Place-making and Place Maintenance: Performativity,Place and Belonging among the Middle Classes

Introduction

This article compares how middle-class residents relate to and practise place in two London neighbourhoods: an inner city, socially mixed, gentrifying neighbourhood and an exurban setting, two proximate villages in the commuter belt. These neighbourhoods are different in terms of their attractions and amenities, their socio-demographic make-up, their reputations in the public imagination, and their histories of middle-class settlement.

Through these two case studies, we illustrate the value of incorporating performativity and a focus on the ‘doing’ of place into discussions of belonging, accounting for the various ways in which middle-class residents constitute neighbourhood and claim moral ownership over their places of residence (e.g. Savage, 2010; Savage et al., 2005; Watt, 2009). By focusing on the concept of place-making as a set of discursive practices, we argue for an analysis of the relationship between middle-class residents and place that recognises that neighbourhoods are shaped not only through imaginings, but also through practice and the ongoing processes through which class and place intersect. In this rendering, place-making may also be generative of subjectivities; the repetitive actions directed at making places of residence simultaneously reconstruct classed identities. The comparison of processes of ‘doing’ place across the rural/urban divide allows for nuanced insights into the complexities of the way that the middle classes practise place. Moreover, in these two contrasting examples we can see how place is not just adopted by the middle classes but actively made and maintained. People do not merely select a place to live that matches their habitus; rather places are made through repeated everyday actions and interventions that work on both the neighbourhood and the individual.

Setting the Scene

The research presented here is part of the comparative research project ‘The Middle Classes in the City: Social Mix or just “People Like Us”? A Comparison of Paris and London’. The study examines the middle-class residents living in five different types of neighbourhood across each of these cities – gentrified, gentrifying, gated community, suburban and exurban. In particular, the project asks how the middle classes relate to their place of residence and to the other people living within it, focusing on the extent to which considerations of social mix or the recognition of ‘people like us’ (Butler with Robson, 2003) influence residential choice.

In total, we conducted 171 interviews with middle-class residents in London, spread equally across the five neighbourhoods. ¹ These were complemented with five interviews with key individuals (these included councillors, local business owners, heads of local associations) in each neighbourhood. Walking tours of each neighbourhood led us to select down to the level of particular streets. We then mailed letters calling for participation to all addresses in those streets. Respondents were, therefore in part, self-selecting, contacting us if they wanted to take part. Nevertheless, we managed to get a good mix of respondents in terms of gender and age, although this cannot be taken to be representative. Interviews were semi-structured, incorporating themes such as residential choices and trajectories, social relations, use of public services and local amenities, political engagements, and relationship to place. We used an inductive process to design a coding structure, deriving our categories from the data. We tested these against the French data and refined these categories further. In this manner, codes reflected the themes emerging from the interviews across the whole project. Although we used NVivo software to organise data thematically, the process of analysis has involved moving between these NVivo ‘nodes’ and full transcripts to ensure that the richness of transcripts is not lost.

Peckham, part of the London Borough of Southwark, is both socially and ethnically mixed, shaped over the years by a combination of changing economic fortunes and waves of immigration. Within Peckham, we focused on a socially mixed, gentrifying neighbourhood, an area that lies between Rye Lane and Bellenden Road. This area has undergone significant change over the past 10 years, notably through interventions by Southwark Council to ‘improve’ the area; for example, the Bellenden Renewal Scheme, which included grants to households to improve the exteriors of their properties and the commissioning of new street furniture from some of its local resident artists (notably but not solely Antony Gormley). Interviews with middle-class residents highlighted that relative affordability, proximity and transport connections to central London were the main attractions of the area.

West Horsley and Effingham, villages in the commuter belt, are located outside the M25, between Guildford and Leatherhead, and are within easy reach of train stations, which offer a regular service into London Waterloo (45–50 minutes). Once farming communities, in these villages today there are low levels of social housing and very little affordable housing. The villages are now home to majority middle-class, professional populations, attracted to the rural surroundings and good transportation links. The contrast with Peckham reflects the racialised and classed spatial division between the rural and the urban in Britain (see Tyler, 2003).

The selected statistics presented in Table 1 show some of the differences and similarities between the populations of these neighbourhoods. The difference in ethnic composition and tenure is particular marked; Peckham is much more ethnically diverse and has higher levels of both social housing tenants and renters in the private sector. However, our sample of middle-class residents in Peckham was predominantly white British and European, with only two Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) interviewees, women from Vietnam and St Lucia. Equally, in West Horsley and Effingham the sample was exclusively white, bar one respondent who identified as Anglo-Indian. In terms of middle-class occupations, the occupational groupings (NS-SeC) demonstrate that Peckham has a similar percentage of people employed in NS-SeC 2 to our exurban locations but Peckham has a slightly lower percentage of people employed in NS-SeC 1.

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Table 1.

Comparing neighbourhoods in terms of ethnic group, tenure and NS-SeC classifications ² .

Neighbourhood		Peckham	West Horsley	Effingham
Super output area		Southwark 025C	Guildford 0003A	Guildford 0003G
Ethnic group (KS06)	White: British	58.5%	93.9%	94.2%
	White: Irish	4.0%	0.5%	0.9%
	White: Other	5.7%	4.7%	2.8%
	Black or Black British: Caribbean	12.0%	0.3%	0.2%
	Black or Black British: African	6.9%	0.3%	0.2%
	Black or Black British: Other Black	2.9%	0.1%	0.2%
Tenure (KS18)	Owner occupation	47.5%	83.6%	86.3%
	Households in rented accommodation	52.5%	16.4%	13.7%
NS-SeC (KS14A)	All people aged 16–74	1138	889	885
	Population (16–74) in NS-SeC 1 (Large employers, higher managerial occupations, and higher professional occupations)	11.9%	18.1%	15.6%
	Population (16–74) in NS-SeC 2 (Lower professional and higher technical occupations)	26.5%	25.3%	26.4%
	Population (16–74) long-term unemployed	2.7%	0.4%	0.3%

From Insiders and Outsiders to Doing and Performing Place

Residential practices are a key feature of identification, instilling a sense of belonging that may translate into how individuals define their position within the social structure (Butler with Robson, 2003; Savage et al., 2005). In this respect, it is critical to understand the role of place in shaping and responding to the classed subjectivities of residents.

The literature on people’s attachments to their place of residence – broadly encapsulated in the term ‘belonging’ (e.g. Cohen, 1982; Pahl, 1965, 1966; Savage et al., 2005) – draws attention to the different relationships that people may have to place depending on their biographies and preconceptions, with middle-class residents claiming moral ownership over place through their (relative) symbolic power. We argue that such conceptualisations of belonging do not recognise (1) how symbolic power is claimed in a neighbourhood through spatial practices; (2) the dynamics and nuances of people’s relationships to place; or (3) that place is dynamic and performative.

People’s attachment to their neighbourhood – broadly encapsulated in the term ‘belonging’ – is well-trodden territory in the social sciences with a focus on understanding the different ways that people relate to place. For example, Pahl’s (1965) seminal work on the commuter belt demonstrated how commuters moved into villages, inspired by the desire for a quality of life that they imagined existed in more rural settings, the generic ‘village/community in the mind’. These villages then became the sites of contestations over space, as middle-class incomers came up against the ‘real’ communities of working-class and agricultural workers, drawn together by their common economic fate, leading to the large scale replacement or displacement of working-class and farming communities (Cloke, 2005a, 2005b; Phillips, 1998a, 1998b). While their experiences at times contradicted these images of rural living, middle-class incomers continued to hold onto such imaginings, with the result that it shaped how they interpreted their lives there (Pahl, 1966, 2005, 2008).

More recently Savage et al. (2005) claimed that the distinction between insiders and outsiders within works such as Pahl’s was outdated in an era of globalisation. Indeed, Pahl (2008) has more recently stressed that the imagined constitution of communities should be attributed as equally to the working classes as to the middle classes. Following a Bourdieusian framework, Savage et al. (2005) argue that belonging results from lining up habitus with a series of different fields within social space. Therefore incomers to an area are able to claim belonging as a result of their choice to move to an area that holds functional and symbolic importance for them, and subsequently claim moral ownership over the place that they live (elective belonging).

While such accounts are valuable in outlining how the middle classes relate to place, they do not account for the generative dimensions of habitus nor of the different ways in which fields are manipulated by individuals within them; insufficient attention is given to the ongoing interplay between people and places, the performative dimensions of belonging and the processes by which particular places become (de)valued. We argue that by introducing the concept of performativity, place-making can be understood as a discursive practice in action through which place and classed subjectivities intersect and are shaped.

Paul Watt’s (2009) discussion of selective belonging, whereby middle-class residents draw boundaries around their neighbourhood in order to disaffiliate from, in their minds, less desirable areas close by, introduces the idea that middle-class belonging (and hence subjectivity) is contingent on the degree to which place can be claimed by residents. For Watt’s respondents, the neighbourhood could not be fully claimed, or the residents fully electively belong, because of the stigma of the wider area. We stress that there is a need for further examination of both how such middle-class residents respond to and utilise circulating representations of place within their claims to belonging and how s/elective belonging is manifested through the ‘doing’ of neighbourhood.

As we argue, bringing together theories of space as in progress (De Certeau, 1988; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1994) with the literature on neighbourhood belonging and class (Savage, 2010; Savage et al., 2005; Watt, 2009) allows for a more nuanced understanding of how the claiming of moral ownership over place (Savage, 2010) works as an ongoing process that may be tied up in the struggle over the definition of place. In other words, choice alone cannot explain how people’s residential practices translate into a sense of belonging; there are other factors at play, such as prevailing representations of place, that have to be negotiated by residents. It is against this background that we argue that place, and our respondents’ relationships to it, should be understood as performative (Bell, 1999; Butler, 1990) and dynamic (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2006).

Lefebvre’s three categories of spatial production (spatial practice, representations of space, representational space) can be used to unpick some of the different types of space-producing processes at work in the two neighbourhoods. While our analysis is not framed around strict definitions of these three categories, the idea of space as produced through a range of everyday practices, regulatory processes and imaginings underpins the arguments laid out in this article. The category of representations of space is particularly useful (‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols … It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 39)) in explaining how people’s spatial practices are related to circulating images and representations of specific places (e.g. Peckham) and types of place (e.g. the rural village).

Representations of space are intimately tied to the performative dimensions of residential practices and belonging. Our understanding of performativity derives from Judith Butler’s definition, focusing on ‘that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ (1993: 2; see also Butler, 1990). In this respect, repeated discursive practices enact and reinforce particular understandings of place; it is therefore through the practice of everyday life that space is remade and place re-inscribed on the individual (see also Fortier, 2000; Gregson and Rose, 2000; Leach, 2005) Inserting performativity into discussions of social class, Skeggs argues that class identities are performative, continually reaffirmed and produced: ‘What we read as objective class divisions are produced and maintained by the middle class in the minutiae of everyday practice, as judgements of culture are put into effect’ (2004: 118). In this article we extend this analysis of the production of class to the production and maintenance of particular neighbourhoods by the middle classes. Using performativity in this way helps us to conceptualise how being a Peckham resident or a ‘country person’ is not just a state of mind but actualised in place and on the person through mundane processes. It is in part through this ‘doing’ that neighbourhoods are created and maintained, and, as Massey argues, constituent identities are (continually) moulded (2006: 154).

In the remainder of the article we compare the performative register of place-making in two different types of neighbourhood. While, in Peckham, the middle-class attempt to appropriate space as their own, in West Horsley and Effingham efforts are directed instead towards the maintenance of space over which they already have moral ownership. While our focus here is on the middle classes and their relationship to place, it is conceivable that similar processes are at work in the way that people from other socio-economic groups relate to place, albeit within the context of varying degrees of symbolic power.

Peckham: A Contested Place

One boasts the Sacré-Coeur, Salvador Dali, Picasso and Van Gogh. The other has abandoned car parks and dark echoes of the murder of Damilola Taylor. On the face of it, Paris’s famed Montmartre and London’s infamous Peckham have very little in common. But all that is about to change.

The Southwark district will throw off its associations with Del Trotter of TV’s Only Fools and Horses and relaunch itself as London’s artists’ quarter, the UK’s answer to the French capital’s right bank. (Simon Tait, 2011, emphasis added)

Peckham is a loaded signifier, a place with a reputation. It carries associations with a Cockney white working class, as typified by the television programme Only Fools and Horses and with gang and gun crime, particularly since the murder of Damilola Taylor. ³ More recently, media coverage of the area has focused on stories of regeneration and the emergence of Peckham as a trendy, arty place. This above extract from the Independent newspaper is typical in drawing on repertoires of (racialised) danger, an emerging cool art scene and an association with Trotters Independent Traders.

Our respondents’ narrations of Peckham both draw on and counter these circulating images. Therefore, their accounts have to be understood in conjunction with these representations of space and in the context of an area with a reputation, a place which, George, ⁴ who has lived there for over 30 years, stressed, ‘is not naturally middle-class territory’. Battling against the area’s reputation was central to our respondents’ stories of arrival. Many described a process of arrival whereby friends and family warned them against Peckham:

I think also because neither of us are Londoners neither of us went ‘huh! Peckham?’ whereas most people who we told … They were like ‘OH MY GOD! You’re crazy!’ ‘But it’s gorgeous!’ (Lucy)

… when you tell people you’ve moved to Peckham, they’re amazed you’re not bleeding to death in a corner somewhere. (Daniel)

It was common for interviewees to contradict or laugh off these powerful and negative associations. While there was some concern over safety, most associate danger with the estates in North Peckham that they consider as outside of their neighbourhood and as largely unrelated to them. Various intertwining narratives emerge as our respondents made sense of their choice to live in Peckham. Navigating their way around what they believed to be the negative received images of Peckham, they often stressed how it had improved, drew boundaries around their own (middle-class) neighbourhood within Peckham (cf. Watt, 2009), and strived to reclaim history, stressing Peckham’s credentials as a traditionally middle-class area (cf. Blokland, 2009).

In both the following extracts a narrative of progress is invoked and the middle-class area of the neighbourhood is distinguished from the rest:

Peckham in the past didn’t really used to have a very good reputation, and still not I suppose … but I suppose where we live we’re like in a bubble, as you know it’s like this little Bellenden village … so you get this lot of little bubbles in areas that are sometimes perhaps poor and not very wealthy. (Annette, emphasis added)

When I first came here, it was almost impossible to get a taxi from central London to come back here, after dark … You know it just had this reputation. […] I never used to say I lived in Peckham I said Peckham Rye; it sounded more like a nursery rhyme! Doesn’t it, actually when you think about it, Peckham is something, and Peckham Rye is something else! (Peter, emphasis added)

The example of black cabs previously being unwilling to come to Peckham is a recurring story, used as proof of the area becoming less stigmatised over time, but perhaps also as proof of the area becoming further incorporated into London. Beyond this, the distinctions that both Peter and Annette made between their area and wider Peckham were illustrative of the way that many interviewees defined their neighbourhood.

It is worth staying with that last quotation in order to probe what the ‘Peckham’ (that ‘is something’) and the Peckham Rye (‘something else’) are being understood as. On the whole, the (predominantly white) interviewees were keen to stress the value of living in a diverse neighbourhood. In fact a key element of being ‘people like us’ (Butler with Robson, 2003) was being able to cope with the diversity of Peckham, while other people could not. As Daniel, a man in his thirties, explained, ‘You don’t move to Peckham if you are uncomfortable with living in an area with a large black population.’ For the two BME respondents, the comfort of living in a diverse area was particularly important. For Dr Huang, a Vietnamese woman, not standing out as different and the presence of shops that sold the ingredients for Vietnamese cooking were crucial.

Simultaneously, it was clear that for many of our respondents the shopping street of Rye Lane in particular roused ambivalent feelings even if, at times, some praised its diversity and others actively expressed their dislike. Whatever their feelings about Rye Lane, our respondents referred to it in heavily racialised, rather than classed, terms: as ‘Africa’, ‘Little Lagos’, and ‘Third World’.

In contrast to their representations of Rye Lane, interviewees keenly stressed the existence of middle-class spaces within Peckham. For example, Lucy said ‘when you actually delve into what Peckham actually is and particularly this bit of Peckham, the Bellenden type bit, it’s actually a little bit more like you would see in Dulwich’. The contrast in how respondents refer to their own immediate neighbourhood and Rye Lane can be understood as processes of selective belonging (Watt, 2009), where the middle classes both appropriate the meaning of place and invest in it, while also distancing themselves from the more stigmatised aspects of the area.

Respondents also laid claim to Peckham as a middle-class place by stressing its middle-class history, reading the Victorian architecture of the area as a marker of prosperity. They seemed to grab hold of Peckham’s middle-class moment in the 19th century in order to challenge both the prevailing image of Peckham, but also to lay claim to how the area should be in the future. For example, one respondent, an architect, described how, above the surface of the street, one could ascertain the middle-class heritage of Peckham.

As an architect, we would like to have the Rye Lane … as a conservation area, so that it’s preserved … if you go there you will see that if you just lift your nose and you’ll see all these Dutch-influenced buildings, Victorian brickwork, you know fabulous property, and some should be listed as well … it’s looking like it could become a conservation area, which would limit developers, and limit owners not to do whatever they want. (John)

As we go on to consider, these re-imaginings of Peckham not only provide another way of talking about the place that challenges contemporary negative images, but through being lived reinscribe meaning on place (Leach, 2005), and also provide a basis for concerted action.

Place-making in Peckham

The discourses of place outlined above can be tied to actions: Peckham has improved, therefore we must keep on improving it; our area is distinct and middle class, therefore we need to support local businesses; and Peckham is naturally a middle-class place, therefore the grandeur of the past must be reinstated. Such processes are, as Blokland (2009) argues, selective and can be exclusionary of other residents who do not have the symbolic power to make their imageries of place dominant.

The relationship of our middle-class respondents in Peckham to their place of residence is reminiscent of the ‘place-in-the-mind’ identified by Butler with Robson (2003) among a similar group of people in Brixton, another contested place. However, in the case of Peckham, middle-class residents also attempt to shape their place of residence through their place-making activities. If we take ‘Peckham-of-the-mind’ as performative and actualised in space through the repetition of spatial practices, then we can examine how ‘“belonging” to place can therefore be understood as an act of territorialisation’ (Leach, 2005: 302). The middle classes thus intervene in re-making ‘Peckham’ in various ways, ranging from everyday practices (shopping, renovating a house) to their concerted efforts to intervene in the future of the area (getting involved in local campaigns).

One respondent, a newspaper journalist, who was keen to use her position to write about Peckham, positioned herself as writing against the prevailing image of Peckham, thus intervening in Peckham as a ‘representation of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991):

… anyone who took a risk here in an entrepreneurial way, it would be really nice if it worked out … I think that we do feel quite protective because we often do get bad press, and its snobbish press actually … if something new opens we try to review it or get it into the paper. (Julia)

This idea of supporting the local businesses on Bellenden Road was often presented by respondents as a way of sustaining their vision of the neighbourhood. It should be said that the same level of responsibility wasn’t expressed towards the meat, fish or vegetable shops on Rye Lane; it is a particular middle-class version of the local that is being supported.

Another way in which respondents intervened in the area was through local campaigns about changes to the physical landscape. Attempts to reclaim the Victorian grandeur of the past (see also May, 1996) can be seen in efforts such as the campaign for stripping back the shops around Peckham Rye station to reveal the original Victorian building. As they attempt to reconstruct Peckham to reflect their own imaginings and tastes, our respondents’ concerns about the wider built environment thus carry with them an undercurrent of social class.

The example of Peckham shows how processes of s/elective belonging need to be considered in the context of ‘representations of space’. The various practices that these middle-class residents adopt exemplify how middle-class people attempt place-making when the meaning of their place of residence is contested. In the context of a research project examining five neighbourhoods across London, it was in Peckham where we found the most passionate claims to neighbourhood belonging. This is a sense of belonging that is not just felt or expressed through narratives of selective belonging but is also performative. Interventions are made in the realm of meaning and the physical environment, while also reaffirming place-based identities.

The Village as a Place Apart

In contrast to Peckham, respondents in the commuter belt do not have to defend their residential choice in the face of notoriety. Instead there was a sense that the village needed to be preserved, to maintain its rural character in the face of possible suburbanisation.

For the most part, it seemed that the decision to live in the commuter belt was initially inspired by the desire for the generic ‘village-in-the-mind’ (Pahl, 1965, 1966). Interviewees commonly drew on widely recognised social constructions of the countryside as they accounted for their choice of residence. As Sarah, who had lived in the village for 22 years, explained, ‘I think this area is small enough to feel like a community, to feel like an entity in itself, not just a suburb of London’ (emphasis added). The wider middle-class valorisation of living in a village in the commuter belt, framed by the idealisation of the countryside as the rural idyll, provides a route through which respondents are able to claim legitimacy for their residential choices. Owning and living in a house in the countryside, albeit within easy reach of London, acts as a kind of positional commodity, made possible by the individual’s cultural and economic capital, while also maintaining and reinforcing their position within the middle classes (Little, 1986; Phillips, 1998a). This broad representation of place is drawn on and upheld precisely because of its loaded symbolic significance.

Central to this image was a sense of the ‘close village community’ (Matilda). There was, however, some dispute over the extent to which community was available and accessible. While for some residents, community was something that they actively participated in, others acknowledged the presence of community, even if this was something that they did not have the time or inclination to take part in, and others yet stressed that a sense of community was lacking.

Despite the variation in how people understood community locally, there was consensus over the value of living in a rural environment, of being a resident of a village surrounded by greenbelt, close to areas of natural beauty (e.g. the Surrey Hills). This was particularly evident in respondents’ fears that the village or indeed the surrounding area might change and they took efforts to control change and development.

… its density, its space, it’s all disappearing, and it’s one of the reasons you choose to live here is for that feeling of space. We would be very upset if they decided to build on the field opposite. At the moment we look out the front and we’ve got a horse field opposite, which is very nice. If you look out and you’ve got houses, the atmosphere is not going to be the same. (Sarah, Effingham)

Such nostalgic images of the countryside and community available locally are, however, ‘intertwined with specifically white middle-class social and moral values’ (Tyler, 2003: 492; emphasis added); ‘the countryside is popularly perceived as “white landscape” … predominantly inhabited by white people’ (Agyeman and Spooner, 1997; see also Neal, 2002). The whiteness of these representations of the rural, and respondents’ efforts to uphold this, became most apparent in discussions of an established Gypsy-Traveller community in Effingham. ⁵

… so there’s the end of Orestan Lane, which is the end nearest the Plough and going down, and a concern you get at the other end of Orestan Lane, it turns into something rather different, there’s a bit of mistrust of the other bit … It’s got a traveller … there’s lots of houses down there that are actually illegal, no planning consents … (Timothy, Effingham)

In these accounts the Gypsy-Traveller population was presented as being on the periphery of the village, as distinct from the rest of the village and in need of control. As Okely stresses, ‘[T]he history of the Gypsies is marked by attempts to exoticise, disperse, control, assimilate or destroy them’ (1983: 1). Respondents’ accounts of the local Gypsy and Traveller community clearly reflect this ambivalence, with the Gypsies cast as part of the countryside, but not as an integral part of the village, with the potential to disrupt, particularly through their position as a racialised other or white underclass (Holloway, 2007; Sibley, 1997).

The lack of trust of many respondents for the Gypsy-Traveller population sat alongside a perception that ‘others’ were a (albeit unsatisfactory) part of rural life. As Sibley (1981) and Halfacree (1996) stress, Gypsy-Traveller populations – particularly romantic images of their lives – have historically been a part of representations of the rural idyll. Stephen, for example, positioned Gypsy-Travellers with other ‘natural’ annoyances of country life, ‘it’s rather like bad smells and things, you have to put up with, well, this is semi-countryside’. Respondents thus expressed rather ambivalent views about this population. Read within the context of wider representations of rural life, the presence of the Gypsy-Traveller site at once challenges pre-existing discourses of the rural, and reinforces them, highlighting the extent to which ‘the definition of the rural … is not simply shaped by pre-existing discourses but is also highly contested’ (Holloway, 2007: 18). Respondents’ presentation of the Gypsy-Travellers thus draws attention to the dynamism of the rural idyll, how ‘it is reproduced and contested through contemporary social practice’ (2007: 18).

In a similar manner, those residents of the villages who lived in social housing were also placed on the periphery, and, as the following quotation identifies, as having a different sense of responsibility to their place of residence:

… it’s [social housing] got a different feel to here even though it’s only a road up, which is quite strange … It just doesn’t feel as well tended … it feels a little bit neglected down there. (Emma, West Horsley)

Aside from the discussion of Gypsy-Travellers and social ‘others’, reflections on the limited ethnic diversity of the villages identified individual ethnic minority members of the community, or highlight that the ethnic minority residents were often involved in local commerce:

… you’ve got the odd Indian … I don’t think you see a true black face at all. There are several shops in East Horsley which are run by Indians. The post office at the Bishops Mead end, she’s incredibly popular because she’s such a darling, she is so helpful with the old people and she’s just so sweet. (Margaret, West Horsley)

By identifying these ‘exceptions’ respondents reinscribe the village as a place of whiteness, reinforcing the invisibility of ethnic minorities in the British countryside (Agyeman and Spooner, 1997; Neal, 2002). Furthermore, highlighting the functional roles that these individuals played within the community, respondents confirmed that these others were not typical ‘country people’.

While in Peckham there is a clear agenda to change the representations of space, in West Horsley and Effingham there is a desire to keep things the way they are, to preserve the village as a rural place, to confer to white middle-class understandings of what the village should be. The following section goes on to illustrate some of the ways in which they practise place to these ends.

Place Maintenance in West Horsley and Effingham

… if you try to do too much you’re going to start changing the nature and character of the village really aren’t you? (Mark, Effingham)

While the sense of a generic ‘village in the mind’ characterised by middle-class imaginings of the rural goes some way in explaining residential choice, the day-to-day experiences of our respondents demonstrate how place is maintained through action, even if this is directed at preventing (undesirable) change, and how residential practices feed back into identities.

Community was one dimension of this. Place, experienced through community, could be relatively spontaneous and contingent upon particular circumstances – the Christmas fayre, the village fête, or bad weather. However, those who felt part of a distinct village community expressed an almost moral responsibility to its maintenance. As Lesley, who had lived in Effingham for 40 years, explained, ‘you can’t just sit and hope you’ll have community, you’ve got to actually take part’. This translated into everyday engagements with the community, including sitting on the Parish Council, or school’s board of governors, getting involved in local clubs (e.g. amateur dramatics, choir) and locally oriented voluntary work. Arguably, participation in these activities often depended on longevity of residence and age, with older, often retired people more involved than younger neighbours. Place – whether maintained, as in the case of these two commuter belt villages, or made, as in Peckham – is thus continually reiterated through the work of individuals.

In Effingham, the sense of reproducing the village through action was regularly traced back to Barnes Wallis who had lived in the village for nearly 40 years. ⁶ As Stephen described, he had been a local benefactor, ‘a great village man’, whose local initiatives had ‘an impact on the village’, laying the foundations for future philanthropic work within the community. Current ‘self-help’ work in the village includes the Parish Council’s maintenance of playing fields and the establishment of a local housing association. In this respect, through their participation in community, respondents maintained the identity of the village (see also Tyler, 2003).

There was also, as in Peckham, agreement that local businesses should be supported, even if the extent to which respondents did this varied. For some people, shops were the ‘heart of the community’, and visiting them became a way of finding out what was going on locally. For others, it was mere convenience that led them to use these. This was seen as a way of preserving the village, with people who do not regularly use the local amenities expressing guilt that they did not:

I say you should use the local store up the road … because when they’ve gone people are going to miss them, and I say that when people just come in for a bar of chocolate, I say ‘aren’t you going to buy anything else? You know, poor Steve [shopkeeper] can’t survive on your bar of chocolate madam’. So we buy as much as we can, don’t we? (Richard, West Horsley, emphasis added)

… the little village market we really only get milk and butter, things that we’ve run out of I’m ashamed to say. (Carol, Effingham)

Although largely unmarked and unnamed, whiteness was expressed through normative assumptions about the village, and inflected through class identities (cf. Frankenberg, 2004), in particular the history of white, middle-class residence in the area (Tyler, 2003). The ‘doing’ of the local also implicitly reproduces class and ethnic distinctions, reaffirming these villages as white, middle-class spaces. Such everyday practices can be read as reinforcing, in Nayak’s terms, ‘the silent cartography of whiteness’ (2010: 2375). At times these practices were made explicit in respondents’ accounts:

… generally speaking the whole area is middle class, and it’s a middle-class activity going to shop in your local butchers, and it’s quite clear from the queue in there on a Saturday morning that people are more interested in the fact that the meat is organic than that it’s the cheapest that you can get. (Timothy, Effingham)

One [pub] is more about eating than the other one is, the other one being more about drinking, and the one more about drinking for a long time had the wrong kind of people in, you didn’t necessarily want to mix with … lots of itinerants … (Stephen, Effingham)

Such discourses further reinforce both the classed and racialised constitution of village life in the minds of middle-class residents. Social practice was directed at the reproduction of this (cf. Holloway, 2007), in particular expressing the pervading desire to preserve the social composition of the village:

… people are quite protective of the Horsleys as they are, and that’s with the type, colour, creed, age, affluence for people that live here, and also what goes on in terms of the environment … in truth I’m probably part of it as well. If push came to shove I’m quite happy keeping it as it is really … if we had Bulgarians I’m sure it would change the feel of the place. (William, West Horsley, emphasis added)

Ian, who had lived in West Horsley for 14 years, recognised this sense of ‘protection’ and ‘preservation’ directed towards the village, although he was critical of this ‘… the community, does have a life … it sort of has an ethos which is very Surrey, professional preservation of what we have, and maintenance of what we have’. ‘Protecting’ the village is thus directly linked to the preservation of the status quo, both in ethnic and social terms.

Alongside these social concerns lies another set of practices directed at the preservation of the environmental amenities. This included interventions in planning and development of the greenbelt, stopping changes to roads, including lighting, usage and traffic restrictions. In large part, middle-class residents’ interventions responded to fears of suburbanisation:

I certainly don’t want street lighting just to protect me from my fears of people jumping out of the hedges … it won’t be a rural area any more … Let’s keep it as rural as we can and not try and make us into a suburb. (Margaret, West Horsley, emphasis added)

‘Doing’ place in this way reaffirms the village as middle-class and rural, with individuals developing their sense of being a country person. Their objections to various potential changes often unquestioningly presented life in a rural village as quality of life. Central to these assessments was the ‘natural’ environment and a concern for its preservation: ‘No telephone masts … No streetlights. No calming traffic in the road … Things should stay as natural as possible’ (Richard). Although there were some minor irritations (e.g. wild animals and bad smells), these were tolerated as part of rural life.

Place maintenance was even more marked when it came to the development of local land. This was particularly evident among residents in one road in Effingham, who expressed the most passionate claims for the preservation of the rural and against changing the character of their road. This translated into actions to block the development of residential properties. Residents often had views of open fields from their properties, and this was clearly something that many of them valued. The fact that so many people in the road were in support of the rural and the view from their houses brought out a sense of solidarity among residents in relation to planning issues, with the result that it seemed to be extremely difficult to get planning permission passed for anything that people deemed to change the character of the road. Mark, who had lived in Effingham for nearly 10 years, quotes a local councillor as saying, ‘Every time we get an application from there, people will always try to turn it down for some reason, because they say it’s going to spoil the rural character.’

By distinguishing place maintenance from place-making, we argue that place maintenance, while appearing relatively passive, is in fact a way of discursively producing place through action. Unlike the processes of place-making that go on in Peckham, which are directed at making the neighbourhood in the respondents’ image, actions in the commuter belt are instead focused on warding off unwelcome change, in particular suburbanisation.

Conclusion

The comparison of the discursive practices of place-making in two very different neighbourhoods has demonstrated that middle-class place-attachments need to be understood within the context of circulating representations of place. These two ways of doing and performing place reflect the different intensities with which people relate to their places of residence, how these correspond, or not, to existing representations of particular places and the amount of energy expended in intervening in the neighbourhood. While we have outlined two ways of doing and performing place, within this there is considerable diversity in the way that people relate to place; the individual’s relationship to place is both messy and ambiguous (Massey, 2006).

For our respondents in Peckham, the strength of popular representations is something that they find themselves variously working with and against as they try to establish Peckham as an appropriate place for people like them to live. Respondents in Peckham are engaged in a process of getting their neighbourhood recognised (by others like them) – investing it with symbolic meaning. Such investments in neighbourhoods are also – if we follow the line that place-making shapes subjectivities – self-investments through which they generate a particular habitus that means that they can live in Peckham. This habitus, as we demonstrate elsewhere, forms the basis of intra-class distinction (Jackson and Benson, n.d.).

In contrast, for residents of the commuter belt, representations intersect with place-making practices in a different way; the pervading understanding of the countryside as a white, middle-class space means that rather than appropriating space, they are instead trying to maintain their moral ownership over place, controlling neighbourhood change and keeping at bay certain unwanted elements of the community. These residents thus engage in what we refer to here as active place maintenance. In this process they reconstitute the neighbourhood as an appropriate place for people like them to live, and continually reconstruct their own disposition for living in these areas, performing being a ‘country person’; repetitive acts of place maintenance are as much about the ‘doing’ of middle-classness as they are about the identity of places.

Therefore, these two case studies show how middle-class imaginings of place are not just ‘in the mind’ but are actualised in neighbourhoods. It is not only the case that class is projected onto place in a unilateral manner, places are made and maintained by everyday practices and interventions that in turn may shape the classed identities of people; place is both performative and dynamic.