Me Me Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England
by Jon Lawrence
(Oxford University Press, £25)

BASED on the testimony of a wide range of interviewees from the immediate post-war period to more recent times, the social studies in Jon Lawrence’s book are drawn from contrasting areas — Bermondsey and England’s first “new town” Stevenage in the 1940s and 1950s, Luton and Cambridge in the 1960s and Tyneside and the Isle of Sheppey in the 1970s and 1980s.

[[{"fid":"15738","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]One of the many illustrations in Me Me Me features a photograph of shoppers battling to secure the knock-down “bargains” on 2014’s Black Friday, a stage-managed event used by the media to show how traditional community spirit has given way to a relentlessly rising tide of selfishness and greed.

Yet Lawrence sets out to refute the generalised opinion that traditional community has been replaced by a consumer society dominated by the language and the ethos of markets “as the principal arbiter of public good.”

Along with the undoubted changes that have come about through the fluctuations of a boom-and-bust economy, he examines the influence of greater mobility afforded by car ownership and that of television on social life.

He also recognises the Thatcherite blows delivered through right-to-buy on community housing and the Blairite meritocratic, aspirational carrots offered to a public, especially in the north who, ironically, had no opportunity to take advantage of.

Just as there are lies, damn lies and statistics, so the findings of social case studies depend on the questions, the questioners and the questioned and often they confirm predetermined conceptions. Here, while the author is anxious to avoid portraying his chosen subjects as “crass social stereotypes,” he is quite open in informing us what he is out to prove.

It’s a message that seems obvious — that we all need now, as always, to have both personal freedom and to belong to “a greater social connection.” We cannot meaningfully have one without the other and that’s evident as a cavalcade of characters reveal aspects of their daily lives and their relationship to family and neighbours, their class consciousness and their changing environments.

The result is a book which reads with the colour and interest of a novel.