‘Community’ is often used as a warmly persuasive word to add a positive glow to a policy or seen in a nostalgic lens as having been the prevailing characteristic of working-class life and being among the primary working-class values. In the process of this research, some assumptions about ‘community’ were strongly challenged. This chapter focuses on the ways that ‘outsider’ positions are constructed and contribute to the social conditions of loneliness. It does this by examining stories we heard that were presented by those who told them as aspects of small-town or small-place experiences. We recognise that these experiences can be mirrored in the more liberal cultures of many cities where young people growing up in socially or religiously conservative families find themselves positioned as ‘outsiders’, especially in relation to liberal sexual cultures. In our analysis, we have connected this with themes of social segregation.

Large urban centres are often seen as ‘the lonely city’. Smaller places are often characterised, both positively and negatively, as having a strong sense of community and belonging, but young people growing up in such places explored how these too can be lonely. It was the experience of being ‘different’ from the norms of a particular place and subject to the formal and informal policing of those norms that threatened to leave young people with the feeling of being ‘outsiders’, of not belonging, and experiencing loneliness in consequence. The research team found that a sense of being an insider or an outsider, of belonging or not belonging, may be strong in places which pride themselves on their sense of community. In a city, where there are multiple possibilities of connection and disconnection, everyone is an outsider to someone, and so potentially also an insider and belonging to someone too. In smaller settlements such as villages and towns, there are different conditions of connection, as most people can be expected to know one another, to attend the same schools and to shop in the same shops. Experiences of loneliness are therefore intricately entangled with our relationships with ourselves, with people we know or are near to and with the spaces which bring us together or keep us apart.