Youth In Britain

This book examines the emergence of modern working-class youth culture through the perspective of an urban history of post-war Britain, with a particular focus on the influence of young people and their culture on Britain’s self-image as a country emerging from the constraints of its post-Victorian, imperial past. Each section of the book – Society, City, Pop, and Space – considers in detail the ways in which working-class youth culture corresponded with a fast-changing metropolitan and urban society in the years following the decline of the British Empire. Was teenage culture rooted in the urban experience and the transformation of working-class neighbourhoods? Did youth subcultures emerge simply as a reaction to Britain's changing racial demographic? To what extent did leisure venues and institutions function as laboratories for a developing British pop culture, which ultimately helped Britain re-establish its prominence on the world stage? These questions and more are answered in this book.

Age was a critical factor in shaping imperial experience, yet it has not received any sustained scholarly attention. This pioneering interdisciplinary collection is the first to investigate the lives of children and young people and the construction of modes of childhood and youth within the British world.

This is a lively account of post-war British youth, combining history, theory and debate. It examines the emergence of youth as a social category which came to embody the hopes and fears of British society in the decades after 1945.

Though they tend to get less attention than other disadvantaged groups, huge numbers of young people today in Britain are marginalized, experiencing isolation, social hardship, gender and ethnic discrimination, and overall social stigma--a situation that has been exacerbated by the combination of austerity measures and a weak job market that has all too often cut young people off from support and employment. This book sets that marginalization in the broader context of austerity, poverty, and inequality to show both recent changes and long-term continuity in the position of young people, with a special emphasis on the voice of youth and the forms of resistance they adopt.

How do young people get by in hard times and hard places? Have they become a 'lost generation' disconnected from society's mainstream? Do popular ideas about social exclusion or a welfare dependent underclass really connect with the lived experiences of the so-called 'disaffected', 'disengaged' and 'difficult-to-reach'? Based on close-up research with young men and women from localities suffering social exclusion in extreme form, Disconnected Youth? will appeal to all those who are interested in understanding and tackling the problems of growing up in Britain's poor neighbourhoods.

This is a lively account of post-war British youth, combining history, theory and debate. It examines the emergence of youth as a social category which came to embody the hopes and fears of British society in the decades after 1945.

In this book, Faye Woods explores the raucous, cheeky, intimate voice of British youth television. This is the first study of a complete television system targeting teens and twenty somethings, chronicling a period of significant industrial change in the early 21st century. British Youth Television offers a snapshot of the complexities of contemporary television from a British standpoint — youth-focused programming that blossomed in the commercial expansion of the digital era, yet indelibly shaped by public service broadcasting, and now finding its feet on proliferating platforms. Considering BBC Three, My Mad Fat Diary, The Inbetweeners, Our War and Made in Chelsea, amongst others; Woods identifies a television that is defiantly British, yet also has a complex transatlantic relationship with US teen TV. This book creates a space for British voices in an academic and cultural landscape dominated by the American teenager.