Centre for Worktown Studies

The National Conference on the Leisure of the People in 1919 marked the emergence of a public discourse on the nature and purpose of leisure in inter-war Britain. One strand of this discourse saw leisure to be problematic as new forms of mass and passive entertainment, the ‘enforced leisure’ of unemployment and the right use of leisure became areas of social concern. Perceptive critics, however, conceptualised leisure as a social sphere in which a new and better post-war society could be built through a democratic ‘new’ leisure and the use of leisure as a vehicle for education in citizenship. Leisure was widely documented in contemporary social surveys and became valued by local councils of social service in developing social life and community identity on new housing estates. This paper argues that a new ontology of leisure was forged between the wars as the Victorian emphasis on rational recreation and private morality was superseded by an understanding of leisure as a social product of late modernity.

Although the Public Libraries Act of 1850 permitted the provision of libraries through public expenditure, the spread of the library movement owed much to philanthropic assistance for the remainder of the nineteenth century. This pattern reflected the contemporary norm of dependence on philanthropy for social improvements, and many public libraries were indebted in some way to financial or other support from private sources. The Harris Public Library and Museum in Preston is widely regarded as the single most impressive example of library philanthropy in Great Britain. Its perceived function and the design of the building placed an emphasis on the culture of classical civilisations, and the role of art and sculpture was given a higher priority than literature. Consequently the design of the building did not serve the library well. The public library service in Preston, and indeed throughout Great Britain, did not depend on philanthropy, but the rate of its expansion was significantly assisted by it.

In post-industrial countries, folk dance may be considered as an embodied performance of a perceived tradition and is representational of values attached to an imagined past. The English Country Dance is one such form of folk dance,
having been revived, or re-invented, in the early twentieth century by Cecil Sharp who claimed it to be a national dance of England. However, Sharp re-defined it not as a popular and spontaneous leisure activity but as a serious middle-class art form representing an English sensibility and the virtues of a pre-industrial pastoral collectivism. After the hiatus of the First World War, the English Country Dance continued to offer a resistance to the modern, this time in the form of a burgeoning popular dance culture which embraced urban sophistication and jazz dance. Using the concept of performativity, this paper attempts to demonstrate that the leisure context of the English Country Dance, in terms of spatiality, style, consumption and gender, enabled a continuity of resistance to the modern in a changing sociocultural environment. The paper draws upon primary research in the archive of the Manchester Branch of the English Folk Dance Society and upon records of contemporary dance in the Mass Observation archive.

Between 1845 and 1914 several municipal museums in Great Britain established an industrial collection of objects relevant to local manufacture. The origins of these collections are found in the 1830s and the reform of design education. Industrial collections assigned an economic function to museums and were contested by critics who maintained that museums should be concerned primarily with fine rather than applied art. It is argued that curatorial decisions on the adoption of industrial collections can be evaluated with reference to contemporary debates on art, design education and the relative values of liberal and applied knowledge.
Through case studies of the municipal museums of Birmingham and Preston, this paper assesses contrasting curatorial responses to industrial collections. Adopting Matthew Arnold’s categories of Hebraism and Hellenism as an exploratory framework, it concludes that industrial collections represented materialistic values associated with Hebraism that were directly opposed to the spiritual values associated with Hellenism.

The success of the Chautauqua Assembly in providing educational holidays in North America in the final quarter of the nineteenth century raised interest in the development of a similar type of holiday in Great Britain. Following the establishment of university extension summer schools, which were themselves influenced by the example of Chautauqua, the Congregationalist social reformer John Brown Paton organised such a holiday in 1889 under the auspices of the National Home Reading Union in Blackpool, a popular seaside resort in the north of England. Adopting the values and practices of the Chautauqua Assembly, this combined informal education, non-conformist Christian morality and socially respectable leisure activities. Although not successful in establishing an English Chautauqua in Blackpool, Paton later mediated the Chautauqua ideal through his sponsorship of the Co-operative Holidays Association, a pioneer organisation in the development of rational holidays. It is argued that both the Chautauqua movement and the National Home Reading Union exercised a crucial influence on the development of rational and respectable holidays in Britain that has not previously been fully recognised.

The Co-operative Holidays Association was founded in 1893 by the Rev. T. A. Leonard, a Congregationalist Minster in Colne, Lancashire. Its aim was to provide organized holidays in the countryside for working-class people as a moral and cultural alternative to the commercial seaside resorts. The Association was not simply a holiday club but a voluntary leisure organization
committed to the promotion of specific cultural values. Adopting the work of a number of nineteenthcentury cultural critics, notably Arnold, Ruskin and Morris, the Co-operative Holidays Association was grounded upon the concept of the countryside as not only a physical but also a cultural and
spiritual alternative to the city and industrial materialism. Its holidays thus sought to recreate the primitive communal lifestyle idealized in Romantic interpretations of pre-industrial pastoral society and to educate participants in the cultural interpretation of the countryside and landscape. Its
antithetical approach to conspicuous consumption and material comfort became a focus of conflict as the proportion of middle-class members increased after the turn of the century and led to the formation of a schism in 1912. This paper assesses the significance of the Co-operative Holidays
Association to the development and consolidation of a dominant cultural mode of countryside leisure practice and also explores the extent to which its self-identity was formed by taste and cultural values rather than social class.

This paper presents a history of the National Home Reading Union from its formation in 1889 to the closing of its operation in Great Bbritain in 1930. The NHru was founded by John Brown Paton as a means of encouraging systematic reading, particulalrly though not exclusively amongs young adults who had recently left school.

The National Home Reading Union was founded in Great Britain in 1889 and quickly spread to colonies and dominions of the  British Empire. In some countries, notably Canada, it gained a fiifm stronghiold and outlived the parent Union in Great Britain. This chapter discusses the ways in which  National Home Reading Union circles were established in the Empire and the ways in whioch they operated. It demonstrates how membership of a reaing circle not only enabled the formation of social friendships but also how it maintained a sense of cultural belonging to the 'home' country - this being a stated aim of the Union.

Rate-supported public libraries were established in Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth century with mixed objectives of educational progress and recreational reform. Although librarians upheld the concept of public libraries as educational establishments and normally deprecated the recreational uses of libraries, the public demand upon libraries was principally of a leisure nature. This article traces the origins of public libraries in the nineteenth-century campaign for recreational reform and evaluates the reaction of librarians to the uses of two specific leisure forms in public libraries, namely newsrooms and games rooms. It shows that public libraries were significant providers of leisure facilities, but that their potential to develop a leisure function was curtailed by the library profession's desire to change the image of the library from a leisure orientated institution to one of educational and information priorities.