Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 22

seriously myself as a first-time home owner in the mid 1990s, I began to notice a
difference between the tastes and practices I had grown up with as a child and the
'desirable' practices novice gardeners were being shown in the media.
This section has drawn parallels between two historical moments in British
culture where the middle-class establishment has attempted, with limited success, to
define and control the aesthetic fabric of the living space of working-class subjects.
The following section looks at how the working-class have historically been made
visible, positioned and regulated through urban planning. It shows that gardening
was historically conceived as a regulatory activity with the potential to position the
working-class into a safe place: the home.
Historical Legacies: Urban Planning and Working-class Leisure Since the
Nineteenth Century
Since the mid-nineteenth century the State, successive governments and upper-class
commentators have demonstrated their fear of the working-class. 6 Constructed as
an object of social and moral concern, the working-class have been regarded as a
degenerate, savage, irresponsible and fecund mass. Seen as a threat to bourgeois
liberal democracy (Walkerdine 1997), they have been conceived as potentially
threatening on two counts: as a dangerous revolutionary collective and as a debased
threat to civilisation and respectability (Skeggs 1997). Examples from social history
show how the middle-class, as a result of these negative assumptions, acted to
regulate, survey and control the living-spaces and recreational activities of working-
class subjects. Savage and Miles (1994) for example, argue that what was significant
about the planning of British new towns and cities in the mid-1800s, 'was the extent to
which the middle-class claimed the right to survey - in the name of health, education
and morality - vast swathes of working-class residence' (Savage and Miles 1994,
58). Philanthropic public health observers, such as Henry Mayhew and Charles
Booth, researched the geography of new cities to position and examine the working-
class to render them discernible to the middle-class. Similarly, 'factory colonies',
such as Saltaire near Leeds, offered Titus Salt the opportunity to regulate his entire
workforce by building houses and facilities for his workers. Often leading employers
funded local churches or schools and played a key role in managing them, 'which
would, in turn, tend to forestall working-class organisation and activity' (Savage and
Miles 1994, 61-62). Similarly, Yeo and Yeo (1981) evidence how social movements
in the north of England in the 1830s, such as the Friendly Societies, which were
devoted to the organisation of financial mutual aid for working-class people, were
systematically denied the right to use so called 'public' buildings as collective
meeting places. The same period saw open middle-class hostility, especially to group
or community types of working-class leisure: 'Temperance reformers, capitalists and
local authorities attacked rowdy styles of celebration …in the interests of salvation,
6 Matthew Arnold, for example, advocated that 'Culture' with a capital 'C' should be
used to enlighten the 'populace' (working-class) precisely as a means to quieten growing
social unrest in the 1840s. Arnold's anxieties about the working-class are illustrated in Culture
and Anarchy (Arnold 1993).