Leisure in Worktown

Abstract

The Worktown archive offers a unique insight into the contribution of leisure to well-being as part of the everyday life of the individual and the neighbourhood community. It shows how in a new phase of modernity of the cinema and wireless, people were not passive consumers but retained agency in the construction of their own leisure lives. This chapter provides an outline commentary on inter-war practices and understandings of leisure and compares them to those of the present as digital media create new means of forming on-line communities and social identity through leisure.

August is nearly over, the people

Back from holiday are tanned

With blistered thumbs and a wallet of snaps and a little

Joie de vivre which is contraband;

Whose stamina is enough to face the annual

Wait for the annual spree,

Whose memories are stamped with specks of sunshine

Like faded fleurs de lys.

Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers,

The workman gathers his tools

For the eight-hour day but after that the solace

Of films or football pools

Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory

Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eyes of doubt,

The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking

In the empty glass of stout.

Louis MacNeice Autumn Journal, New York: Random House, 1939.

The original version of this chapter was revised: Chapter abstract has been corrected. The erratum to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65651-9_9