Sarah Kenny, "Growing Up and Going Out: Youth Culture, Commerce, and Leisure Space in Post-War Britain" (Manchester UP, 2025)
43:44 Share

This episode is brought to you by Polestar. There's only one true way to experience the all-electric luxury SUV Polestar 3, and that's to take a test drive. It can go from 0 to 60 in as little as 4.8 seconds with the dynamic handling of a sports car. But to truly understand how it commands the road, you need to be behind the wheel. Up to 350 miles of range, the 3D surround sound system by Bowers & Wilkins, it's all something you have to experience to believe. So book your test drive for Polestar 3 today at Polestar.com.

At Capella University, you can learn at your own pace with our FlexPath learning format.

Take one or two courses at a time and complete as many as you can in a 12-week billing session. With FlexPath, you can finish the bachelor's degree you started in 19 months and under $19,000. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. Fastest 25% of students. Cost varies by pace, transfer credits, and other factors. Fees apply.

Hey, business owners. We know you know the importance of maximizing every dollar. With the Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business American Express Card, you can make your expenses work just as hard as you. From afternoon coffee runs to stocking office supplies and even team dinners, you can earn miles on all your business expenses. Plus, you can earn 110,000 bonus miles for a limited time through July 16th. The Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business Card. If you travel, you know. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Offer ends 7-16-25.

Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books and Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Sarah Kenny about growing up and going out, youth culture, commerce, and leisure space in post-war Britain. So welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. This is a fascinating book and has that kind of wonderful combination of being, I think, an important intervention into how we think about various kind of debates in things like history, leisure studies.

discussions about the nighttime economy, youth studies, but also it's full of these wonderfully evocative stories about fashion, music. And it's also a story about place as well. And we're going to probably dive into that

And the place to start, I guess, is what kind of inspired you or what got you kind of interested in writing this book about kind of youth culture and the kind of history of youth culture?

Yeah, thank you. So this is a book, I think, like many are, that was just so many years in the making. So its focus is really developed, I think, as the project has aged, as I have developed as a historian. But I was an undergraduate student at the University of Sheffield way back when, in the late 2000s. And I was really introduced there to histories of popular culture and histories of youth culture there.

Now, this is a field that has been developing since the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. But in the late 2000s, it was still a relatively recent addition, I think, to many undergraduate history curricula. It was something you were much more likely to find in cultural studies and media studies, in sociology than you were in history. And I just completely fell in love with particularly this history of the immediate post-war period, the 1950s, the 1960s.

and was fascinated by the sense of transformation, I think, that I found in those histories I was encountering. I think it was also driven in part by my conversations with my grandparents who grew up in Liverpool in the 1950s, the 1960s. And I really wanted to understand the changing landscape that they were describing to me.

So the book, I suppose, is, I guess, partially driven just by my passion, I suppose, for post-war histories of popular culture. But it is a book that takes one particular city as its focus and it focuses on Sheffield. And that was inspired in part, I think, by my move there. It's a city I still live in. It's where I call home.

But it is somewhere that I think is relatively overlooked, particularly in histories of popular culture, histories of youth, and is often overlooked in favour of sort of the more well-known metropoles, London, and then places like Liverpool and Manchester that perhaps have a more well-known musical history.

But the longer that I lived here, the more I knew about the city, the more I could see the benefits of studying the history of a place that perhaps doesn't have such a well-known history of popular culture. And I think I was

I was particularly keen to try and tell a history of the city that moved away from being just a tale of industrialisation and its subsequent de-industrialisation. Those are themes I think that you can certainly trace through the book, but this is a history of the city that really tries to use Sheffield as a springboard from which to explore a much bigger history of popular culture, of urban change and of youth in postal Britain.

So, yeah, it was partially kind of my own personal interest in the period and then driven, I suppose, by my own interactions with the city of Sheffield and thinking about what an alternative history of youth culture that moved away from those main cultural metropoles might look like. I guess the story of a kind of ordinary place that isn't kind of attached to these places

very sort of famous and in some ways quite self-publicizing kind of scenes in Liverpool and Manchester. Um,

I guess is a sort of theoretical intervention as much as it is a kind of empirical or historical one. And you've talked already, you know, kind of over and over there about the importance of place. And this is something the book tries to do by saying, you know, actually studying youth culture in place really matters. And I'm intrigued as to, I guess, kind of why place is important. And I mean, obviously like history,

as academics we write in the context of a lot of really excellent work that's gone before and you know we sort of pay attention to that but one of the things the book does is to say your emphasis on place is a bit different so why does face matter and how I guess is the book doing something different? Yeah that's a really interesting question I mean I suppose the

The answer to this is twofold. I think I started off by thinking about place, but ended up, I think, thinking much more explicitly about space as sort of as a theoretical concept rather

And this was driven by two key things. The first is a broader move, I think, in the last 10 or 15 years or so to pay attention to place, to region, to local environment. And that, I think, has been a really productive turn in some of the more recent scholarship in modern Britain research.

particularly and I'm thinking here of work by people like Aaron Andrews and Otis Warris-Smith, Sam Weatherall who's fantastic book on Liverpool has just come out a couple of months ago so there's been a broader move I think to really try and situate our histories in modern Britain within particular regions and particular built environments so the book is definitely a response to that

But from a history of youth perspective, I was really interested in paying attention to the kind of histories that don't just see places and spaces as backdrops to the experience of youth, but actually things that are central in shaping the youth experience. So

Often when we talk about histories of youth, we talk about youth activities, we talk about their increased mobility, we talk about increased independence. But we don't often talk in specific terms about the kind of places that they're moving through. We don't always talk about how those places are shaped by youth and in turn are shaping the youth experience.

So I really wanted to know what that history of youth looks like when you put the built environment first, when you think about their movement through individual towns and cities. And it's that really, I think, that shaped my decision to use one city as a springboard to think about this bigger history. Because I think it's only when you look at the level of an individual place that you can chart that level of detail together.

in terms of which venues develop in relation to each other, which physical path through the city are young people making at night. That, I think, tells us a huge amount about the youth experience. So it's really, it's a way, I think, to try and get to a more granular history of youth and their relation to leisure and leisure space. Yeah, and that kind of,

dynamic or dynamism between uh the the spaces and the people is something that runs right the way through the book you know how i guess in some ways the places are changed by the people but also you know that the people are using these spaces as part of their um kind of senses of identity and sense of kind of discovery of not just adulthood but kind of you know maybe personhood to

That sort of prompts a series of questions that the book deals with, but it's just sort of occurred to me, you know, we've spent a couple of minutes already talking about youth, youth culture, youth studies, and it's probably useful to say, what do we actually mean? Because in some ways this is quite a broad category. And, and,

I guess, you know, it could potentially run from, you know, sort of school age right the way through to people who are, you know, students in university, people, you know, kind of entering the labor market. But one of the things I took from the book is there's this kind of particular, I guess, kind of

transitional moment really of kind of like mid-teens through to the kind of end of the teenage years that's really important and as people later on in the book kind of reflect on them you know their use of fashion or what kind of music they were into or what scenes they were part of it is that kind of like you know late teen into early 20s that sort of comes up so so what I suppose kind of is youth in the book

That is a really tricky question to answer, I think, because I think youth is kind of a...

a notoriously tricky concept to try and define. And for anybody that reads the book, you'll see in the introduction, I really tried to shy away, I suppose, from putting kind of a definitive age date on what constitutes youth. And part of what I do really actually in the final chapter of the book is argue that the definition of youth itself is so porous, changes so dramatically, particularly towards the end of the 20th century, that

The question perhaps is less about what constitutes youth, but actually what does youth represent to adults, to wider society and to people themselves who are reflecting back on their teenage years. But I think you're absolutely right. There is a moment of transition. And I suppose for me,

The book is really trying to think about youth through that process of transition. So transitioning from childhood into adulthood and the touchstones that we might associate with that. So this is a particular history of leisure. So it explores those touchstones through the kind of leisure pursuits that young people are engaged with.

And because the book is particularly interested in nighttime leisure, so pubs, nightclubs, bars, discos, it kind of also intersects them with a really interesting question of what forms of leisure are seen to be appropriate at different points in the life cycle.

And I think it's something we will touch on later. But part of that is also a discussion about licensing and alcohol. So the fact that alcohol is in theory limited to those under the age of 18 is

Should mean that certain parts of the book perhaps feel they don't fit in a history of youth culture. But I think part of what I show is that pubs, nightclubs are open to many young people from the ages of 14, 15. And it is that moment of transitioning into a new life cycle, into a new environment.

series of leisure spaces trying to distinguish themselves from adults but also from their younger peers I think that makes this particular moment in life kind of 15 to 19 I think such an interesting period.

Yeah, and the book kind of brings that to life sort of wonderfully in several different ways. And one way of kind of bringing it to life, I guess, is to get into some examples. And I was struck actually, you know, you were talking about...

not just alcohol, but the kind of broader creation and perception of appropriate or inappropriate spaces. And quite early on, the book talks about things like coffee houses or coffee shops that are open slightly late at night. The kind of rise of particular sort of suburban bits of leisure space, as well as more kind of traditional things that we'd associate with 50s and 60s, like, you know, going to the cinema or

um, these kind of, um, sort of more formal leisure spaces. So I wonder if you can give some examples of what kinds of spaces were available in the fifties and sixties, and I guess kind of how, how they might have changed thinking about that theme of, um, people impacting the spaces and the spaces impacting people. Yeah. So there,

Because it tries to focus explicitly on evening leisure, the first couple of chapters really try to get to grips with how that leisure environment is changing. And I think what is really notable about the 1950s is you do have this moment of transition where more established leisure spaces like the cinema, like the dance hall are changing.

paying attention, I think, to the changing leisure patterns of youth and increasingly towards the end of the 1950s into the 1960s, the perceived affluence of young people. Now, I try to be critical, I think, of that idea of sort of the affluent society and of affluent youth, but

There is clear evidence, I think, that relationally young people have got more money to spend in the 1950s and 1960s. And that has a really significant impact on the leisure environment. And you see sort of two things happening. The first is that established spaces of leisure, like the dance hall,

really start to alter what they're doing to try and draw in those young consumers. So there's a change in the kind of music that's being played. There's a move away from live bands, from live music towards what they termed more mechanical music, so playing records, and

For the older dance halls, there was a really kind of practical reason for that, which is that for the bands, it took quite a long time to learn new pieces of music, to rehearse, to perform those. You could have a much more immediate response from your audience if you were playing some of the latest records by playing those in their recorded form rather than their live form. But what you did see over the course of the 60s is a number of dance halls changing.

kind of specialising in certain forms of music or hosting particular swing nights or beat nights that would try and bring in particular youth audiences. And that was a way of trying to distinguish them from perhaps more traditional dance nights that would attract a slightly older clientele at various points in the week.

The other thing that happens is really the emergence of new spaces, often run by local entrepreneurs or local businessmen who kind of are keen to tap into this youth market. And coffee bars and coffee clubs are, I think, a really fantastic example of that. These are often quite small, quite unassuming places. In lots of cities, they move into empty shop fronts. They tend to take over shops.

buildings have got a basement attached and you see lots of these venues that have got kind of the coffee bar at the top with kind of the usual shop front but then you go down into the basement or into the back room and they'll have a space for live music often for local bands or for touring bands that are kind of moving through that youth circuit and these are spaces that feel

I think very absent from the adult imagination. So what you start to see over the course of the late 50s into the 60s is a real fear emerging about some of these new leisure spaces that feel quite unfamiliar, that feel quite unknown to the adults around them. And that in turn creates a very particular sort of moral panic about whether or not these spaces are appropriate. And coffee bars and dance halls, I think through much of this period,

are so interesting because they're not serving alcohol. So they are not designating themselves as adult spaces. They are not particularly...

associated with questions of intoxication by alcohol, but do become associated with intoxication via drug use. So amphetamines is particularly associated with coffee bars, but it's also associated with particular forms of social mixing. And that causes real concern for parents, for the media, and for those that are really only getting their information about these places through those kind of dominant media narratives.

Yamaha Resort & Casino at San Manuel is giving away a Porsche every Thursday in June. Club Serrano members play all month long to earn entries for your chance to win a luxury all-electric sports car. Join for free today and don't miss your chance to drive off in a new Porsche. It's all happening at Yamaha Resort & Casino, the only AAA five-diamond rated casino hotel in the country. Details at yamaha.com must be 21 to enter. Please gamble responsibly.

This episode is brought to you by eBay. We all have that piece. The one that's so you, you've basically become known for it. And if you don't yet, Fashionistas, you'll find it on eBay. That Miu Miu red leather bomber, the Cousteau Barcelona cowboy top, or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway. All these finds are all on eBay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by authenticity guarantee. eBay is the place for pre-loved and vintage fashion. eBay. Things people love.

Savor every last drop of summer with Starbucks. From bold refreshers to rich cold brews, the sunniest season only gets better with a handcrafted ice beverage in your hand. Available for a limited time. Your summer favorites are ready at Starbucks.

Mate, it's so interesting, isn't it? The kind of...

I suppose, sort of... You've used the term moral panic, which I think is perfect. That seemingly kind of like quite...

from modernized benevolent spaces, you know, that seem quite, not boring is the wrong term, isn't it? But you know what I mean? Quite innocent in some ways generated this kind of, and the book talks about this a bit later on, you know, a series of kind of like, you know, legal questions about what's appropriate about, you know, kind of where should be licensed and for what and this kind of stuff. And I suppose that

is partially a story that we might kind of be familiar with for the nighttime economy. But at the same time, there's another bit of the story, which is this kind of like

corporate control is is that the right term and and you do kind of bring in this idea that on the one hand these spaces that seem um you know in some ways to have a kind of organic um kind of story and almost the sort of like you know built by particular scenes or whatever vibe to them actually there's an important kind of um intersection of uh

seriously big businesses providing leisure and then also regulation. And I mean, there are lots of different examples in the book. And I wonder if you could pick out, you know, maybe one, maybe two to kind of say who were the kind of like big players in this landscape and maybe like how were they kind of regulated as well?

Yeah, so there's two, I think, that are most well-known and I think still are household names in terms of that big business. And that's Mecca and Top Rank or the Rank Organization, as they were known at the time. And

These are both, I think, quite interesting examples because they have a really long history and established history in the leisure industry by the 1940s, 1950s. Mecca, of course, makes its fortune in the 1920s and 1930s in dancing with dance halls is already well established by the post-war period as a space of youth leisure. And Alison Abra and James Knott have done some really fantastic work

on the history of Mecca as an organisation, showing really how they get to the heart of tapping into a new demand for a very particular British, quote-unquote British, form of leisure. But in the post-war period...

Mecca realised, I think quite quickly, that they are coming under increased competition from alternative leisure spaces and that there is increasingly an association with these dance halls of speaking to quite a traditional form of leisure that feels less exciting, perhaps less attractive than some of the other new beat clubs and coffee bars that are emerging, particularly in the larger cities. It's really what Mecca does

do here is kind of first they focus on diversifying so their business portfolio transforms dramatically they take on holiday parks they start to build new leisure centres they are early adopters of some of the big kind of out of town leisure super centres they start to build some of these the new Bristol Centre is owned by Mecca which opens in the early 1960s and is a huge high

hundred thousand pound million pound project and is a really significant investment and it taps into the business model of Mecca which is that everything is in-house so you should be able to go out to the Mecca centre and you can go dancing you can play bingo you can go to one of the Mecca restaurants you can do everything under one roof so Mecca really tried to diversify

But what they also do is pay really close attention to what is happening in their dance halls and recognise quite quickly, I think, that the way that young people are dancing, the way that they are interacting with each other on the dance floor starts to shift really quite dramatically through the early to mid part of the 1960s. And they undertake a really rapid renovation of lots of their venues and dance.

That becomes quite contentious at a number of points in the later 20th century. But they really try to focus in lots of venues on updating their decor, on leaning into kind of themed decor. They want to evoke a particular sort of everyday affordable glamour. So these are places that are meant to be aspirational. They're wanting to draw young people in. But they also have a very particular concern with public reputation.

And I think because they are a household name by this point in the 20th century, they are incredibly concerned with keeping a very particular set of associations with the label Mecca. That plays out in a number of different ways. But one of the ways I explore this in the book is

is by thinking about the informal colour bar that Mecca essentially bring in. So there is no formal policy across Mecca organisations. They are all managed independently. They maintain a sense of independence from each other. But Mecca's management policy was often to prioritise white customers. It was to reject individuals

any indication of trouble. And that was incredibly racialized, very heavily racialized, very heavily gendered. And what this means is that Mecca door policies were often incredibly exclusionary. It shaped the kind of music that was being played. It shaped the way the door policies were put in place in various venues.

So that question of kind of respectability and of internal regulation for Mecca, I think plays a really important role.

top rank a slightly different story in that they have a longer history in cinema and like Mecca they really try to diversify across the second half of the 20th century cinema audiences are declining so they start to undertake a series of renovations of often old picture houses old cinemas into large dance halls and large nightclubs and again they become kind of

I suppose the biggest competitor for Mecca early on in that dancing space and you have this kind of rivalry that starts to develop over the course of the second half of the 20th century then ends with Mecca being brought out by top rank and it's this kind of battle of the dance floor that plays out across the 20th century so

So you get a sense, I think, through the book that business absolutely matters. You know, this is not just businesses responding to youth demands. This is absolutely about profit. It's about making money. And I think it shows that.

the power that that money has in transforming the urban environment, particularly in slightly smaller towns or cities that don't have big established leisure venues. It's often companies like Mecca and Top Rank that are coming in and bringing that investment. So the story, I think, of these companies is really important and often, I think, quite overlooked. So far, I guess we talked about the spaces and we've sort of thought about them in a variety of

of different, different ways. And I mean, the book isn't entirely a book of sort of two halves, but one of the things that happens in the second half of the book is I guess the kind of the people in the spaces become a bit more of the focus become a bit more kind of prominent. And, um,

There's lots of different kind of ways we could sort of take the discussion. But given you were talking about things like door policies and kind of who gets in and, you know, the kind of racialized and kind of gendered. And I suppose, you know, as with all of these things in Britain, you know, the kind of classed elements of who was seen as trouble or whatever. It'd be interesting to pick up, I think, that theme of gender because, you know,

One of the things that comes up in the second half of the book is experiences around alcohol and I guess kind of pubs and, you know, sort of clubs, places that are serving booze. And what's really interesting is the kind of the gendering of the use of these places, both in terms of

what's the right term? I guess kind of traditional pubs or, you know, the traditional kind of image of a pub and how some women would kind of subvert that. But also, I guess, the relationships between kind of what became what we'd understand as kind of like nightclubs by the time we're into the kind of 70s and 80s. So I guess what's the sort of gendered experience of some of these licensed premises? Yeah, so the...

I suppose the key starting point here is that the association of alcohol and public space in the city is

was predominantly masculine right the way through the first half of the 20th century. It starts to change in some ways in the interwar period with the emergence of what become known as reformed pubs, which seem to be a little bit more family friendly. They encourage family dining. So they're not solely spaces of kind of masculine activity.

masculine sociability. But through much of that first half of the 20th century, the public house really is seen to be a masculine space.

So the big shift, I think, that the book charts is kind of how that changes and the various steps that are taken by pubs themselves to try and make themselves more welcoming to younger women. That starts in the 1960s with certain pubs applying for music and singing licenses so they can open up music in the back room. And they start to kind of divert from that masculine space of sociability and

But for women especially, there is often quite a difficult negotiation with these spaces. Part of this is negotiation, particularly for those young women that are still living at home or are still living kind of in the confines of family and community spaces.

is trying to navigate access to these spaces. So there's a really nice example of one of the women who I interviewed who grew up in the 1960s. He went to the local art college and often at lunchtime and in the evening would nip into the pub that was near the campus of the art college and trying to actively be...

not be seen by family members, by cousins that worked in nearby shops, because there was a very particular association with being a young woman in a pub in the 1960s that was seen as negative, was associated with a variety of negative behaviours for young women.

But what starts to happen over the course of the 70s, the 80s, is that you see the emergence of spaces that are designed much more explicitly with women in mind. And that kind of aspirational glamour that I spoke about with Mecca kind of starts to make its way into the wider nighttime economy. And these are spaces that are designed really to bring young women in. And you can see over the course of the last two chapters of the book, kind of how those gendered

behaviors start to emerge so the emergence of the girls night out as a yeah as a kind of part of of the week sees young women uh moving through the city in groups after dark um you know drinking uh engaging in behaviors that 10-15 years earlier would have been completely frowned upon

And that, for me, feels like a really significant cultural transformation is, you know, spaces of alcohol, spaces of drinking becoming sites of female sociability, I think is so important. So the book sort of partially, I guess, charts the emergence of that as a phenomenon, but also thinks about some of the negative associations that many young women then have as a result of that. So it thinks about

you know, societal and community control of where young women are seen to be socialising and where they shouldn't be seen to be socialising. But it also thinks about the growing connection between the night-time economy and sites of sexual experience and sexual encounter.

For some women, that was liberating. It was freeing to be able to have a night out on the town and kind of see who you would bump into and see who you would meet. But for lots of women, that also felt quite oppressive. So that emergence of sort of the girls' night out is also a way of charting sort of the spaces where women felt that they could socialise together, where they felt safe. And that sense of safety and belonging is really one of the themes, I think, that comes through in that section of the book.

I mean, the other kind of elements of belonging that comes up in the very last chapter is how, I guess, kind of...

young people who are sort of now old people or at least middle-aged and people looking back on some of their lives, how they got a sense of kind of who they were by on the one hand kind of belonging, particular fashions, music, like going out, but also, and the thing that I've

that on a personal level really intrigued me from that last chapter was the kind of like negative sense of you know not being into things or um kind of positioning oneself as you know possibly against kind of a particular subculture or whatever and there's i mean there's so much in in that um kind of oral history uh that the book uses um and i i wonder like like to give you a question that is actually answerable rather than just saying wow there's loads of stuff there i i wonder kind of

I suppose what would be the kind of particular story you wanted to tell using the oral history testimonies? Because obviously it's a bit different to things like the discussion of like, you know, council regulations or or legal cases. And as you've mentioned, you know, kind of corporate archives that come earlier in the book.

Yeah, so I think there's two things I wanted to do. The first actually is just to give a sense of lived experience. I think it's, you're only going to go so far telling the story of youth and leisure in

If you only explore how those leisure spaces are created, managed, regulated. I think to get the other half of that story, you really need to understand not only how young people moved through those spaces, but why, what sorts of decisions were they taking? What kind of factors were shaping the way that they moved through the city? So really, I think that was kind of my driving aim was just to try and get a sense of lived experience and to try and understand the meaning that young people were attached to.

to their leisure choices, to the kinds of spaces they chose to socialise in. The second, I think, really was driven by a desire to move away from histories of youth that focus predominantly or exclusively on subculture and the spectacular.

Now, in saying that, actually, I think what I kind of came to the conclusion of actually is that subculture absolutely does matter. And it's almost inescapable in some ways in how we tell our histories of youth and youth culture.

because it is so important to how people understand themselves. And that was something that I really maybe wasn't expecting to find come through so centrally in the conversations that I was having with people that I interviewed. But while I was interested in getting a sense of the quote unquote ordinary, and that is a theme I kind of tried to unpick a little bit through the book,

And lots of people felt that their experiences were ordinary or one participant termed it kind of middle of the road or uninteresting often was their assumption. But actually the...

The conversations I was having with these people showed me first that there is no such thing as the unspectacular youth experience. Everybody has something interesting and significant to say. And it was very interesting to me that the association of an important or culturally significant youth was by these people themselves associated with particular subcultural tropes and narratives.

But that sense of belonging and that sense of identity, I think, was inherently tied to those subcultural frameworks. In the way that people tried to kind of narrate and navigate telling their own histories was often either told through, well, I was quite mainstream and I was kind of middle of the road and I was very boring and down the line, except as they talked and as we had conversations, it would turn out that that really wasn't the case.

Or it was the narrative of, you know, I felt very excluded by that cultural mainstream. So I sought to try and find myself elsewhere. But the language is often used. The language used is often less subcultural and more of kind of alternative mainstream. So those subcultural markers, while they are much more porous, I think, in the book. So the sense of subculture or the concept of subculture, I think, remains really important.

But I think it also showed me that space absolutely does matter. It's very clear from these conversations that space matters.

matters to people's sense of self, you know, where they chose to socialize, who they chose to socialize with in those spaces, how they chose to present themselves in those spaces, aspiration to particular cultural scenes associated with certain venues and certain spaces, that plays a really important role in how people narrate their experiences. So I

While I think this is a book of two halves and quite literally is part one and part two, I hope that that last chapter really starts to bring together that larger conversation about why we should pay attention to space. This is not just the backdrop to young people's lives, but is a really central and mutable part of that relationship. It's shaped by young people, but also really inherently shakes young people's identity and sense of self.

Yeah, I mean, the chapter definitely does that. And that question, I think of,

why should we pay attention to space would be, I guess, a really straightforward starting point for the next or actually several new books and, you know, various kind of papers. And I'm intrigued to know whether this is something you're going to be kind of carrying on with in terms of a research agenda or equally, you know, have you kind of shifted to think about a range of other kind of ideas or questions?

Yes, I'm in. It's definitely a set of questions that I want to continue exploring and I have...

I have plans in the longer term to come back to this and think about a question, a history that thinks about underage drinking specifically, and really tries to pick up on some of those questions in, uh, in the fourth chapter on drinking and, uh, kind of the, the liminality of underage drinking, um, that I would, I want to come back to in the longer term. Um, more imminently, I am working on a couple of, um, of separate projects. I've got a,

kind of fun little side projects um that I've started recently on the milk marketing board um they put together a really interesting set of adverts that I came across in news magazines as I was researching for another project a few years ago which speak to a very particular idea of youthfulness and youthful independence of the 1960s so I'm currently in the midst of kind of diving into their archives at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading um and trying to understand kind of

why the Milk Marketing Board were so keen on advertising to teenagers and particularly keen on advertising to their vision of the newly mobile, newly independent teenager. So that really carries on, I think, some of the themes in the book on sort of perceptions of youth and adolescents and how those are changing and being shaped in the 1960s in particular.

And then I'm at the start of a much bigger project on the history of the YMCA at the moment. So really trying to chart the history of the organisation through the 20th century, but particularly trying to understand how organisations like the YMCA kind of shift their approach in the second half of the 20th century in response to the emergence of commercial leisure, but also in response to things like the Albemarle Report,

of 1960 which really tries to rework youth work and access to youth services in Britain so this is kind of a more organisational history I suppose but again sort of keeping that same theme of kind of that particular vision of a change in youth experience from the 1950s and 1960s.

Come eat, drink and be cherry. Join the Gilroy Gardens Cherry Jubilee, a sweet celebration of food and family fun from June 6th to July 6th. Discover mouthwatering cherry infused delights, spectacular entertainment and all sorts of cheerful cherry challenges. Join the Jubilee and get tickets now at GilroyGardens.org.