Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 27

thirds of Britons had gardens by the 1950s and four fifths by the late 1960s, and by
1969 a government survey found that for men, gardening followed television as their
favourite form of leisure (Constantine 1981, 401). Concomitantly, the consumption
of home-centred leisure products grew: by 1970 for example, £100 million was
being spent on garden products per year. Since then, gardening has played a key
role as part of the contemporary consumer lifestyle package; in fact according to
MINTEL (2001a) 'Gardening Review' report it was 'still the number one hobby
in the UK'. Garden lifestyle television began to burgeon in the mid-1990s and this
led to a steady growth in the gardening retail sector. For example, the total garden
market was worth £2.75 billion in 1996, but had risen to £3.35 billion by 2000
(MINTEL 2001b). The number of garden centre outlets rose by 17 per cent between
1998 and 2001 and total retail sales were 25 per cent higher in 2000 compared to
1995 (MINTEL 2001a). Changes to the primetime schedule highlight the popularity
of lifestyle gardening television in the mid to late 1990s (Brunsdon et al. 2001) and
there was a concomitant rise in the popularity and spending on garden magazines.
By the late 1990s - at the time when the research for this topic was being conducted
- gardening was a phenomenally popular leisure pursuit and the garden lifestyle
consumer circuit was beneficial to both the media and garden retailing.
So far this chapter shows that while the middle-class have historically acted to
frame the working-class both in terms of the spaces they inhabit and the aesthetic
choices they might make, ordinary people create their own meanings and creative
aesthetics in relation to their surroundings. However, it also shows that there is a
history of the excoriation of working-class culture and aesthetics. Because this topic
is about ordinariness and working-class culture I now turn to thinkers who provide
a means to value working-class culture and aesthetics on their own terms. In the
following section, I turn to the founders of the early left-culturalist strand of cultural
studies, in order to frame my own ethnographic study within a tradition of thought
which values working-class lived experience and ordinary culture. However, early
culturalism tends to offer a gender blind approach to class. I therefore also turn
to contemporary feminist work which continues the culturalist project of valuing
ordinary culture and working-class lived experience, while insisting that gender is
central to cultural analysis. In Formations of Class and Gender (1997), Skeggs uses
ethnography to examine how the subjective locations of class and gender are lived
out in contemporary culture.
Frameworks for Valuing Working-class Culture, Gender and Lived
Experience
'Culture is ordinary' argued Raymond Williams (1989, 4), one of the founders of
British cultural studies. William's definition provided a direct challenge to earlier
writers on 'culture'. Matthew Arnold in the mid-nineteenth century defined culture as
the 'best that has been thought and known in the world' and the pathway to 'sweetness
and light' (Arnold 1993, 79). Arnold embraced the political philosophy of liberal
humanism. Liberal humanist values, which arguably still under-gird British cultural
institutions (Jordan and Weedon 1997), assert that the individual can develop their