ABSTRACT
In this chapter Hoggart surveys attitudes towards and engagement in customs, hobbies and habits. He positions leisure and cultural activity as the desire to make a ‘brief statement of a fuller, better life’. The three sections of the original chapter focus on the desire to spend, enjoy life and be generous and recalls day trips to the seaside to ‘make a splash’ and habits of popular and community music making. In revisiting this chapter we take account of access to a much greater plurality of ways in which individuals and communities can seek pleasure and fulfilment. Technology has enabled more access to distant countries in a real and virtual sense and the desire and the ability to consume global cultural and material goods continues to increase. Alongside this is there are important changes in terms of poverty, health and wealth. In public discourse working-class lives are often characterised as in crisis and today the crisis is having too much rather than too little.
We consider the impact of these changes on individual, family and community practices, drawing particularly on notions of identity and narratives of self. Hoggart’s focus on community music making raises questions about music making in urban communities today, set against a creative arts industry in which working class, BME, disabled, northern people are particularly underrepresented. We will examine local cultural practice and its relationship to global media, not least in the way in which the ‘full rich lives’ of working class people are derided across media. We will examine this preoccupation and positioning of working class lives as unruly and excessive and ask whose interests they are serving in an era of ever greater credit, high interest pay day loans, neoliberalism and populist politics.
