Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain - Hardcover

by Ben Highmore (Author)

In postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong. Lifestyle revolution charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cuisine and lifestyle magazines. Novelists, cartoonists and playwrights satirised the tastes of the emerging middle classes, while sociologists claimed that an entire population was suffering from 'status anxiety', but underneath it all, a new order was being constructed out of duvets, quiches and mayonnaise, easy chairs from Habitat, white emulsion paint and ubiquitous pine kitchen tables. More than just a world of symbolic goods, this was an intimate environment alive with new feelings and attitudes.

Back Jacket

In the second half of the twentieth century, a revolution happened in Britain. Consumer items such as TVs and washing machines went from rare to commonplace, while record numbers of people became homeowners. Many predicted the British class system would not survive this transformation. The reality proved to be more complicated.

In Lifestyle revolution, Ben Highmore reveals how consumer culture and new ideas about 'tasteful' living changed British society. Far from being abolished, class was reshaped from the 1950s onwards through colour supplements, flat-pack furniture and Mediterranean cooking. Tastes initially regarded as bohemian and trendy ultimately became mainstream. Taking to the high street, Highmore retraces this process by following the rise - and sometimes fall - of chains such as Habitat and PizzaExpress, alongside the appearance of exciting, must-have products: pine kitchen tables, chicken bricks, duvets and more.

Drawing on everything from the Adrian Mole novels to Len Deighton's Action Cook Book, Highmore reveals how ideas of social class became more complex over time, as the British embraced a world of 'controlled casualness'. He also reaches a new understanding of what taste is: the promise of a different way of living.

Author Biography

Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. His books include The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain (2017) and The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House (2014).