Beyond the Council Estate
Cinematic Spaces of the Working Class
Will be published approx. on 30. November 2026
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-1-3995-3363-8 (ISBN)
Description
In recent years British cinema has utilised the iconic image of the council estate as an emblematic shorthand for defining the supposedly dysfunctional character of the working-class people who reside there. As a spatial determinant, it has come to signify a whole group of people in the popular imaginary as anti-social, violent and workshy. Drawing on the latest research into class and British cinema, the chapters in this edited collection explore classed identities in relation to the spaces which they occupy, both onscreen and off.
The chapters in this collection shift the spatial location of the working class away from the council estates in which they are visually and symbolically contained to explore alternative spaces where their complexities, struggles and resistance to the systemic cultural and political discourses that define them can be foregrounded.
The chapters in this collection shift the spatial location of the working class away from the council estates in which they are visually and symbolically contained to explore alternative spaces where their complexities, struggles and resistance to the systemic cultural and political discourses that define them can be foregrounded.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
8 black and white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-3363-8 (9781399533638)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Deirdre O'Neill is a Senior Lecturer in Film Theory and Practice at the University of Hertfordshire. She is the author of Film as a Radical Pedagogical Tool and the co-ordinator of the Inside Film Project. She is the founding and principle editor of the Journal of Class and Culture and has co-directed (with Mike Wayne) three films, Listen to Venezuela (2008), Condition of the Working Class (2012) and The Acting Class (2017), which was the winner of the National Feature Documentary Award at the 2017 Labour Film Festival. Katerina Flint-Nicol is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. She is a founding member of the British Popular Cultures Research Network and has published on the gothic in musical performance and television adaptation. Her PhD, Men, Manors and Monsters: The British Hoodie Horror and the Cinema of Alterity addressed the horrorisation of the working-class in British cinema in the early 2000s.
Content
Introduction
Katerina Flint-Nicol and Deirdre O'Neil
1. 'Tough Blokes, Tough Buildings': The Significance of Brutalist Architecture in Constructing Working-Class Masculinity in Post-War British Cinema
Johny Smith
2. Moving beyond 'That Hill': Shelagh Delaney, David Storey, and a new class topography of the British New Wave
David Forrest
3. Loss, impasse, and the myth of class transcendence: Shelagh Delaney's Charlie Bubbles (1968)
Thirza Wakefield
4. Back 'Up The Junction': Nell Dunn's Working Class Women's Lives on Film
Mary Irwin
5. The Aimless Class Wanderers - Psychogeography in My Childhood Trilogy and Ratcatcher
Kyle Barret
6. 'Motorways, Service Stations, and Brighton Pier' - Landscape and the Flow of Working-Class Life Amid the Post-1979 Cinematic Output of the Children's Film Foundation
Peter Jachimiak
7. A World of Arrangements: Feminist and Transnational Mappings of Class Struggle in Cinema Action's So That You Can Live (For Shirley) (1982)
Rachel Fabian
8. Sea, Coal and Beauty: Seacoal (1985) by Amber Film and Photography Collective
Karolina Kosinska
9. Mutations of British social cinema
Annette Kuhn
10. New Girls on the Block: Music and Dance as Spaces of Aesthetic Politics in Fish Tank (2009) and Rocks (2020)
Alice Pember
11. Representing Working-Class Space in UK Drill Music Videos
Austin Cooper
12. 'Enduring symbols of people and place' (2015)
David Roberts and Andrea Luka Zimmerman
13. 'You didn't have to sell us this house.'/?'Didn't we?': ?Bait?(Mark Jenkin, 2019)?
John White
Katerina Flint-Nicol and Deirdre O'Neil
1. 'Tough Blokes, Tough Buildings': The Significance of Brutalist Architecture in Constructing Working-Class Masculinity in Post-War British Cinema
Johny Smith
2. Moving beyond 'That Hill': Shelagh Delaney, David Storey, and a new class topography of the British New Wave
David Forrest
3. Loss, impasse, and the myth of class transcendence: Shelagh Delaney's Charlie Bubbles (1968)
Thirza Wakefield
4. Back 'Up The Junction': Nell Dunn's Working Class Women's Lives on Film
Mary Irwin
5. The Aimless Class Wanderers - Psychogeography in My Childhood Trilogy and Ratcatcher
Kyle Barret
6. 'Motorways, Service Stations, and Brighton Pier' - Landscape and the Flow of Working-Class Life Amid the Post-1979 Cinematic Output of the Children's Film Foundation
Peter Jachimiak
7. A World of Arrangements: Feminist and Transnational Mappings of Class Struggle in Cinema Action's So That You Can Live (For Shirley) (1982)
Rachel Fabian
8. Sea, Coal and Beauty: Seacoal (1985) by Amber Film and Photography Collective
Karolina Kosinska
9. Mutations of British social cinema
Annette Kuhn
10. New Girls on the Block: Music and Dance as Spaces of Aesthetic Politics in Fish Tank (2009) and Rocks (2020)
Alice Pember
11. Representing Working-Class Space in UK Drill Music Videos
Austin Cooper
12. 'Enduring symbols of people and place' (2015)
David Roberts and Andrea Luka Zimmerman
13. 'You didn't have to sell us this house.'/?'Didn't we?': ?Bait?(Mark Jenkin, 2019)?
John White