Growing up and going out: Youth culture, commerce, leisure space in post war Britain

A study of youth, commerce, and leisure that explores the reimagination, remaking, and regulation of the post-war city after dark. Using a case study of Sheffield, this book considers the relationship between young people and their local environment and the meaning of leisure in post-war Britain. In the decades following the Second World War, youthful sociability was remade as young people across Britain flocked to newly-opened coffee bars, beat clubs and discos, drawn to their dark corners, crowded dance floors and loud music. These spaces, increasingly unknown and unfamiliar to the adults who passed by them, played a remarkable role in reshaping town and city centres after dark as sites of leisure and recreation. Growing up and going out tells the story of sociability, leisure, and youth culture in post-war Britain, demonstrating how young people’s experiences of commercial youth leisure was increasingly characterised by its spatial and temporal separation from the wider urban leisurescape. Telling the history of youth in post-war Britain via the towns and cities that young people moved through, this book traces how the new spaces of post-war youth leisure transformed both young people’s relationship with their local environment and adults’ perceptions of the possibilities and dangers of modern leisure. Using an extensive range of sources from oral histories to licensing documents, government records and newspapers, the volume demonstrates the importance of taking popular youth cultures seriously. Exploring the making and meaning of youth leisure, Growing up and going out offers a timely reassessment of young lives in the second half of the twentieth century that will be essential reading to scholars of youth, modern Britain and popular culture. In the decades following the Second World War, youthful sociability was remade as young people across Britain flocked to newly-opened coffee bars, beat clubs, and discos. These spaces, increasingly unknown and unfamiliar to the adults who passed by them, played a remarkable role in reshaping town and city centres after dark as sites of leisure and recreation. Telling the history of youth in post-war Britain from the ground up, through the towns and cities that young people moved through, this book traces how the new spaces of post-war youth leisure transformed both young people’s relationship with their local environment and adults’ perceptions of the possibilities and dangers of modern leisure. Growing up and going out offers a timely study of youth, commerce, and leisure that explores the reimagination, remaking, and regulation of the post-war city after dark.