Beyond the Council Estate

In recent years British cinema has utilised the iconic image of the council estate as an emblematic shorthand for defining the supposedly dysfunctional character of the working-class people who reside there. As a spatial determinant, it has come to signify a whole group of people in the popular imaginary as anti-social, violent and workshy. Drawing on the latest research into class and British cinema, the chapters in this edited collection explore classed identities in relation to the spaces which they occupy, both onscreen and off. The chapters in this collection shift the spatial location of the working class away from the council estates in which they are visually and symbolically contained to explore alternative spaces where their complexities, struggles and resistance to the systemic cultural and political discourses that define them can be foregrounded.