ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Bennett and his city is informed by historical sociology in that it focuses on a particular age cohort of Leeds-based northern intellectuals. Postmodern theory would now cast them as cultural intermediaries who articulated and made sense of emerging lifestyles, a unique and differentiating feature of the postmodern condition. The chapter explores the tension between local roots and wider metropolitan culture; between an industrial past and present and then sudden transition to a postmodern future. This journey may be mapped against Alan Bennett's own life, his deep childhood roots in Leeds, the Oxbridge scholarship, acting, and on to national and international fame as a playwright and author. The chapter explores how this particular cohort articulates its distinctive Northern roots the unique and often idiographic reminiscences of Richard Hoggart's Hunslet and Alan Bennett's Headingley. These times and places are embedded in urban industrial modernity.
