Introduction

I premised at the outset that the idea of community is often romantic and utopian, idealising and evoking a bygone age. Often considered to have been ‘lost’ through modernity, community has also been hailed as the solution to social ‘problems’ by successive governments in the UK. From the New Right to the present Conservative-led coalition government, community has become synonymous with a relinquishment of responsibility by the state (Hoggett et al, 1997). When the women made their move to Spain, community in policy circles was presented by the then government, as a panacea to the lack of social cohesion among diverse ethnic groups. Exploring how ‘community’ is presented and constructed in new contexts and examining how and to what women constructed belonging, illuminates their agency and positionalities within wider structural contexts and also processes of social change and continuity.

The women featured orchestrated their own solution to nonbelonging in the UK: they chose to leave the UK but found themselves once more on the margins in Spain. As a result, they needed to forge and construct new forms of belonging and community and review and revisit old ones. These women constructed belonging and community, based on being of and from a place, through social networks and this was also shaped by their social locations. Although community could at times be superficial and tenuous, for them, its presence denoted a better quality of life. Isolated diasporic communities like this one – formed through migration – often look back to the past to create a sense of belonging among members (O’Reilly, 2000a; 2002). Nostalgic constructions of belonging and community are key to how these women gave meaning to their lives through an orientation to the past. In the final analysis I revisit the abiding importance of unravelling belonging to different representations of community to understand retired British women's experiences of migration to Spain.

Place, networks and positionalities

In the current context of global movement, place is still important since people still construct belonging to places (Cronin, 2006), social interaction is located ‘somewhere’ (Jackson, 1999 and Stevenson, 1999, cited in Sherlock, 2002) and ‘people and place interact’ (MacLennan, 2000).