ABSTRACT
Focusing on the elderly residents of Ashington, a former coal-mining town in North East England, this chapter argues that leisure provides an important context through which people can respond effectively to or, in other words, ‘work-out’ change, and post-industrial change in particular. A basic starting point in most sociological writing on leisure is that it is ‘non-work’. Ashington, a town of almost 30,000 in North East England, was born on the back of coal-mining, and for much of its existence it was commonly referred to as ‘the biggest coal-mining village in the world’. The ‘working-out’ of change through leisure also consists of a mode of communication in which the potential for conflict that would otherwise be wrought by the unfettered expression of individual views, about the changes that have beset the area, is minimized. In some instances, leisure pursuits provide a fund of cultural resources with which to negotiate the practicalities of change.
