Being middle class

John Prescott to thread!

in strict economic-political terms, the echt bourgeoisie has probably CONTRACTED since then, what with the casualisation of layer on layer of clerical work etc etc => even middle management is really only management in name

i doubt this dissonance can survive very much longer: 20 yrs of cutting to the bone means there's a lot less give left than there once was (most govt spending, since dispensed with, cushioned the middle classes)

Question: from this sentence I conclude that government spending has been decreasing in the UK. Is this correct?

As a comparision, in the US, (overall) government spending has never decreased (it has, as far as I know, always increased). Is there a correlation between government spending and the middle class in either country?

I reside squarely in the upper lower class with middle classs tendencies.

i love the word boondoggle.

Does my occupation matter? My parents'? My husband's?

Or that middle class people eschew accents. Has Ogmor Roundtrouser actually *met* any real people, or is this all based on watching Keeping Up Appearances?

Basically, if you go to get drink i.e. alcohol, if you buy for immediate use, you are Working Class. If you buy for drinking later (as in a week or more later), you are middle.

Try that on for sausages.

A lot of the traditional signifiers are useless. The middle class and the working class have become more like each other over time, and there were always sub-divisions within each group: my dad's family were mostly skilled engineers from the Midlands, that's a very different group from, say, casual labourers. And this whole class thing isn't prescriptive, it's an honest attempt to describe the weird cultural differences that are gradually disappearing but are a long way yet from gone.

1. The upper classes, the "barbarians"
2. The middle classes, the "Philistines"
3. The lower classes, the "populace"
4. The fourth class. the "people of sweetness and light"

I'm No. 4, how 'bout you?

I went to school and have memories of South Shields, terraced house, outdoor lav, all that.

My sister went to Windsor as her first school. (Not at the same time as me at SS, that's where we moved to, dur)

So, if there is such a thing as roots, I do have some distant roots there, whereas my sis cannot claim to remember much about it from then.

So, does my school of choice and intellectual tastes make me middle-class? When I look at my friends who come from a middle-class background, the biggest difference between me and them seems to financial security, which has never been part of my life.

However, I'm not a martyr to it and I won't stay in sackcloth and ashes over it. I'm pretty much the same situation as noodle vague, I think, in that my parents were most definitely working class, and I'm somewhere past that - if I had children, I'm guessing they would feel middle class - at the moment, I'm somewhere in between. I have no airs and graces at all, as anyone who knows me will testify.

so do i but that's cause i watched too much bbc. *roffle*

Sounds like Lidl to me. 9p tin of chopped tomatoes with Arabic writing on it = exotic foreign foodstuffs.

The chain (Trader Joe's) was founded by Joe Coulombe and is currently owned by a family trust set up by German billionaire Theo Albrecht, one of the two brothers behind Aldi.

Aldi is only slightly less ghetto than Lidl, but still!

I guess I'm middle class now, work in IT, live in Muswell Hill. I used to really resent being called middle class (because of my accent/the fact I went to public school) mainly because the people calling me middle class came from much better off families than mine and they'd be all "working class and proud of it". I guess I didn't like being presumed to have a silver spoon in my mouth when the reality was quite far from that.

Don't really give a shit now though.

So I'm upper middle class am I? Actually I can't stand anyone apart from me and my friends and my immediate family and even then I blow hot and cold...

My dad's parents both went to good universities and he was expected to do the same, but although a good enough athlete to swim in the Junior Olympics at 14, he wasn't academic and I think is borderline dyslexic. He is ambidextrous.

"As the middle-income population hovers near minority status, the population of upper-income adults is growing more rapidly than the population of lower-income adults. From 1971 to 2015, the number of adults in upper-income households increased from 18.4 million to 51 million, a gain of 177%. During the same period, the number of adults in lower -income households increased from 33.2 million to 70.3 million, a gain of 112%."

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/

I just read that the 1% mark for my state is $500K a year. Fuck.

where did you see that?

how to be middle class -
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n15/carolyn-steedman/wall-in-the-head
She learned about being nice in her two years at college; about being what she is now; projecting an image to others of being pleasant and above all reasonable. By watching, she learned how to be middle class: her fellow students were ‘the nicest and most reasonable individuals I had ever met. I mean, I’m not reading the bloody news here; that’s what being-middle-class-in-the-world is about. Darkness is managed or hidden.’

Really bad article.

can't read it because pay-wall but the book looks interesting if not the review

the book sounds interesting, esp as most (m/c mainly?) people seem to regard those brutalist buildings quite fondly. not read the whole article yet (recently got a trial subscription to LRB - its not quite as excellent as i hoped)

i love brutalist architecture and having lived in a concrete maisonette i'm not convinced the fault is in the genre per se

i mean it was a lousy building in a not great estate but the faults are more about planning, housing and building than the conceptual worthiness of tower blocks

Had that argument on another thread, no-one came up with any conceptual reasons why those estates were worse than what they replaced. That review did catch my eye though.

I saw Lynsey Hanley speak at a thing a couple of years back, and I recall she'd refined her position on brutalist architecture somewhat. She was saying that the problems were (as NV says) problems of planning and building (and also of the way class functions in the UK) rather than the architecture per se. The thing was in the Barbican so it'd have been fairly tricky to stick too closely to an argument that brutalism necessarily = social exclusion and misery etc.

there were literal problems with the building i used to be in - it was v hard to heat in winter, as the council began moving people out for eventual demolition the damp was literally running down the concrete walls at times, but my understanding is the problem with a lot of post-war architecture was not that this was inherent to the style/materials but that a lot of buildings were thrown up on the cheap

and yeah they were mostly still in their brief-ish lives preferable to the slums that the original tenants had moved out of

cellular inner city accommodation is still something we need to find ways to embrace, the rush to Barrattise green belts has not been an adequate response to anything

Yeah post-war public housing + schools where totally rough and lots of corners where cut off building regs in the name of deadlines and cost. I once had an interesting chat with this clerk of works dude about this topic. Apparently all those prefab shack style schools with much asbestos in the walls and support structure were only designed with a 15 year lifespan in mind, definitely not 60+

Owen Hatherley is good on brutalist architecture and its popularity with tenants in the sixties and seventies.

This is interesting:

https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/the-park-hill-estate-sheffield-streets-in-the-sky/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/28/sheffield-park-hill-class-cleansing

The brutalist stuff tended to be more robust than a lot of the cheap stuff thrown up. High-rise blocks from that era generally have more living space than new builds in places like Stratford. They were never properly looked after though and the recent efforts at regeneration have either been with a view to replacing the previous tenants or tacking up a lot of brightly-coloured chipboard on the outside and doing very little about lighting, maintenance, security etc, etc.

Good and fair discussion of brutalist architecture

[ which btw is not what that bad LRB article above is about! :-) ]

I'm not sure if it applies to British high rises but the main problem with concrete is the use of rebar in construction and the unintended consequences. On paper reinforced concrete was (and in some cases, is) a great idea in that construction time is reduced and tensile strength increased, but the long-term effects of temperature fluctuation, use of rebar that can corrode, and the reaction between metal substructure and concrete mixes wasn't adequately accounted for.

When I was in school there was a section of dormitories that weren't meant for long-term use, although they were still standing decades later, that were ostensibly brutalist or brutalism-inspired. The fences around the base of the building keeping pedestrians out of the path of falling chunks of concrete is, for many reasons, not a ringing endorsement of the style.

The Park Hill story is really interesting. Those are great looking buildings imo.

Also "anodised aluminium" somehow makes it past spell check on my computer, hmm

I was working in Sheffield when the Park Hill refurbishment was started about 5-6 years back. They stripped it to it's basic concrete structure which was the part of the building that was listed, and slotted in these new and colourrful ready wired/plumbed flats like giant lego pieces. The site manager where I was working at the time grew up in the original Park Hill flats and was keeping a photo diary of the whole job and love chatting about it.

It is really shit that most of them new flats are all private sector, but that is another story.

Now I'm just thinking about Ballard's High Rise and the recent movie, although that story recast brutalist high rises as mixed-class housing

Actually a small amount of them are Housing Association, but only about 200 out of 900 or something.