The Post-war Dream and its Afterlives

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This ESRC Fellowship project will explore the sensibilities which attach to post-war aesthetics and how those born in the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s are navigating the present. Through a focus on the environment in which the UK's ageing population grew up, and spaces including semidetached houses, cul-de-sacs, red brick universities campuses, primary schools, and shopping centres, the research will examine how these spaces still influence contemporary life and maintain an affective appeal. Spaces built between the late 1950s and early 1970s form a large bulk of the UK's built environment. But beyond architecture and planning, they also attract deeper affective, sub-emotional or unconscious connections (Pile, 2010). This study will generate insights on how these generations are adapting and navigating social and cultural change. Rationale.The UK has an ageing population and is predicted to have 3 million more people aged over 65 in the period between 2028 and 2043 (ONS, 2019). Responding to this challenge is one of the four priorities in the Government's Industrial Challenge. Covid-19 lockdown(s) in 2020 and 2021 have accelerated the process of everyday life moving from physical to digital spaces (Florida, RodriguezPose, & Storper, 2020). For example: (1) physical shops such as Evans, Debenhams and Topshop closed forever in 2021; (2) millions of people started to work from home; and (3) education and other public services were delivered online. An article in The Guardian argued that shops such as Debenhams are "...far more than just shops. Their loss leaves a hole in the heart" (Toynbee, 2021). A reduced range of physical spaces could reduce opportunities for people to meet, particularly affecting older people. Others suggest that older people could driver the revival of high streets (Phillips, Walford, Hockey, & Sparks, 2021). Theoretical and conceptual background Theoretical and conceptual background My PhD research project focused on one settlement of 8,000 people in south Wales. I interviewed over 20 older people to explore everyday lives of the past and using site-specific performance to coproduce a wider story of industrial and housing investment in the 1950s and 1960s. The Fellowship will take this work forward by connecting to the theory of non-representation (Thrift, 2008). This theory is relevant because many of the phenomena which older people recall are not immediately visible to a younger researcher. Moreover, a Fellowship would give me scope to concentrate on an unashamedly complex ontology, namely a "distribution of the human across some form of assemblage that includes all matter of materialities" (Anderson & Harrison, 2010, p. 13). The latter authors provide many starting points to research, coupled with a body of work on site-specific performance (Smith, 2018) and ethical considerations (Darling, 2016). The recent Routledge Handbook of Place (Edensor, Kalandides, & Kothari, 2020) has many more proposals. A need to connect on a deeper level - and to find context. Ageing populations pose challenges for society to be inclusive of people who have diseases such as dementia, cognitive impairment, and other age-related conditions. Methods need to offer "more than talking" (Phillipson & Hammond, 2018) and knowledge exchange with older people (Andrews, et al., 2015) should highlight that humans are storytellers and respect the importance of context and "the ordinary". This Fellowship proposal therefore centres on everyday space (see method in section iii) as "...the sphere in which distinct stories coexist, meet up, affect each other, come into conflict or cooperate. This space is not static, not a cross-section through time; it is disrupted, active and generative" (Massey, 1999). My mentor Dr Angharad Closs Stephens has published widely on topics such as sensory auto-ethnography, the affective and the atmospheric.