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

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

'Lifestyle revolution is a brilliant corrective to our lazy habit of condescending to the recent past by reducing it to the eccentric, the uncool and the kitsch. Through his richly evocative readings of chicken bricks, quiches, self-assembly furniture, duvets and dinghies, Ben Highmore tells the unwritten story of our collective life. Blending the personal and the political with great skill, this book is a joy to read.'
Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University and author of Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV

If you ever wondered how a taste for wooden floors, duvets and flat-pack furniture became widespread in British homes, this book is for you. Ben Highmores focus on the feelings embedded in changing tastes allows him to investigate the meanings of material culture in the making of new middle-class identities. He brings to life a world of controlled casualness and spontaneous sociability often around a stripped pine kitchen table that will be familiar to many readers.
Deborah Sugg Ryan, Professor of Design History and Theory at the University of Portsmouth and author of Ideal Homes: Uncovering the History and Design of the Interwar House


'An engrossing social and cultural history of the rise of consumerism, and a persuasive account of how it changed us.'
Alwyn Turner, author of A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s

'...thought-provoking analysis of such a complex subject, done in such an entertaining style.'
Shiny New Books

Author Bio

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).