Do you remember the park you played in as a child? A place of magic and wonder, where monsters and fairies could stalk or dance – children’s imaginations run wild
and the concrete half built, rusting slide, with mad stray dogs off the leash – were never forefront in our memories. The pubs, and clubs in our communities where we walked past looking in straining to know what happened behind those doors the music, the singing, the dancing and the sweet smells, the disco lights, the happy faces that staggered and danced out into the street or the chip shop. The seaside caravan parks the highlight of any year, sleeping in bunk beds for the first time, or the smell of the damp floral sofa which was also to our amazement turned into a bed. Looking out the window at the rain lashing down in August . Even our homes and communities places of love and belonging where family and people like us lived – familiar faces in the shops, knowing the long and complicated histories of the families who live there, being let in to the secrets of the community, knowing what business to speak and what business to hold to yourselves – these are working class fantastic spaces – we don’t see the rubbish or the badly built concrete structures, we don’t know yet that cocks on a stick from Skegness, Southend, or Blackpool are tacky, in bad taste or kitsch. We know our communities, our council estates can appear to be dodgy and scruffy through what is said about them and us - from people who have never lived in them, we know they are edgy and gritty from the endless high fashion photo-shoots, and album covers that feature our communities- but not us - we are not invited into those stylised images. We know the places where we go on holiday, the pubs and clubs our families and communities drink in are ‘interesting liminal spaces’ from the art galleries, the high end and famous photographer who uses our places as their cool/edgy/interesting backdrops for their lens and interpretation they get to say whatever they need or want to say about us – the working class – whether that is ‘divided Britain’ or ‘Broken Britain’ or tasteless stupid spaces that can be photographed/filmed or imagined as a profound show/book/project take your pick as long as the lens and the viewpoint is from afar – from a class above.
