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Political Cinemas, 2

Beyond the Council EstateCinematic Spaces of the Working Class

Edited by Deirdre O'Neill and Katerina Flint-Nicol

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Published 30 November 2026

About this book

Reshapes the narrative and its trajectory in how the working class is discussed in relation to British Cinema

  • Considers classed identities beyond the confines of social realism
  • Navigates between historical and contemporary cinema narratives and aesthetics
  • Illuminates the epistemic dimensions of working-class political struggle through the specificities of distinct places
  • Utilises film and the study of film to make connections between politics, classed experience public life and larger social issues

In recent years British cinema has utilised the iconic image of the council estate as an emblematic shorthand for defining the supposedly dysfunctional character of the working-class people who reside there. As a spatial determinant, it has come to signify a whole group of people in the popular imaginary as anti-social, violent and workshy. Drawing on the latest research into class and British cinema, the chapters in this edited collection explore classed identities in relation to the spaces which they occupy, both onscreen and off.

The chapters in this collection shift the spatial location of the working class away from the council estates in which they are visually and symbolically contained to explore alternative spaces where their complexities, struggles and resistance to the systemic cultural and political discourses that define them can be foregrounded.

Reviews

The work undertaken here fits very well with the burgeoning scholarship of social class in British cinema and will add to the expanding body of knowledge and publications devoted to the subject. This is an invaluable resource for any scholars or students studying class and British cinema (as well as representations of class in film more broadly).
Table of contents

Introduction
Katerina Flint-Nicol and Deirdre O’Neil


1. ‘Tough Blokes, Tough Buildings’: The Significance of Brutalist Architecture in Constructing Working-Class Masculinity in Post-War British Cinema
Johny Smith
2. Moving beyond ‘That Hill’: Shelagh Delaney, David Storey, and a new class topography of the British New Wave
David Forrest
3. Loss, impasse, and the myth of class transcendence: Shelagh Delaney’s Charlie Bubbles (1968)
Thirza Wakefield
4. Back ‘Up The Junction’: Nell Dunn’s Working Class Women’s Lives on Film
Mary Irwin
5. The Aimless Class Wanderers – Psychogeography in My Childhood Trilogy and Ratcatcher
Kyle Barret
6. ‘Motorways, Service Stations, and Brighton Pier’ – Landscape and the Flow of Working-Class Life Amid the Post-1979 Cinematic Output of the Children’s Film Foundation
Peter Jachimiak
7. A World of Arrangements: Feminist and Transnational Mappings of Class Struggle in Cinema Action’s So That You Can Live (For Shirley) (1982)
Rachel Fabian
8. Sea, Coal and Beauty: Seacoal (1985) by Amber Film and Photography Collective
Karolina Kosińska
9. Mutations of British social cinema
Annette Kuhn
10. New Girls on the Block: Music and Dance as Spaces of Aesthetic Politics in Fish Tank (2009) and Rocks (2020)
Alice Pember
11. Representing Working-Class Space in UK Drill Music Videos
Austin Cooper
12. 'Enduring symbols of people and place' (2015)
David Roberts and Andrea Luka Zimmerman
13. ‘You didn’t have to sell us this house.’/ ‘Didn’t we?’:  Bait (Mark Jenkin, 2019) 
John White

About the contributors

Deirdre O'Neill

Deirdre O’Neill is a Senior Lecturer in Film Theory and Practice at the University of Hertfordshire. She is the author of Film as a Radical Pedagogical Tool and the co-ordinator of the Inside Film Project. She is the founding and principle editor of the Journal of Class and Culture and has co-directed (with Mike Wayne) three films, Listen to Venezuela (2008), Condition of the Working Class (2012) and The Acting Class (2017), which was the winner of the National Feature Documentary Award at the 2017 Labour Film Festival.

Katerina Flint-Nicol

Katerina Flint-Nicol is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. She is a founding member of the British Popular Cultures Research Network and has published on the gothic in musical performance and television adaptation. Her PhD, Men, Manors and Monsters: The British Hoodie Horror and the Cinema of Alterity addressed the horrorisation of the working-class in British cinema in the early 2000s.

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