Class, Culture and Community

First published in 1982, Class, Culture and Community (now with a new preface by the author) is a biographical study of class, culture, and community in a mining village based on the life of one man, a Northumberland pitman and the author’s grandfather. It traces some of the principal social changes in British society in the twentieth century and raises issues which are central to an understanding of the sociology of modern Britain.

The mining village, Throckley, in which James Brown lived, was part of the Northumberland coalfield. The author describes it as a ‘constructed community’, with two historical impulses giving shape to its principal institutions—the capitalist drive for profit from pits, and the efforts of organized labour for a better standard of life. He shows how the Throckley coal company built up a village, but shows that so, too, did the Throckley miners themselves; the class relationships of the village are discussed in these terms.

The life story at the heart of the book illustrates how processes of the social construction of community arise from the compelling activities of everyday life and how from these, in their turn, arise the institutions of organized labour itself. Culture and community are discussed as questions of identity, social recognition, and shared understanding. None of these is static: their changing meanings through war and industrial struggle are described here in the life of a single man and his family.