Books in the Studies in Popular Culture series

During the Second World War, the popularity and importance of the cinema in Britain was at its peak. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Farmer provides a social and cultural history of cinemas and cinemagoing in Britain between 1939 and 1945, and explores the impact that the war had on the places in which British people watched films.

The book is the first comprehensive survey charting the development of cinema exhibition and cinema-going in Britain from the first public film screening - the Lumiere Brothers' showing of their Cinematographe show at London's Regent Street Polytechnic in February 1896 - through to the development of the multiplex and megaplex cinema. -- .

The book explores the identity of British agricultural labourers during a time of crisis for the British countryside. It looks at how they expressed grievances and celebrated their sexuality and way of life through songs -- .

Hard sell explores advertising in Britain in the 1950s and 60s through extensive new archival research in Britain and America, combining the study of business practices with analysis of television and press advertisements. -- .

Explores the major changes in our use of and attitude to time over three centuries. Asks why the 1960s and 1970s expectation that leisure time would increase has failed to come about

Examination of the popular film and fiction consumed by Britons in the 1920s and 1930s -- .

Looks at the history of the London suburbs in the interwar years

Combines research on a wide variety of leisure activities in the early modern and modern periods, providing an unprecedented transnational perspective to the study of European leisure history.

Working with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political, this book brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. -- .

A study of non-professional film making using regional archive sources and oral history. The book traces the rise of Britain's amateur cine photography from its early pioneers, through its years of peak popularity to its adjustment to wider societal and technological changes. -- .

This book illuminates the history of popular dance, one of the most influential and widespread leisure practices in early twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the relationship between dancing and national identity construction, in a period when Britain participated in increasingly global markets of cultural production, consumption and exchange. -- .

A history of smoking in British popular culture from the early-19th to the end of the 20th century. It explores the culture of the pipe and cigar in the 19th century, the cigarette's role in the mass market economy of the early 1900s, and the politics of smoking and health since the 1950s.

The nineteenth-century's steam railway epitomised modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. In Railways and culture in Britain Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of train technology, and how this was represented in British society. -- .

The first study to examine both the experience and representation of Christmas during the formative period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. -- .

The first book to study railway enthusiasts in Britain. The postwar train spotting craze swept most boys (and some girls, despite railways being coded as a male business) into a passion for railways. These people invigorated different sectors in railway enthusiasm's life world - from railway modelling to Britain's huge preserved railway industry. -- .

This book explores how home was pictured in the 'golden age' of British cinema. Drawing on a wide range of evidence to explore the depiction of domestic life in popular culture, it resituates feature films from the 1940s in relation to narratives of domestic, suburban modernity and the middlebrow established in the interwar years. -- .

A global history of couple dancing in commercial venues in the era of the two world wars. -- .

Drawing on an extensive range of sources, from newspapers and institutional records to oral histories and autobiography, Dangerous amusements explores the beginnings of a distinct youth culture in the streets and neighbourhood spaces of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. -- .

A collection of articles addressing research trends in the history of British leisure while also presenting a wide range of articles on cultural conflict and leisure in the twentieth century. It includes innovative research on a number of topics, including television, cinema, the circus, women's leisure, dance, football and drug culture. -- .

Presents a highly original and detailed investigation into the nature of American visual, musical and cultural influences on British youth between 1945 and 1960. It looks at the spread of youth culture, juke boxes, coffee and milk bars, dress styles and rock 'n' roll and the context of these 'new' cultural influences in design, music and lifestyle. -- .

Offers a way of conceptualising how women's drinking habits changed over more than a century in Britain. -- .

This is a landmark study which examines the film and reading tastes of working-class consumers in 1930s Britain. Drawing on a wealth of original research, Robert James argues that working-class consumers used popular film and fiction to answer a range of cultural and social needs in this tumultuous decade.

Explores the history of sanatoria and of winter sports between 1860 and 1914 in Switzerland. This book offers an overall view of the growth of health and sports tourism in Switzerland.

Investigating areas as diverse as travel literature, fiction, dialect, the stage, radio, and television, feature film, music and sport, this fascinating book assesses the attitudes and portrayal of the North of England within the national culture and how this has impacted upon attitudes to the region and its place within notions of 'Englishness'. -- .

This study of working class tourism examines the evolution of the English holiday over two centuries, charting workers forms of travel from 'tramping' and the 'artisan's grand tour' to day tripping and package holidays abroad. -- .

Music hall was the most dynamic and successful popular theatre genre of the 19th century. This text explores all aspects of the Scottish music hall industry, from the lives and professional culture of performers and impresarios to the place of music hall in Scottish life and national identity.

This book is the first study of how the BBC, through radio, tried to represent what it meant to be British. The book combines an examination of the BBC's desire to construct a strong, unitary sense of Britishness (through empire and the monarchy) with a thorough consideration of the broadcasting in the non-English parts of the United Kingdom.

Arguing that there was a remarkable continuity in male working-class culture between 1850 and 1945, this book contends that despite changing socio-economic contexts, male working-class culture continued to draw from a tradition of active participation and cultural contestation that was both class and gender exclusive.

A study of darts and society. It examines the development of darts in the context of English society in the early twentieth century, concentrating principally upon key developments between 1918 and 1939. It is suitable for sports historians, social historians, business historians, sociologists and sports scientists.