chardonnay at your local pub. We are, in consumption terms, nearly all middle class. The white-goods revolution that started under Harold Macmillan, along with the white heat one under another Harold, not only put gadgets into consumers’ hands, it freed millions of women from the drudgery of housework, allowing them to join the ranks of the salariat. Washing machines, freezers and microwaves replaced domestic servants, and in so doing played their part both in creating two-income households and, in turn, a society with enough disposable income for status-defining trips to Itsu and days out at Blenheim Palace, where they can buy the ‘Below Stairs’ range of House Maid’s scrubbing brushes and Butler’s champagne openers.
Even as early as 1960 David Marquand, the academic and future Labour MP, declared that – superficially at least – ‘the class war appears to be over, its warriors drowned in a sea of consumer durables. The working class itself is rapidly adopting middle-class standards, middle-class values and a middle-class style of life. Marks and Spencer dress every shopgirl like a débutante, hire purchase equips working-class kitchens with gadgets which would once have made the middle classes gasp with envy; night after night telly erodes what cultural barriers still remain to divide one class from another. These changes may disconcert the intellectual and appal the nostalgic, but the onward rush of modern industry continues undismayed, slowly transforming the most class-conscious country in the world into “one nation”.’3
But 50 years on, new gulfs have opened up within that ‘one nation’ of shoppers. Do you buy your meat wrapped in waxed paper from a farmers’ market, from Tesco or from Asda? Is your holiday a trip to Butlins in Bognor or via Ryanair to Rimini? Is your electrical gadget a Roberts Radio from John Lewis or a James Martin spice grinder from Argos? These may seem trivialities that can only concern a society corrupted by consumerism. But they matter to an awful lot of people – even if they don’t realise it. One of the women I interviewed for this book, Hayleigh, a mother of three who was brought up in a council house, is accused by her grandmother of ‘shooting above her station’ because she owns a Sainsbury’s hessian bag-for-life. ‘She says I’ve forgotten where I came from.’ Hayleigh uses that same bag-for-life if she should ever pop to Iceland to buy her food – too embarrassed to be seen carrying Iceland plastic carrier bags.
Snobbism was never confined to ducal palaces, and certainly didn’t die out when the Queen stopped débutantes (‘debs’) being presented at court in 1958. It is a powerful social force and has a major influence on how we spend our money. This, particularly in an era when there is less cash about, is now more important, when it comes to deciding status, than how we earn that money, I argue. If everyone around you professes to be of the same class, or even classless, then the battle to assert one’s position comes down to what you consume rather than what you produce. It is about the little things – where you buy your jeans, the thickness of froth on your coffee, the thinness of your bresaola. The food, the clothes, the holidays, the homes, the culture, the furnishings we choose to spend our money on – even the plastic sacks we choose to carry those purchases around in.
This book tries to decipher all these products and work out what they say about us. Spending is more than just a frivolous matter of bags and burgers. It is, for some, a cause of great social anxiety as well as financial hardship and starts when they are in the womb – whether they were born in a private hospital or not, and whether their parents paid for a classified to announce their birth in the pages of a broadsheet newspaper or bought a Burberry sleepsuit and a Juicy Couture buggy to welcome them into the world.
I am aware that a book on class, which ignores the old pillars of social status – family, education, work – is one that only tells half the story, so I have attempted to tackle these topics as well, though even here, I argue, consumption plays a significant part in determining status. There are not many children that made it to Oxford whose parents never spent a penny on a tutor, music class or educational trip out.
It is all these consumer decisions that help separate the ‘middle classes’ that somehow include the Duchess of Cambridge – in her Le Chameau green wellies, Zara tops and Boden skirts – from the ‘middle classes’ that include Asda Mums, living off tinned food just before pay day. With a dazzlingly varied array of shops, brands and products available to furnish our lifestyles, there are many different types of middle class. This book attempts to categorise these different middle classes along patterns of consumption and explain why some brands remain exclusive and desired and others succumb to ‘prole drift’, why Iceland is despised by so many while Aldi is worshipped, why holidaying in Norfolk in a tent is so much more high class than in a hotel in Florida. For ease of reference I have given all these groups labels, many of them a bit flippant. Despite the stereotypes, we are not as a nation easily split into discrete groups, and I realise many of the labels are far from perfect.
There are the Portland Privateers, high earners and high spenders, who stamp their status (often newly won) onto their children before they have even been born by booking into the private maternity unit, preferably the Portland Hospital in London. They are some of the key supporters of a number of successful high-end, high-visibility brands that have flourished even in the economic downturn: Mulberry, Belstaff, Smythson. To the untrained eye they may appear similar to the Rockabillies. This lot is a broad church of consumers, but they have very much a rural attitude to life, even if they live in Fulham rather than Fairford. They are often wealthy individuals, sometimes not at all, whose defining feature is holidaying at home, ideally at the resort of Rock in Cornwall, where they can mingle with fellow Prosecco-sipping holidaymakers in their Jack Wills hoodies and Boden swimming trunks, red trousers, whipping up a Jamie Oliver recipe on the barbecue.
Similar in attitude to the Portland Privateers, but a million miles away from them in terms of income, are the Hyphen-Leighs – acutely aware of the power of brands and labels and keen to assert their status through spending. Their ability to latch onto the latest fashions and make them their own stretches even to the naming of their children – invariably double barrelled and unusually spelt. Paul’s Boutique and Sports Direct are their natural high street habitats, places where smart casual takes on a whole new meaning.
Sun Skittlers couldn’t really give two hoots about whether their polo shirt has a penguin in a top hat, a crocodile, a polo player or a hippo in a bath on the front. Money is spent on leisure, not fashion – from a 40p copy of the Sun to a game of skittles down at their local working men’s club. None of them defines themselves as middle class, but they are fully paid up members of the modern consumer class who despite fairly low incomes are usually home owners, sun seekers and season ticket holders.
The Middleton classes, named in honour of Carole, rather than Catherine, started off life in almost an identical situation to the Sun Skittlers, but have spent many of their waking hours escaping from their red-top, blue-collar, hire-purchase background. They too embraced all the opportunities that consumer Britain threw at them but they wanted more; and trips to Torremolinos were upgraded to Tuscany, the Daily Herald was swapped for the Daily Mail, the Co-op meat counter for M&S ready meals. This does not make them traitors to their roots; they are the golden generation that helped drive post-war Britain out of austerity and are proud to declare themselves ‘middle class’.
Asda Mums, mostly on low incomes, shy away from defining themselves as middle class. But their subtle understanding of status and brands, their insistence that their babies are given organic Ella’s Kitchen mango pouches (while the older one gets a McDonald’s as a treat), their championing of Pampers and Thorpe Park, prove that so much of modern consumption is driven by parents buying for their children. No more so than with this group.
Then there are the Wood Burning Stovers, the descendants of the original Habitat-shopping generation. A well-turned garlic press and a wood-burning stove, rather than an electric whisk and a large TV, is what gives them pleasure – you can spot them with their Daunt book bags tripping their way to pick up a box of yellow courgettes from their farmers’ market in their Birkenstock sandals, trying not to look too smug.
These
