‘“The Ghosts of Class”: Space, Waste and Hope in the Ex-Industrial North’

This chapter draws on what has been termed a 'cultural class analysis' perspective, with a particular focus on the spatial dynamics of contemporary class inequalities, their socio-cultural effects, and political implications. It explains how social class identities are being reconstituted regionally, and with what consequences for the 'hope' that Mason sees represented in an older configuration of social relations. The chapter addresses the relationship between objective and subjective class identities further, and with particular reference to identity formation in the north of England. It shows that the notion of a 'working class of the mind' has particular regional purchase, but that this needs to be contextualised further by taking into consideration the structural dimensions of class formation as well as other ways in which class is mobilised as a discursive practice. The chapter uses a particular form of 'Big Data' data, generated online from the BBC's Great British Class Survey experiment between 2011 and 2013.