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The article presents information on the social policy of Great Britain before 1914. The prevalent assumption among historians is that in Britain before 1914 the approach to social policy was overwhelmingly empirical. This empiricism is seen to rest on a tradition of the disinterested study of the causes of poverty formed in the nineteenth century mainly by Charles Booth, or possibly to a lesser extent by the earlier work of Sir John Simon and other administrators of his generation. This article is intended as a contribution to a necessary revaluation of the climate of opinion in which the great social legislation of the 1905 Liberal government occurred. It is concerned with one aspect of Charles Booth's work, his ideas on unemployment which became briefly fashionable although they had little impact on policy. More generally, it is an attempt to describe and explain some of the neglected moral assumptions behind the discussion of policy. Booth and his followers were empirical in their careful study of all the available evidence, especially statistical, on the causes of poverty. But their investigations were influenced by certain prevalent ideas, particularly by a concern for the effects of policy on the character of those whom it relieved, and, among other things, this led them to make a strong distinction between unemployment among the skilled and the unskilled workers.

Copyright of Sociología del Trabajo is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite its significance in determining poverty risk, family size has received little focus in recent social policy analysis. This paper provides a correction, focusing squarely on the changing poverty risk of larger families (those with three or more dependent children) in the UK over recent years. It argues that we need to pay much closer attention to how and why poverty risk differs according to family size. Our analysis of Family Resource Survey data reveals how far changes in child poverty rates since 1997 – both falling poverty risk to 2012/13 and increases since then – have been concentrated in larger families. Social security changes are identified as central: these have affected larger families most as they have greater need for support, due to both lower work intensity and higher household needs. By interrogating the way policy change has affected families of different sizes the paper seeks to increase understanding of the effects of different poverty reduction strategies, with implications for policy debates in the UK and beyond. In providing evidence about the socio-demographics of larger families and their changing poverty risk it also aims to inform contested debates about the state's role in providing financial support for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the interconnectedness of liberalism between Britain and the U.S. from 1870 to 1920, challenging the perception of separate developments in each country. It highlights the transatlantic influence on political ideologies and reform movements, emphasizing the collaboration and parallels between American Progressivism and British reformers during this period.

This article provides information regarding urban poverty in Great Britain from 1880-1920. In his survey of poverty in London, England published in 1889 and 1891 scholar Charles Booth had put forward a classification of the population according to the degree of want or comfort in which they were found. By contrast, in his survey of poverty among the working-class population of York, undertaken in 1899, scholar B.S. Rowntree took a great deal of trouble to obtain information on household income. He used this information to produce a classification of working-class households and also to calculate the number of households in primary poverty. However, Rowntree regarded primary poverty, characterized by family income insufficient for the maintenance of mere physical efficiency, as a mere sub-category within the larger category of poverty. The purpose for which that sub-category was invented or the detailed calculations and assumptions by means of which it was constructed cannot be discussed here. It was complemented by secondary poverty, characterized by family income that would have been sufficient for the maintenance of mere physical efficiency were it not that some of it was absorbed by other expenditure either useful or wasteful. But secondary poverty was simply a residual category, calculated by subtracting the numbers of those in primary poverty from the total of all households in poverty.

This article analyzes some sociological studies and measurement of poverty in Great Britain, conducted in June 1954. In the study authored by Charles Booth and B. Seebohm Rowntree, the families living in poverty was divided into two sections. First, families whose total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency. Second, families whose total earnings would be sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency were it not that some portion of it is absorbed by other expenditure, either useful or wasteful. The minimum necessaries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency were calculated by estimating the nutritional needs of adults and children and by translating such needs into quantities of different foods and hence into money terms, and by adding on to these figures certain minimum sums for clothing, fuel and household sundries, according to the size of the family. The studies that followed adopted the same approach and although there were some minor alterations, the standards used for measuring poverty were broadly the same, adjusted according to change in prices, as that used by Rowntree in 1899.

Food markets were a vital element in the economic life of Britain over many centuries, and the arrival of railways into urban spaces during the nineteenth century provided unprecedented opportunities for them to expand the range and volume of good that they sold. This article examines the impact of railways on these markets during the decades following the arrival of trains into London through a case study of Borough Market. This important London fruit and vegetable market is examined through the prism of its financial records. Detailed analysis of the Market's income produces a timeline for growth, while the records for the goods ported through the Market help to explain the change. The case study also highlights developments in trading techniques at Borough Market that enabled it to prosper during the second half of the nineteenth century, despite limitations placed on its expansion created by the impact of railways on the urban physical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK's social security system has attracted much criticism for the severity, ineffectiveness and invasiveness of its sanctioning regime. Political theorists, news outlets, and welfare claimants repeatedly describe sanctions as punitive, yet most use the term 'punishment' in a colloquial manner, rather than treating it as a theoretically-contested concept. Instead, this article subjects the empirical realities of welfare sanctions to four theoretical models of punishment: the classic Flew-Benn-Hart model, a Foucauldian model focussed on the disciplinary potential of punishment, a Durkheimian model concerning social sentiments, and Feinberg's censure-based model. This article ultimately concludes that there is sufficient overlap in order to consider welfare sanctions a form of punishment. For this reason, proponents of welfare sanctions must be able to justify sanctions not just as a mechanism of social security law, but also as punishments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 2000 book, Between Camps, and its 2005 follow-up, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy described postcolonial melancholia—a failure to mourn the loss of imperial prestige—and conviviality—the messy and banal navigation of fractally complex but increasingly less meaningful lines of difference in the city—as two opposing but related characteristics of the British urban experience at the dawn of the century. Nowhere is this more evident than in the neighbourhoods of riverine East London, whose identity and urban morphology have been shaped by the river running through them, upriver to the heart of the imperial metropolis and downriver to Britain's extensive colonies and postcolonies. In these long-standing arrival quarters, the structure of feeling includes two elements in tension with each other: a mode of lament expressing a form of morbid attachment to the perceived greatness of the imperial age, whose ghostly afterlife is etched in the monumental architecture of London's boroughs and inscribed in the names of its streets and buildings; and a fragile emergent form of convivial coexistence that finds resonance in alternative narratives of the imperial past. Gidley's article addresses these issues through data from long-standing research engagement with Bermondsey and Deptford on the southern shore and with Barking on the northern shore of the Thames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official statistics tend to rely on a headcount approach to poverty measurement, distinguishing 'the poor' from the 'non-poor' on the basis of an anchored threshold. Invariably, this does little to engage with the gradations of material hardship affecting those living, to varying degrees, below the poverty line. In response, this paper interrogates an apparent flatlining in UK poverty to establish the changing profile of poverty, as well as those most affected by it. Drawing on the Family Resources survey, this paper reveals an increasing depth of poverty in the UK since 2010, with bifurcation observable in the living standards of different percentile groups below the poverty line. In addition, this paper demonstrates substantial compositional changes in the socio-demographic profile of (deep) poverty. Since 2010, the likelihood of falling into deep poverty has increased for women, children, larger families, Black people and those in full-time work. Within the context of COVID-19, I argue there is a need to re-think how we currently conceptualise poverty by better attending to internal heterogeneity within the broader analytical and methodological category of 'the poor'. Doing so raises pressing questions about the prevailing modes of poverty measurement that tend to frame and delimit the social scientific analysis of poverty, as well as the policies deemed appropriate in tackling it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the emergence of a new mode of representing the poor that became dominant in Britain in the early twentieth century—a mode in which the "point of view" of impoverished people themselves was increasingly foregrounded. Focusing on examples drawn from documentary film, Mass Observation, and the publications of Victor Gollancz Ltd., the article considers how, while marking a kind of formal shift away from a late Victorian discourse of poverty, this development maintains that earlier discourse's disciplinary agenda. In examining three case studies—John Taylor, Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, and Ruby Grierson's Housing Problems; Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge's Mass Observation Day Survey; and H. Beales and R. Lambert's Memoirs of the Unemployed—it argues that the new point of view mode marked a continuation in the twentieth century of the outlook that shaped representations of poverty in the late Victorian era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered an experiment in enforced home-working across the globe. In the UK, the home-based workforce jumped from 14 per cent to almost 50 per cent of the overall working population, a trend mirrored in countries across the world. Largely welcomed by both employees and employers, many organizations predict a hybrid future that combines working at home and in a centralized collective workplace. This has major consequences for the way we inhabit, conceptualize and design the city and the suburbs, as more (and different) space is needed in the home and employers realize that they can reduce their property footprints. The 24-hour inhabitation of residential areas brings new life to local streets and economies, while Central Business Districts and High Streets lie silent. This paper approaches this as a paradigm shift: for more than a century mono-functional homes and workplaces have been systematically separated – ways now have to be found to reintegrate them. Covid has shone a spotlight on major social and spatial inequalities, with the poor and the young disproportionately impacted. Priorities for researchers and policy-makers include the future use of redundant commercial buildings, and analyses of policy and law, including planning, space standards, tenancy agreements, Bedroom Tax and social housing allocations, that obstruct home-based work – and proposals for alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Booth's seventeen volume Life and Labour of the People of London has been called the first social survey, it demonstrated the techniques of organised social research, and proved an impetus to the Social Survey Movement. In spite of its key position in the emergence of empirical sociology, little attention has been paid to the organisation of Booth's research team winch was to provide a template for the subsequent development of organised social research, nor to the identities of the twenty people who made up the research team, Remarkably for the time, one-quarter of the researchers were women, including the young Beatrice Webb and Clara Collet. This paper looks closely at the personalities and the organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its heyday in the 1970s, Britain's council housing sector provided homes to 40 per cent of the British population before falling victim to privatization, which changed homes for Britain's workers into commodities subject to property speculation. The fraction of the original council housing stock that has been preserved serves the needs of the society's most vulnerable. However, the concept of council housing as social housing is a later one; originally, council estates were designed for aspirational workers and were intended as mixed communities, with working and middle-class residents living side by side. Taking a historical perspective, the article maps the development of the concept of council housing in Britain from the original idea, inspired by garden cities such as Letchworth or Welwyn Garden City, to the gradual changes to both the design of council estates and their intended purpose that transformed the once socially desirable housing type into a symbol of social failure and deprivation. The recent tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire is used as a case in point to illustrate this process of change. In addition to historical research, the paper draws on recent sociological reports and newspaper articles dealing with the issue of Britain's council housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Direito e Práxis is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents the wartime state in the local context and looks at how the daily activity of local courts and police changed dramatically during the wartime period. It also assesses the complex role that police and local courtrooms played with regards to ethnicity and nationalism. The increasing authority of local courtrooms and the enhanced powers of policing, I argue, amplified the role of the state in certain aspects of London life, but reduced it in others. New demands on local courtrooms and policing could only be accommodated by the redirection of their efforts from pre-war priorities. The traditional roles of the police in addressing 'moral' crimes such as public drunkenness and gambling declined dramatically as policy redirected police resources towards the enforcement of wartime regulations, the support of military conscription and discipline, and the policing of immigrant communities and ethnic minorities, and of 'enemy aliens' in particular. Although the balance of power in the latter case was highly asymmetrical, those brought before the courtroom on accusations of being 'outsiders' or 'enemies' in the national community were not entirely without recourse. The public nature of courtrooms meant that, in some circumstances, they could become sites for the affirmation of rights and national belonging in wartime Britain, rather vehicles for their abrogation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence-based policy relies on measurement to trigger actions and to manage and evaluate programmes. Yet measurement requires classification: the making of categories of understanding that approximate or represent collective phenomena. In 1931, two decades after implementing the first compulsory unemployment benefits in 1911, the British Government began to carry out a census of out-of-work individuals. Why such an inversion, at odds with the exercise of rational-legal authority, and unlike to its French or German counterparts? To solve this puzzle, we document the making of 'the unemployed' as a category of scientific analysis and of public policy in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Our circumscribed contribution to the history of economic thought and methodology informs today's controversies on the future of work, the weakening of wage labour through the rise in the number of part-time contracts and self-employed workers, as well as the rivalry between the welfare state and private charities with regard to providing impoverished people with some kind of relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 100th anniversary of the Liverpool Tidal Institute (LTI) was celebrated during 2019. One aspect of tidal science for which the LTI acquired a worldwide reputation was the development and use of tide prediction machines (TPMs). The TPM was invented in the late 19th century, but most of them were made in the first half of the 20th century, up until the time that the advent of digital computers consigned them to museums. This paper describes the basic principles of a TPM, reviews how many were constructed around the world and discusses the method devised by Arthur Doodson at the LTI for the determination of harmonic tidal constants from tide gauge data. These constants were required in order to set up the TPMs for predicting the heights and times of the tides. Although only 3 of the 30-odd TPMs constructed were employed in operational tidal prediction at the LTI, Doodson was responsible for the design and oversight of the manufacture of several others. The paper demonstrates how the UK, and the LTI and Doodson in particular, played a central role in this area of tidal science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the importance of the role of the national and local state, and of increasing socio-economic inequality for understanding urban super-diversity in a time of austerity. Using a methodology and conceptualization that avoids the methodological ethnicism and "methodological neighbourhoodism" inherent in some diversity research, we draw on quantitative analysis and ethnographically produced material from south London to ask what differences make a difference. Examining interactions in "welfare micropublics", including maternity services, schools, and elderly social care, we show that residents and service providers, often following an "ethos of inclusion", routinely engage with difference in encounters, allowing the potential for conviviality to emerge. We argue that only by considering diversity together with inequality, can we develop more textured and nuanced accounts of super-diverse urban areas, including a fuller understanding of the social production of difference and indifference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers attempts in the late nineteenth century to bring about a confluence of Catholicism and Socialism in Britain by examining the writing and correspondence of one man, the art critic and Fabian socialist Robert Dell. Beginning with Dell's involvement as a young man in London-based radical politics, the article examines his efforts to bring his socialist politics and Catholic faith together. Dell attempted this through stressing a narrative of Catholic collectivism, under the aegis of a benevolent Church, contrasted with a post-Reformation Protestant individualism leading to the inequities of capitalism. The appeal of Catholicism in a Victorian Britain undergoing a collective crisis of faith is addressed. The second part of the article documents the failure of these attempts and Dell's disillusionment with the Catholic hierarchy that by 1908 had led to a complete break on Dell's part with the Catholic establishment. The catalyst for this break was the brutal treatment of Catholic Modernists such as George Tyrrell, Maude Petre and St George Mivart by the Vatican and the English Catholic leadership. Dell's final rejection of organised Catholicism is charted through pamphlets, newspaper articles and personal correspondence. Ultimately, the article considers how Dell's early political and theological career reflects on the relative positions of Catholicism and socialism at the turn of the twentieth century, and more broadly the dynamics of personal belief and political allegiances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws noted in 1909, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the Poor Law (Scotland) Act of 1845 sprang from rather different motives. Whereas the first Act aimed to restrict the provision of poor relief, the second was designed to enhance it. However, despite these aims, it is generally accepted that Scotland's Poor Law continued to relieve a smaller proportion of its population and to spend less money on them. This paper revisits the evidence on which these claims are based. Although the gap between the two Poor Laws was less than previously supposed, it was nevertheless substantial. The paper also explores the links between the size of Scottish parishes and welfare spending, and demonstrates that the main reasons for the persistence of the spending gap were related to different levels of investment in poorhouses and workhouses, and support for the elderly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016 the UK's Conservative Government radically changed the official approach to child poverty measurement, scrapping targets for income poverty and material deprivation and introducing instead indicators of household 'worklessness' and children's educational attainment at age 16. This paper seeks to assess the extent of support for this move among a range of national experts. The paper briefly reviews the way that poverty has been conceptualized by researchers going back to Booth and Rowntree, before going on to examine 251 responses to a 2012–2013 UK government consultation on child poverty measurement. By drawing on the consultation, the paper is able to consider the views of those working in local authorities, children's charities and frontline services as well as academic researchers. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the literature on poverty measurement by considering a wider set of voices than are often heard. The paper identifies very clear and broad-based support for an approach to poverty measurement that has income and material deprivation at its heart. Out of 251 responses, just two advocate removing income from poverty measurement. Responses also overwhelmingly reflect a relative understanding of poverty. There is fairly limited support for a multidimensional approach, and the paper reflects on why this might be, given a shift to more multidimensional thinking about poverty globally. It concludes that poverty measurement is highly political: what is measured drives policy, and preferences for indicators therefore reflect, at least in part, current political concerns about how best to hold government to account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a century, congenital syphilis has been reduced from a major cause of morbidity and mortality to a condition rarely seen in the UK. Here, newly-derived literature and information searches were used to create a contemporary overview of the epidemic, including its epidemiology. Although constrained by high-quality healthcare services and with an incidence below the World Health Organization elimination threshold, congenital syphilis still has the potential to cause major consequences for the health and life chances of affected infants. If the complex challenges presented by this preventable disease are to be resolved, intervention strategies need to be optimised, rigorously assessed and extended across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines critically the persistently antagonistic relationship – across the past quarter-century – between the provisions of international human rights instruments and the nature and direction of youth justice reform in England and Wales. It introduces the core provisions of the human rights framework that pertain to youth justice and it sketches the nature and direction of policy reform over the 25-year period under scrutiny (1991–2016). To obtain a comprehensive sense of the relationship between human rights and youth justice reform in the jurisdiction, it applies a detailed systemic analysis; beginning at the point at which criminal responsibility is formally imputed and progressing through each stage of the youth justice system, up to the point where the child might ultimately be deprived of her/his liberty. By taking a ‘long-view’ of youth justice reform and by adopting a systemic end-to-end analysis of the human rights–youth justice interface, the article presents an analytical account of both change (policy reforms) and continuity (the enduring nature of human rights violations). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In modern Britain, pressure on parliament for social reform has been transmitted not only by mass movements of the people, but by well‐organised pressure groups and small coteries of experts. Driven by intellectual imperatives and by differing ideas of ‘progress’, these experts and activists have directed the impetus for measures to tackle poverty, working conditions, or inequality, mediating a broader sense of pressure from without. In contrast to political histories of social reform, this essay offers a history of ideas for social reform and the methods by which reformers shaped parliament's agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationships between space, ethnic identity and anti-state violence in twentieth century London. It will do so by comparing the Spitalfields violence of 1906 and the Brixton unrest of 1981. The association of physical metropolitan space with 'difference' in the Edwardian East End and post-consensus South London, and how this 'othering' was influenced both by the state and the anti-migrant far right will be analysed. The paper will then dissect relationships between the police and working class Jewish and Caribbean communities, and how these deteriorating relationships exploded into extreme violence in 1906 and 1981. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the twentieth century, historians debated what happened to the living standards of ordinary men, women, and children during the British industrial revolution. But where this historical question once attracted attention from across the methodological spectrum, the past two decades have seen cultural and qualitative approaches eclipsed by statistical accounts written by economic historians. In this article, I will argue that the marginalisation of social and cultural approaches to historical living standards has been to the detriment of our understanding. Through an analysis of two discrete sources of evidence – nineteenth-century budget data and working-class autobiography – this article sheds new light on the diets and living standards of the labouring poor. It rejects the optimism/pessimism dichotomy that continues to frame quantitative analyses and presents a more nuanced account that examines how experiences varied according to region, gender and age. The article concludes that it is not only that it is possible to incorporate cultural change into our analyses of living standards, but that it is necessary to do so in order to grasp this period in all its complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was the extent of marital breakdown and separation in a society where divorce was unlikely to be an option? This article investigates the status and longevity of the marriages of a group of parents whose children were admitted to the care of the poor law authorities in Camberwell in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It finds that spousal death or misfortune, rather than marital breakdown, were the primary reasons for a parent to send a child to the poor law authorities, and that most of the marriages of the parents in the sample remained intact. It also explores whether those who separated formed new co-residential relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For generations the folk of Tyneside and Wearside have fervently and passionately supported their respective football clubs. What are their origins? How did this hotbed develop in the far north? Historians Paul Joannou and Alan Candlish look at the trail from the 1870s which takes us through the social spectrum of the North East; creation by the upper-classes and ex-public-school boys with amateur principles to the enthusiastic middle and working-classes of the industrial heartland who cemented the game for longevity. By 1882 the move from the gentleman footballers to the man-in-the-street was complete. Development escalated and within a decade the hotbed was smouldering ready to see two major clubs, Newcastle United and Sunderland make a mark on the game. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the premise that officially sponsored heritage bodies in England are intrinsically involved in the formation of national memories which fail to reflect the stresses within British society and ignore the value of areas of recent past. As a result, investigation of sections of British history is discouraged and the archeological potential of sites of conflict and confrontation between the mainstream elements of society and those seen as threatening it are being destroyed without the proper archeological investigation. This premise will be examined by looking at the how the history of British industry and a former mining community are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings together analyses of the micro paradata 'by-products' from the 1967/1968 Poverty in the United Kingdom (PinUK) and 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE) surveys to explore changes in the conditions of production over this 45 year period. We highlight technical, social and professional role continuities and changes, shaped by the institutionalisation of survey researchers, the professionalization of the field interviewer, and economisation. While there are similarities between the surveys in that field interviewers were and are at the bottom of the research hierarchy, we demonstrate an increasing segregation between the core research team and field interviewers. In PinUK the field interviewers are visible in the paper survey booklets; through their handwritten notes on codes and in written marginalia they can 'talk' to the central research team. In PSE they are absent from the computer mediated data, and from communication with the central team. We argue that, while there have been other benefits to field interviewers, their relational labour has become less visible in a shift from the exercise of observational judgement to an emphasis on standardisation. Yet, analyses of what field interviewers actually do show that they still need to deploy the same interpersonal skills and resourcefulness to secure and maintain interviews as they did 45 years previously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marginal spaces are increasingly being taken up for commercial use in London. This includes railway arches, which are appropriated for many different social and economic activities. This article presents the findings of a study on 165 arches in three London neighbourhoods (Hackney, Bethnal Green and Bermondsey), which found the arches to host a disproportionate amount of manufacturing, in addition to concentrations of sectors such as food and drink; and taxi services. Despite being part of Britain's industrial heritage, the arches have proved highly adaptable 'hybrid' spaces supporting office, retail, wholesale and production. They are also modular - businesses move into neighbouring arches as they expand. The arches are therefore well-suited to the postfordist economy of the inner city, which incorporates a highly networked system of small-scale manufacturers and retailers that require flexible and affordable small spaces close to commercial centres. Being arranged side-by-side, and open onto the street, they support knowledge-sharing between firms, while also bringing life to neighbourhoods. The arches have a spatial/functional configuration that might be copied in new forms of industrial development. Indeed, they suggest the possibility of a new spatial form - 'industrial streets' as opposed to industrial estates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a corpus-based discourse analysis of child welfare and infant mortality in Victorian newspapers published from 1801 to 1900. It attempts to assess the potential of corpus linguistics to analyze real-life language data and uncover objective patterns in a text through a quantitative analysis of language.

This is the chant of 1500 protesters marching across Tower Bridge in London on a very wet and very cold Saturday afternoon in January. This was the very boisterous and loud section of the 'March for Homes', which started in Shoreditch in east London, led by the Focus E15 campaign - a group of young mothers and their children who were forcibly evicted out of a homeless hostel in 2013. The hostel sits in the shadow of the billion pound developments of the Olympic Park and the Westfield Shopping Centre. The campaign and fight of the Focus E15 mothers is just one example of the terrible and cruel ways that working-class families and young mothers in particular are being treated in austerity Britain. This is the consequence of inequality gone mad, unrestrained markets, and a lack of empathy for those who struggle to survive in a rampant neoliberal campaign for wealth and more wealth to be redistributed upwards. This is my current research: examining what is happening to working class families, and how precarious their lives have become because of the structuring forces of the open market. Drawing upon my previous research in St Ann's in Nottingham, I show how working-class people and their communities have been devalued to such an extent that the land that they live on is worth more than them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article continues research into social mobility in England in the nineteenth century by examining the links with different occupational structures, socio-economic and industry/occupation, for a specific location. This allows an examination of the impact of the characteristics of these structures on occupational and thence on social mobility. Occupational mobility has long been recognised as a major determinant of social mobility and has been the subject of a number of papers, usually to determine how much a specific variable affects the level and type of mobility observed. Rarely do these analyses consider the location’s occupational structure, and its changes, as a determinant of the level of mobility. This paper finds that much of the variability of occupational mobility of a locality is determined by the characteristics of the different industries and occupations in that location. Industries and occupations provide a context within which other factors, such as literacy, operate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to the debate on London’s social class structure at the start of the 21st century. That debate has focused on the use of census metrics to argue the case for whether or not the capital has become more or less middle class in composition between 2001 and 2011. We contend that the definition of the middle class has become confused in the course of this debate and is of less critical importance for an understanding of the city’s contemporary class structure than is a focus on London’s elite. We make use of data from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey (GBCS) to shed light on the social, cultural and economic resources of this group, in addition to their spatial location. We then return to the census data for 2001 and 2011 and posit that belying the image of stability in London’s class structure these data suggest clear and localised patterns of intensification in class geographies across the capital, an intensification characterised by a growing cleavage between Inner and Outer London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]