Betwixt & Between: precarious class positions in Spam City
by Katy McEwan
“I suppose I am working-middle”
Only a few of my research participants (admittedly) took part in the Great British Class Survey by using the BBC Class Calculator. One begrudgingly shared their responses identified them as ‘Established Middle Class’; something they felt an inherently uncomfortable fit. Visibly squirming in their seat, and appearing to physically shake off the title as they spoke, they explained to me this just wasn’t right. While they may have the external characteristics of the middle class, this was not who they felt they were; this was not their true identity.
Ingleby Barwick, my field of study, is Teesside’s new suburb for the new middle. Once titled, local folklore insists, Europe’s largest private housing estate, building commenced on the site in the late 1970s and continues to date. In her vivacious social history of the working class, The People, Selina Todd identifies this period as the start of the polarisation of the working class. An era when a ‘new middle’ class was created, fractured off from rest of the working class, and used to deny class in turn. These were the aspiring and home-owning, working class- many of whom inter-generationally moved into white-collar work and took up the widening participation opportunities in higher education.
Ingleby is a fantastical destiny of class, a place where those Steph Lawler would define as ‘getting out and getting away’ would seek to go, but such flight does not come without potential harm. Although seemingly presented as an unquestionable good, social mobility is not value free, and whether class is even mutable, is questionable. Have the residents of Ingleby Barwick remade their class status? It seems they are frequently reminded that in a fundamental sense they have not.
They are, quite literally, put in their place by both their traditional working and middle-class neighbourhood residents by the clear recital of their postcode; TS17, the same as their working class neighbours in Thornaby. In local lore Ingleby has been long known as “Spam City”, alluding to the fact that residents may have the external indicators of wealth (and class) but a lack lays behind it. When asked to define what they thought “Spam City” meant, a resident used another more widespread idiom that appears to allude to performance and lack, stating, “they think we are all fur coat and no knickers”.
Why is this so important? Because this ‘missing middle’ of society is a sizeable part of the UK population yet we seem to know so little about them (or rather us- I’ve long aspired to Ingleby myself), as Dave Byrne states in an introduction to a special edition of the journal Sociology . Why don’t we know more about the lives and experiences of those in the middle? There are approximately 21,000 residents on Ingleby Barwick, and they are young, the average age across the estate is 35. If trends of social change are so great that new classes are being created, we should see them here. Furthermore, if trends of precarity are sweeping across suburbs like Ingleby all over the UK, surely their ontological and economic security will affect their lived experiences and so their political motivations? This affects us all.
The inter-generational fairness foundation clearly present in their latest data- that the next generation, the young people of Ingleby, face a very different economic future to that of their parents. Young people in the middle have high debts, high un- and under-employment rates and high service and housing costs, as such, their ability to reproduce their parent’s housing and economic careers are clearly constrained.
As social mobility is tied to the myth of meritocracy, and so then to moral worth; if these young people are facing downward mobility it is crucial we understand the precarity they face, in an economic and cultural sense, and the impact this will have on their health, well-being, experiences and sense of self and identity.
Liminality is an anthropological concept it refers to an in-between stage of a rite of passage wherein an initiate ceases to be who they once were, yet has not yet become who they will go on to be. Liminality is about transition, it is about change, and it is also about ambiguity. I suggest young people in the ‘missing middle’, so more indeterminate class positions, between the working and middle classes, may be in a three-fold liminal state, in:
a liminal stage of life- the youth phase
a liminal indeterminate classed place- Ingleby Barwick
a liminal socio-economic phase- enduring increasingly precarious economic times where inequality is expanding and pathways to secure social positions are receding.
This concept of people and places being betwixt and between, offers a spatial and temporal way of thinking about boundaries and thresholds, how and where individuals are located within society, and how they recreate structure. Could young people be becoming lost in liminal phases and spaces, making incomplete transitions and heading towards marginalisation?
We must understand what the implications are for those who Sam Friedman would call ‘culturally homeless’; those whose classed location has wandered far from its source. The lived experiences of those in the missing middle, already dealing with insecure status and class positions, requires and demands focused sociological attention.
Katy McEwan is a PhD student at Teesside University.
