Sociology and the Urban Experience: Double lecture

German Historical Institute London Podcast · Aug 8, 2025 · 55m

Jon Lawrence: Shifting Visions of Working-Class Community in Post-War Britain The idea that the British working class had its own distinctive way of life and culture can be traced back to at least the 1880s, but in the wake of the Second World War it became common to argue that urban working-class life was marked by dense networks of reciprocal social relationships and shared norms worthy of the term ‘community’. Out of this came Michael Young’s influential engagement with working-class culture and ‘community’ in the early 1950s, especially Family and Kinship in East London (1957), which…