In the countdown to a possible no-deal exit from the EU, there are some who cling to an optimistic narrative that our community spirit will get us through. Indeed, recent experiences in Whaley Bridge lend some support to the idea that in a crisis community is revealed. The irony is that, in part, the whole Brexit project has been fed by an inchoate, but powerful, sense of nostalgia for community lost.
There is nothing new about this longing for a past “golden age” of community. For at least two centuries, writers such as Coleridge, Ruskin and TS Eliot have compared their own fragmented, hedonistic and selfish times with an imagined earlier age of social harmony and “community” (indeed, a medievalist colleague assures me that, in the early eighth century, the ageing Bede took a similar view of developments in Anglo-Saxon England).
Stories about close-knit communities resonate because they are so much part of the fabric of who we think we, or our grandparents, were. Nostalgia is sedimented into our consciousness at three levels: through reminiscences retold within families, through film and television plotlines and through public discourse in its myriad forms.
Romanticised togetherness and community have been a staple of British soap operas since Granada’s first visits to Coronation Street in 1960. Arguably, the blueprint for this heartwarming story of urban community was Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s 1957 Family and Kinship in East London. This classic study became a staple text for would-be social workers, selling more than half a million copies. It contrasted the cosy, tight-knit communities of postwar Bethnal Green with the social anomie that supposedly dominated life on new, out-of-town housing estates.
Young and Willmott wrote with a laudable purpose: to halt the wholesale destruction of urban neighbourhoods and family networks by postwar slum clearance schemes, but their arguments helped to codify a deeply unhelpful, romanticised picture of “traditional community”. The authors insisted that “very few people wish to leave the East End. They are attached to Mum and Dad, to the markets, to the pubs and settlements” and argued that those who did make the move switched “from a people-centred to a house-centred existence”, where “relations are window to window, not face to face”.
However, my recent research, based on rereading the notes from Young’s original interviews in Bethnal Green, alongside material gathered from hundreds of other similar encounters across postwar England, suggests a different picture. What we hear, instead, are contemporaries testifying to the fragile, conditional and at times coercive sense of lived community.
In 1947, a Bermondsey labourer told the anthropologist Raymond Firth that living in flats was “like a country village – anything happens everyone knows it”. His answer was simple: “We keep ourselves to ourselves and then we can’t get into trouble.” Similarly, Mrs Kimber, a widow with seven children, told Young that poverty meant she was unable to move to the suburbs, but she insisted that it had nothing to do with being “afraid of being cut off from people, as [you are] better off if you keep yourself to yourself”. It was clearly a local commonplace because Young wrote “Again!” in his notes. Mrs Quail, a young mother of two, offered a different version of the same homily about protecting one’s privacy, telling Young her motto was: “Don’t mix up with the neighbours. Just pass the time of day, that’s all.”
But this did not mean that there was no such thing as “community”. Privacy might be jealously guarded, and relations with neighbours could be fraught, but poverty and proximity did encourage people to look out for one another – it was a type of informal mutual insurance.
Perhaps the most powerful account of community in action I found when researching Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England concerned a barman from Bermondsey explaining the local custom of whip-rounds to a New Zealand-born anthropologist. Speaking in 1947, he described how, if a local was bereaved or otherwise in need, everyone would be asked to contribute two shillings (10p), or “what they can”, to help. When the collection was complete, a list of donors would be posted at the bar and the money handed over “without fuss”. My first reaction was: “Eureka, this is community.” And indeed it was – complete with its hidden coercive edge. The list of donors was not just protection against fraud. As the barman explained, if someone declined to contribute, or refused to be helped, they “wouldn’t belong”.
Wariness of neighbours and concern for domestic privacy represented defence mechanisms against the coercive, controlling sides of close-knit living. As the British social and cultural historian Mark Clapson has shown, millions leapt at the opportunity to escape the close-quartered, face-to-face communities of Victorian Britain, where everyone knew each other’s business, as soon as they were able. This was not a rejection of community per se, rather, it represented an attempt to find new ways of living better suited to the modern world. In the process, community became increasingly personal and voluntary, based on genuine affection rather than proximity or need.
It is the persistence of this urge for social connection that offers some hope that society may ride out the storms of Brexit. It is important not to fixate on the anger and hatred broadcast daily into our homes in the name of adding “reality” to news stories. Yes, we are a nation divided. But precisely because Brexit is causing rifts within families, most people go to great lengths to avoid it bringing them into conflict with friends and neighbours. When Grayson Perry made the Channel 4 programme Divided Britain, what was striking was not just that the Remain and Leave pots he created from crowd-sourced suggestions had so much in common, but so too did the participants from the rival “tribes”.
All is not lost. If we abandon vague aspirations to rediscover an idealised vision of community that never existed and focus instead on small-scale, practical initiatives to foster social connection and understanding, we stand a chance of weathering the present crisis with our social fabric intact. But it would certainly help if politicians on all sides grasped how high the stakes are for us all.
• Jon Lawrence teaches History at the University of Exeter and is the author of Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England published by Oxford University Press.
