In this chapter I will introduce the city of Potsford, within which this research primarily took place, before providing a vivid picture of the various fieldsites I inhabited. By offering a thoroughgoing description of Potsford, I hope to provide the context underpinning my sample’s lives, before emphasizing the burgeoning health and fitness industry that has swept the area in recent years. Similarly, by furnishing the reader with a description of the sites under study, I will set up what is to come and allow for a degree of familiarity prior to my interrogation of the use and supply of IPEDs in this context.

‘Myopic provincialism’: the geography of Potsford

Potsford teeters between the Midlands and the North, flanked by the heavily rebranded cities of Birmingham and Manchester. The area is often misplaced as an outright northern city (see Evans, 2017) due to its heavy industrial heritage and characterization as the ‘most working-class city in England’ (Jayne, 2004: 199). However, in reality it lies in the upper Midlands. While Potsford is the largest city in the region with a population of just over 260,000, its industrial past is shared collectively with ‘five towns’, known locally as ‘The Kilns’. Owing to this unique layout, Potsford lacks a conventional city centre, instead hosting various localized hubs that service residents of each town in a highly parochial manner. Discussing this, Williams notes that Potsford exhibits a sense of ‘myopic provincialism’ (Williams, 2006: 183), fed by locals’ resounding pride in their town.

Potsford has been lambasted as a city devoid of any resounding contemporary identity, described as ‘lacking in things for people to talk about’ (Hansard, 2007: 562) besides its former industrial glory days, and, as Hart (2005) coyly notes, being the birthplace of celebrity Robbie Williams. Instead, The Kilns’ five towns mostly centre around decidedly rundown highstreets (see Figure 2.1), composed mostly of shabby independent retailers, charity shops, and ‘booze and fag’ stores (Ancrum, 2013: 117).