What parts of traditionally working class English culture do you love?

25 comments

1. Drinking tea that is strong and with milk.

2. I like being worked to the bone and riddled with debt.

3. I live by the seaside, so it’s not a thing I enjoy as much as I used to. But a chippy tea always goes down well.

4. Chippy tea on a Friday, tea in horrifically large mugs, spending Saturday mooching around the local town centre

5. Working mens/social clubs.

   Yes, they are old fashioned and sexist. I’m not downplaying that.

   I grew up on a council estate and they did a lot of good for the community.

   They used to run subsidised summer trips where we would get a day out, a bag of sweets and £5 each. For some on the trip, it would be the only one they had in the 6 weeks holiday. They did similar at Christmas too, a trip to the cinema and a selection box.

   If someone died and didn’t have family to bury them, the club would often pay. My nana had almost half of my grandads funeral expenses paid by the club.

   They helped people make connections that meant they got jobs, they ran day time events for elderly people on the estate. Someone used to come and collect my wheelchair bound aunt and bring her for bingo on a Tuesday!

   And most importantly, who doesn’t love a meat draw.

6. What is ‘working class’ culture? Drinking Bovril at the dog races?

7. Chips, fags and booze. Just the honesty of it all.

8. I dunno if I think the seaside and football are specifically now working class. I’ve always liked those anyway and do’t think of them as being class-related once a) cars were common b) football was televised.

   I have to say that my first thought is things I DON’T love and they are ALL to do with having to be clean and tidy- wash the doorstep, wash the bins, ironing the clothes etc.

   EDIT: I can’t pretend to be working class, but I grew up with a lot of these things that people are calling working class- football, fish and chips, the pub when I was old enough, faggots (the last one for school lunch). But I am 62. maybe a lot of these things are just OLD British culture.

9. Genuinely giving a shit about football and having a good knowledge of the game. I’m middle class, and however much I delude myself, I don’t have the sincerity of feeling for the team I support and I am tactically illiterate.n

10. I love going to the pub, watching the football, eating fish and chips, faggots, the Abba and Grease megamix at a wedding.

11. The allotment – whether it’s used for growing prize veg or keeping pigeons.

12. The pub trips. The one my grandparents owned had female day trips (Wallace Arnold hired coach) to Blackpool or Bridlington. Loads of Kiss-Me-Quick hats and mini View-Master keychains. The men’s trips were usually Scarborough or Whitby. Lots of large fish in our bath for days. All early 1970’s.

    Later, the pub my parents owned, it was group trips to Spain. My mother (landlady) set-up bi-weekly payments for those going. Invariable she got a free trip from the travel agent and would raffle it to those going and use the money for group drinks upon arrival in Spain. We had some very memorable times. All pre 1980.

    Ken. If you’re out there, I’ve still got the photo of you with paper money hanging out of your passed-out drunk arse with lipstick kisses every where.

13. Greggs.

    I could have Pret a Manger if I wanted to (i will have it out of tradition on the rare occasion I’m in London), but Greggs just tastes better to me, especially their hot chocolate.

14. Full English, builders tea, spam sandwich, munchie box

    ​

    My first house was in a very working class area, now we’ve shifted to a very different area demographically, but we still love some of the old ways

15. Drinking on trains at 7am

16. Memories of caravan trips down Clacton, the smell of old smoke in arcades, fish & chips/pie & mash on a Friday night, drinking panda pops in the corner of the pub, watching my painter & decorator grandad loading up the van, family Christmas parties listening to my relatives telling funny stories.

17. Unquestioning solidarity with strikers rather than buying into the narrative pushed at us from
    power. It’s self-sabotage.

18. How generally helpful the community is. If someone needs help, people are there to give it.

19. Chippy tea, sausage mash and beans with Fruity brown sauce, sponge and custard, marrowfat peas, mashed potato with anything…

20. Football is no longer working class, stolen off them.

21. Chatting to everyone you meet – on the bus, in Tesco’s, at the pub, at the park, in the post office…

22. This is going back a long time but is worth looking into https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/43618/forgotten-poetry-of-the-lancashire-cotton-famine

23. Brass bands.

24. Gregariousness and practical social skills. As in: talking to each other in queues at supermarkets; saying hello to neighbours; asking after someone’s gran who had a bypass last month.

    Contrast that with the awkwardness of middle class people like myself. It’s never more obvious than the way a certain type of middle class person absolutely freezes when a taxi driver starts chatting to them.

25. Pearly Kings and Queens. I know that’s specifically London but it is a well-known cultural thing outside the M25.