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‘Calculating class’: housing, lifestyle and status in the provincial English city, 1900–1950*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

NICK HAYES
NICK HAYES*
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NGII 8NS
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Abstract

The multifarious ‘objective’ indicators used to place individuals by class (for example, occupation, wealth, income), or proxies thereof, capture only a part of who we are. More important is our ‘style of life’: our tastes, how we spend what we earn and how this interplays socially to include or exclude us from ‘society’. Of these the most significant cultural site was an individual's house and home, against which, using local property tax records, we can place a defined numeric value. This article analyses class in relation to housing and property values in Nottingham in the first half of the twentieth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , May 2009 , pp. 113 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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