population. In Bermondsey Story , his 1949 biography of local socialist hero Alfred Salter, Fenner Brockway proclaimed that, ‘[n]ot one Londoner in thousands visits Bermondsey; its life is almost as self-contained as that of a provincial town.’ 2 ‘Nearly everyone who lived in Bermondsey worked in Bermondsey,’ he explained, ‘they knew each other at their job, they knew each other in their streets . . . In such a community local news and ideas spread quickly.’ 3 Similarly, the sociologist Pearl Jephcott, writing in 1962, emphasised ‘the stable, near-villagey character’ of Bermondsey, arguing that its ‘homogeneous character [derived] from a closely-knit social life and extensive kin relationships’. 4 According to Jephcott, the borough was ‘solidly working-class in character, and possessed a strong sense of community’. 5 And in the 1970s, the American political scientist John E. Turner, in his study of Labour’s doorstep politics in the capital, described Bermondsey as a ‘tightly-knit community with a distinctive character’ and as marked by ‘sentiments of local loyalty and dignity among the people’. 6 Nor has this perception of Bermondsey been wholly undermined by the rapid social and cultural change of the late twentieth century. In the mid-2000s the social anthropologist Gillian Evans was still able to describe the district as ‘akin to a typical English village occupied by a group of people closely tied to a particular location through a specific economic history and in-marrying links of kinship and residence’. 7
It was this reputation for community cohesiveness which, in 1947, encouraged a large team of anthropologists from the London School of Economics to choose Bermondsey for their proposed study of English working-class kinship patterns. The American tradition of the community study had been slow to take root in Britain, where the ‘social problem’ paradigm continued
to dominate social science down to the Second World War. 8 Organised by the New Zealand-born Raymond Firth, the team set out to establish whether tight-knit networks of kin relations underpinned the sense of ‘community’ that was believed to animate working-class districts such as Bermondsey. 9 Wartime celebration of the working-class Cockney as the epitome of the nation’s defiance of the German bombing campaign fed a new-found interest in urban, working-class ‘culture’. 10 But Firth and his team were unusual in having no strong political agenda and no connection with postwar efforts at reconstruction, unlike left intellectuals such as Ruth Glass, Charles Madge and Michael Young, who, in their different ways, all hoped that social research could help the post-war Labour Government realise its socialist ideals. 11 By contrast, Firth and his team relished the chance to work in a context where for once they did not have to fear being seen as representatives of an alien, colonial state power. 12
Influenced by the communitarian social theory of Robert Morrison MacIver, as well as his own wartime experiences, Firth went into the field expecting to find that propinquity, reinforced by close kinship ties, generated a strong working-class sense of ‘community’. 13
Firth chose Bermondsey because it seemed to embody this ideal of tightknit working-class community. In particular, he chose to study the Guinness Trust Buildings at Snowfields because they promised to offer a microcosm of the kin-based community system that interested him. There were known to be many long-term residents in the blocks, including many inter-related families. 14 But others on the team, notably the experienced Africanist Audrey Richards, were always more sceptical about the concept of ‘community’, and when the fieldwork offered little support for Firth’s hypothesis about kin-based community feeling, he was happy to shift the project’s focus to the reconstruction of working-class kinship networks. 15 His approach contrasts sharply with that of other British social scientists, such as Michael Young, who were more strongly committed to ‘community’ as a political ideal which could underpin a more decentralised, pluralist version of socialist reconstruction. 16
From the outset Firth and his co-researchers were struck by the ease with which people felt able to ignore the supposed social obligations of kinship, let alone propinquity. In contrast to Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and Kinship in East London , their famous study of the East London borough of Bethnal Green, Firth concluded that kinship ties depended on ‘emotional attachment’ rather than any strong sense of familial obligation. 17 Aware of Michael Young’s work from at least 1954, Firth sought to explain their divergent conclusions about the power of kin-based ‘community’ in working-class districts in terms of the different traditions of their two disciplines. 18 The sociologist, Firth argued, was ‘apt to be surprised by the degree of patterning discernible in the kinship field when he turns his attention systematically to it’, whereas the anthropologist was more struck by ‘the degree of flexibility and personal choice’ at play in comparison to
the ‘highly formalised systems’ encountered in non-Western societies (Firth himself worked mainly on Polynesia). 19
Unusually, a large collection of field notes from this 1947 study, and from a follow-up study conducted between 1957 and 1959, survive with Firth’s papers. Besides Firth’s own field notebooks, the collection includes dozens of field reports from other researchers, detailed kinship histories of the main families studied, and two complete censuses of the tenants living in the six blocks of flats which formed the core of the two inquiries (these had been built by the Guinness Trust in the late 1890s and still stand on Snowfields, see Figure 2.1 ). This material provides strong support for Firth’s conclusions about the limited and conditional nature of English kinship bonds. It also suggests that, whilst residents possessed a powerful sense of place and of belonging, communal interaction was more cautious and conditional than the researchers had originally supposed. Privacy was strongly guarded by almost everyone, and many residents had nothing to do with the communal life of the buildings, or even with their immediate neighbours. 20 Perhaps most strikingly, comparing the two censuses of the Guinness Buildings also suggests that there was much greater social flux in this part of Bermondsey than contemporary observers generally recognised. More than sixty per cent of the flats changed hands in the twelve years between the two studies. By
the late 1950s many of those traced from the original study had mixed feelings about the changing character of both their immediate neighbourhood and Bermondsey. These respondents rehearsed a familiar narrative of declining ‘community spirit’, but crucially most also expressed a powerful desire to move out themselves. This was not simply a nostalgic lament for better times. Complaints about decline were mobilised specifically to justify moving on, even if this meant abandoning ‘old Bermondsey’.
