Unruly bodies and dangerous spaces: Masculinity and the geography of ‘dreadful enclosures’

Introduction

Over four decades ago, the sociologist Sean Damer (1974) explored the idea of ‘the sociology of a dreadful enclosure’ – a description of the social and spatial effects of living in a place marked by material poverty and widely-held stereotypical assumptions about its residents. The occupants of Govan, a small area in Glasgow, as a consequence of its characteristics and reputation, led lives that were tightly bounded by and limited to the estate in which they lived. This eloquent phrase has haunted me across the decades but it is only recently that I have returned to it and to Damer’s now classic piece, in a study, with Anna Harris, of young lives in contemporary Britain.

This article draws on interviews undertaken in 2017 in Hastings, an English seaside town, to reflect on the consequences of living on a ‘disreputable’ local authority estate where poverty and inequality have increased in recent years. To what extent does the concept of an enclosure have purchase at present? Are young people stigmatised by their association with certain spaces? And does this association in turn affect the image and use of these spaces by other residents? Other studies of the associations between class and territoriality that inform the arguments here include Hanley’s (2016) vivid accounts of growing up on an estate in Birmingham, and Skeggs’ (1992) now-classic work on young working class women growing up in north-west England. There is also an interesting and expanding literature in geography and youth studies about gender, self and territoriality, some of which is cited below.

In the last 15 years or so, alone and with colleagues (Hardgrove et al., 2015; McDowell, 2003; McDowell et al., 2014), I have been collecting stories of young working class men with few educational qualifications and limited workplace opportunites. It is now clear that their opportunities have declined over this decade and a half. The impact of the financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures, as well as changes in the nature of employment, have increased class and spatial inequality (Cribb et al., 2017). The combination of declining real wages and cuts in the eligibility for and level of social security benefits, as well as the closure of many youth services, has had a deleterious impact on young men searching for work (Cornwall et al., 2016; Hughes et al., 2014; McDowell et al., 2014; Yates, 2012; Youdell and McGimpsey, 2015). The jobs available to young people with few qualifications are increasingly precarious, often casual or part-time, sometimes without guaranteed hours (termed zero-hours contracts) and poorly paid. For too many, unemployment is the consequence of these changes, leaving young men with few options but to fill their time ‘hanging out’ on the streets and in the public spaces of the towns in which they live.

The focus here is on the everyday lives of young unemployed and underemployed men in public places in Hastings. Through a case study of the geographical reach and location of these young men’s lives, we demonstrate the ways in which the associations between particular places and a version of protest masculinity act to restrict their opportunities, not only through rising material inequality but through a discursive association with ‘dangerous’ spaces and unregulated bodies. Before turning to Hastings’ reputation and the three spaces, we explore the parallels between the long-standing associations of the disreputable working class with dangerous or undesirable spaces: the dreadful enclosures of Damer’s analysis, as well as the more particular associations of working class masculinity with unruly behaviour in public spaces, including the street (Pickering et al., 2012; Robinson, 2000), locating our case study in a critical theoretical understanding of the interconnections between the performative construction of bodies and spaces in times of material inequality.

Dangerous youths and disreputable places: Theco-constitution of stereotypes

The construction of certain places in cities and towns as disreputable and dangerous has a long history and a double-sided effect. Drawing boundaries, both material and virtual, between geographic areas is a common way of separating the desirable from the undesirable, creating a binary distinction between the pure and the impure (Sibley, 1995, 2001). The building of a physical wall in north Oxford in the 1950s, preventing the working class residents of a local authority estate from walking through a privately-owned area, is one of the best known examples of spatial exclusion, restricting the right of the less affluent to occupy certain spaces on the assumption that their very presence would reduce the status of the more prestigious group of houses (Collison, 1963). Residents of certain streets or estates are not only socially excluded, but may be rejected as workers or as customers on the basis of their address (Shildrick et al., 2012). They may also suffer social stigma, seen as people to be feared by more respectable residents of the town. As Hanley (2007: 5) argued, ‘to anyone who doesn’t live on one (and to some who do), the term “council estate” means hell on earth’. The stigma of growing up there, she suggests, is almost impossible to escape. Numerous other studies of territorial stigma show the widespread and long-lasting impact of the association between location and reputation (see Kirkness and Tijé-Dra, 2017, for many examples).

The idea of places as dangerous has a long history. In the Victorian era, the East End of London was constructed as the dark heart of the city, a site of sinful behaviour, which both repelled and attracted middle class men seeking pleasure in ‘slumming’ or, more virtuously, middle class women and men seeking to reform the working class (Koven, 2006). In the 20th century, literally liminal places, coastal towns such as Brighton, were associated not only with urban violence, as in Graham Greene’s (1938) Brighton Rock, but in the 1950s and 1960s with sinful lust and quickie divorces (Shields, 1992).

The history of youthful masculinity is also replete with spatial associations. As the sizeable literature about the construction of a particular version of an embodied and performative masculinity makes clear, young working class men typically are seen as a threat, as out of control, on the rampage in the streets, too loud, too noisy, as a challenge to the middle class through their swaggering behaviour (Campbell, 1993; Connell, 1995, 2000; McDowell, 2003; Pearson, 1983). This form of masculinity has been defined by Connell (1995) as a version of ‘protest masculinity’. In the UK, the discursive construction of working class young men, especially if unemployed and visible in public spaces, as abject, even feral (a term used by the former Prime Minister Tony Blair), was revived in particularly virulent form after the urban unrest in a number of British cities in 2011. The popular press, opinion makers and politicians reached for a rhetoric of individual blame, constructing young men as unsocialised, with little sense of collective responsibility. As theoretical arguments about the performative construction of identity assert, discourses have power to affect identities and opportunities. Goffman’s (1963: 3) early work on social stigma makes a similar point, as he argued that narrative expectations of individuals – perhaps regarding them as inadequate or bad – reduce them to a tainted or discounted subject.

Subjects, however, have agency, both constituted by and aware of discursive constructions and widespread stereotypes and so not entirely reducible to them (Nelson, 1999). Arguments from cultural theorists and within youth studies also insist on the connections between the effects of discourses that construct young men variously as idle or feckless and the structural inequalities based on class and gender that remain so significant in young people’s lives. As Hall (1996: 6) noted, ‘identities are … the points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us’. Identities may be relational and performative but they are not free floating or indefinitely changeable. Nevertheless, if young men are repeatedly told that they are undeserving, bad or dangerous, they are not only constructed within these discourses as ‘other’ but may also begin to see themselves through the eyes of others. As Bourdieu (1999: 12) noted, young men like these tend to ‘make a virtue out of necessity’, exaggerating a tough street-savvy version of masculine identity in the context of an economy and society that undervalues them. Young men without waged work may feel they have nothing to gain from conformity and nothing to lose from engaging in various forms of anti-social and criminal behaviour. Sennett and Cobb (1972: 69–70) recognised that:

to be caught in a scheme of particular values, to live under terms set out by others, is to feel inadequate in relation to those others. This is the ground upon which the feelings of inadequacy, as opposed to feelings of mere difference, arise.

As Threadgold (2012: 31) argued, ‘young people’s rights are continually abused, they are treated as scapegoats and blamed for all manner of things in the omnipresent media moral panics about them, and they are constantly talked about rather than to or with’. Indeed, Skeggs (2004) argued that the ideas of lack of moral worth and the embodiment of the working class as out of control have produced a discourse of visceral distaste, as well as a climate of class condescension in Britain. The middle class mock and parody the working class, and subject them to regulation both through the law and through cultural practices, as well as, in the era of austerity politics, threatening living standards through cuts in services and benefits. Increasingly and significantly for the argument that follows, the middle class enforce their own social and spatial separation through, for example, exclusive leisure and residential spaces or, as in Hastings and elsewhere, the avoidance of spaces associated with ‘undesirable’ residents.

Avoidance, privatisation and/or fear in public space is a mechanism through which class, gender and racialised privilege are maintained, but may also be over-turned, as the less privileged and socially excluded assert their right to the streets, often through forms of violence. Ideas of ‘turf’ and territory, for example, are key mechanisms in gang cultures of spatial dominance and exclusion (Alexander, 2000). Previous research shows that young men, especially men of colour, are the objects of fear, although this varies with the demographic composition of neighbourhoods and the wider urban area (Day, 2005; Ellis, 1995). In British seaside towns, there is a post-war history of urban violence between white youths with different sets of loyalties, including fights between Mods and Rockers in south coast towns in 1960s England (Cohen, 1972) which troubled settled residents. In more recent years, whiteness matters in a different way, as new migrants from parts of eastern Europe move to many parts of the UK and stereotypical views of Romanian and Bulgarian men in particular as rough and uncouth are common in the local press.

There is also a large and long-standing literature about women’s fear in public spaces (Day, 2001; Pain, 1991, 1997; Sur, 2014; Tandogan, 2016; Valentine, 1990, 1992), as well as the work on racialised masculinities and men of colour as objects of fear (Day, 2005; Ellis, 1995). Here we explore the connections between masculinity and fear in a double sense: young men’s deliberate efforts to induce fear in others and so take control of the streets, but also their own fears of living rough in public spaces.

Before turning to an exploration of three different spaces in Hastings – a working class estate of housing, the central streets and a square with a particularly notorious reputation – we outline our methods.

Talking to young men: Methodological issues

The argument is based on interviews undertaken in autumn 2017 with 10 white working class young men aged between 17 and 24, who were unemployed at the time or working on an informal basis, usually for cash in hand. As a consequence, they had time at their disposal and engaged in different ways in what Jeffrey (2010) termed, in the context of urban India, ‘timepass’. The men were invited to participate through a series of visits to various places in the town where they hung out, including a volunteer-led drop-in centre providing cheap meals, a laundry and companionship.

This study is not a representative sample, but rather an indicative case study of the current lives of 10 young men who grew up in the same few streets in Hastings. All the men were white in a town that has one of the least diverse populations in the country. Identifying and persuading young men to talk is not easy nor straightforward for numerous reasons, including differences of class and gender, familiarity with talking to strangers and fears of sharing disruptive and unruly behaviours that may be on the edges of legality, as well as anxieties, desires and hopes. The hegemonic version of the protest masculinity, that youthful ‘hardness’ and immunity to pain and fear outlined above, may also inhibit young men from opening themselves up in ways that make them vulnerable.

We talked to the 10 men at some length, recording the conversation when they agreed and, as is often common practice, paying a small sum in compensation for their time. Although some researchers prefer to give a store voucher instead of cash, we decided this might lead the young men to be accused of theft. We interviewed together and separately, hoping that as women (both white, one young and one not young) we were regarded as non-threatening. As Delamont (2000) has argued, men interviewing men in different class positions often sets up a conflict in which envy may affect the relationship. Young men without work may be suspicious of academics or scornful of their efforts. They may also be reluctant to talk about what they may regard as their own failure, seeing apparently more successful men as a threat to their sense of themselves.

We endeavoured to encourage the men to talk freely. We discussed a range of issues, led by the respondents, including school careers, job searches, families, friends and personal life and their sense of changes in Hastings. We did not comment if details were shared about involvement in semi-legal activities, nor on racist or sexist views. Our aim was to listen, not to judge, not assuming that sexist or racist comments necessarily map on to discriminatory behaviours. Rapid notes were taken after each interview as a reminder of the location and characteristics of the interaction. With the consent of the interviewees to recording their lives, both at the time, and later as text, pseudonyms were agreed, to maintain as high a degree of confidentiality as possible, although some of the young men knew each other and were known to public agencies in the town. To help in anonymity we have removed the names of the estate where the young men grew up and the streets where they hang out, but have left in the name of the square that was so significant in their lives. The interviews were transcribed and analysed thematically.

The town: Dark days

The research was carried out in Hastings on the south coast of England. The town, with a population of just over 90,000, ranks highly on indicators of social deprivation, despite recent attempts to improve its reputation, by, for example, the establishment of a new art gallery, the Jerwood Gallery, and the renovation of the pier, which won an architectural prize in 2017. Its historic urban core and the streets around are becoming gentrified as young professionals seeking cheaper housing move to the town. They are known as the DFLs: down from London, initials that to the working class young men captured instead the movement of drug dealers from London – a phenomenon known as county lines. The problem of street dealing is growing and, as a headline in the national newspaper The Times suggested, the town ‘fears the return of the dark days’ (O’Neill, 2017: 4). The local paper, the Hastings and St Leonard’s Observer, is full of reports of arrests of young dealers, reports that through pejorative language aid in the construction of stigma (Cipris, 2018). Articles playing on fears about ‘pushers’, ‘addicts’, ‘crackheads’, street begging and thieves are common, exacerbating the discourse of abjection discussed above. A more nuanced, but still somewhat pejorative, essay by a journalist (Blass, 2016) entitled ‘The battle for Hastings: Is it a dumping ground for the dispossessed or ripe for gentrification?’ captures the growing spatial inequality in the town, as Georgian and Victorian terraces are either restored by a new middle class or turned by the local authority into houses for multiple occupation by asylum seekers (Hastings was designated as an asylum seekers dispersal area in 2000) or by others in need of emergency rehousing.

Hastings is among the 10 most deprived towns in England (Corfe, 2017), many of them coastal towns where casual seasonal employment in the tourist industry is poorly paid. These customer-facing jobs depend on a deferential performance at odds with characteristic attributes of youthful masculinity (Bourgois, 1995; Nayak, 2006; Newman, 2006; Nixon, 2009). Indeed, several of the men to whom we talked regarded this work as demeaning. They were, however, restricted to the local labour market by poverty and inaccessibility (Hastings is poorly connected by public transport to other towns), as well as by lack of money and, sometimes, confidence.

Rates of unemployment are higher than the national average (9.3% in Hastings compared with 4.8% in Great Britain as a whole in 2017). Young men are particularly likely to be unemployed, leading to visible groups of young people on the streets during the day and into the late evening. The percentages of the town’s residents on low incomes, in fuel poverty and claiming state benefits are considerably higher than in other towns in the same county, paralleling levels found in northern deindustrialised towns. Both seaside towns and northern industrial areas in England and Wales were hardest hit by the austerity measures and cuts to welfare provisions introduced following the financial crisis in 2008 (Beatty and Fothergill, 2013). The current generation of young people, especially from poor families, are hindered by an unfair education system (Reay, 2007; Social Mobility Commission, 2016), a two tier labour market and an unaffordable housing market, resulting in stalled or downward social mobility. For young working class men growing up in Hastings, these problems are exacerbated by additional material factors in the town. High levels of crime, disorder, anti-social behaviour and street assaults, as well as visible drinking and drug taking, and youth homelessness, are common (East Sussex Public Health, 2017). For the men whom we interviewed, growing up on an estate with a poor reputation, attending schools where achievement levels were low and finding it hard to find employment, ‘hanging out’ and, as one of our respondents admitted, ‘creating mayhem’ in public spaces felt like the only option open to them, supporting Bourdieu’s claim of making a virtue of necessity.

Growing up in a ‘dreadful enclosure’

Ever since the connection between certain places in the city and deviant behaviour explored in the early urban sociology developed by the Chicago School, it is widely assumed that there are neighbourhoods in cities that people know to be dangerous. These spaces are, as Damer (1974: 221) noted, ‘identified totally with danger, pain and chaos … [with] reputations for moral inferiority, squalor, violence and social pathology’. Typically, they are areas where populations are regarded as rough or lower working class, as incomers or as ‘Others’, as not respectable and, of course, often as poor. As Damer suggested, these dangerous places are usually areas of inadequate housing. In Govan the estate was publicly owned but streets of multi-occupied privately rented properties, where landlords exploit the urban poor or provide overcrowded rooms for incomers and asylum seekers, are also areas where residents are stigmatised by their address.

In Hastings, both types of dreadful enclosures are common, although here we focus on a local authority estate. Indeed, both these types of ‘poor’ housing are common as the housing stock of Hastings, as in many coastal resorts, differs from the national average. There are lower levels of owner occupied and socially-owned housing (council housing was transferred to Registered Providers in the town in 1996), and correspondingly higher levels of privately rented accommodation in resorts compared with most British towns and cities. The latter tenure tends to be dominated by older properties, often in and close to the city centre and typically in poor condition, but it is in the estates of socially-owned properties, located on the edges of the centre or the periphery of the built-up area, where the highest levels of social deprivation are found in Hastings (Hastings and St Leonards Council, 2015). These estates are among the most deprived in the south-east as a whole. A larger than average percentage of households claim housing or council tax benefits, educational attainment levels are low and a high proportion of adults are on working age benefits. The Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, designed to ‘encourage’ adults into waged employment through a number of restrictions on benefits, reduced the annual benefit cap per household to £20,000 (from £26,000), which, as the interview extracts below document, has increased hardship for parents, sometimes leading to the eviction of ‘troublesome’ teenage dependants. The same Act reduced the ability of vulnerable young people aged under 35 to access affordable accommodation, and so youth homelessness has increased in the last two years.

For young men without regular work and a regular income, growing up on a local authority estate in Hastings, leisure opportunities are limited. A form of car vandalism by restless young men is both an opportunity to demonstrate a form of protest masculinity and a problem for other residents. A practice known as one-two-stepping is one response to boredom, where ‘vandals’ (the local press’s term) jump on the bonnets of cars, kick windscreens twice to smash them and then run away. This is reminiscent of the behaviour of young men living on local authority estates in Oxford, Cardiff and Tyneside, after urban unrest in England in the early 1990s. Campbell (1993), for example, talked to young men in Oxford who were involved in anti-social activities, including fighting, joy-riding and twoccing (taking away without consent). One-two-stepping is perhaps the current equivalent of twoccing, as cars are now harder to break into and start without keys.

It was evident from the interviews, however, that the version of a hard, protest masculinity identified by Connell and others and reinforced through popular discourse is not a sufficient explanation of these men’s subjectivity and behaviour. As Nelson (1999), Cupples and Harrison (2001), McDowell (2003) and MacDonald et al. (2010), among others, have argued, subjects are able to both construct and negotiate discursive contradictions. Thus studies of youth employment show that young workless men continue to adhere to the hegemonic version of breadwinner masculinity, despite it being out of reach. Similarly, work on youth culture and masculine identity has revealed that young men are able to empathise with the problems faced by local residents and by their own families at the same time as their actions exacerbate them.

The men in this study spoke convincingly and movingly of the issues they faced. Conor and Jordan had been asked to leave home by families struggling on low incomes. As Conor noted, ‘I’m just not getting on with my mum and dad and brother because there’s too many of us and you know, you know what brothers are like. They fight all the time’. Jordan, one of 11 children, was homeless. He too mentioned overcrowding as a reason for his eviction by his parents. He also suggested that living on an estate had pros and cons – ‘everybody knows each other and is supportive’ – but that deviant behaviour and a bad reputation were hard to hide. When still at school he was excluded on a regular basis, and hanging around the estates, he told us, meant ‘I got into lots of fights’. As he explained:

Yeah definitely, I feel I’ve got a reputation here. I’ve 100% got a reputation. People just know me as not really a criminal but just doing the wrong thing, like getting into trouble. Doing the wrong things. If I move, I think I can start again; you know get a reputation that’ll be better.

Ryan, aged 19, had also been in trouble: ‘stealing from a shop, taking two push bikes’. As he explained, ‘it’s tough round here, drinking and that’, adding ‘my family have got a reputation. My family’s always been in and out of prison. I’ve met half the people from round here who’ve gone in there’.

Like Damer’s ‘dreadful enclosure’, the reputation of the estate stigmatised residents. A search of the local press archives showed the dominance of a discourse of ‘otherness’ across the last decade. The estate was labelled a ‘war zone’ in 2006; in 2009 it was ‘terrorised by teenage yobs’ and by continuing vandalism in 2018 (St Leonards and Hastings Observer). This labelling and reputational damage affects the population living there as they internalise widespread ideas that are common in the town. It affects their attitudes but also their opportunities. Negative and pejorative attitudes about the estate tend to jaundice the way residents perceive their estate but also stigmatise them as deviant behaviours are attributed to them, or to their sons, regardless of their actual behaviours. In everyday interactions – with taxi drivers, in schools, shops and banks, in job applications – this stigma disadvantages them. For young people, especially young men, often workless and so visible on the streets of the estate in the day time, the temptation is to live up to the stereotypes of deviance and danger, exaggerating the very attributes that exclude them from a socially-defined respectability. These young men, living in working class areas, carry the weight of an unacceptable working class masculinity, a version that is in itself regarded as anti-social.

Despite anti-social activities, including joy-riding and fighting, as McDowell (2003) found in an earlier study in Cambridge and Sheffield, young men often rejected the labelling of their estates, and were proud of their neighbourhoods and the social networks within them. Even Ryan, perhaps the interviewee who most closely conformed to the stereotype of the ‘vandal’ identified by the press, recognised the impact his actions were having on local residents:

It is difficult. It’s upsetting because I’m seeing what people are going through. Like it’s their stuff that’s getting thieved and me taking the money and I only noticed it like two weeks ago and that’s why I ain’t been doing it lately. I’ve been actually like sorting my life out like since I’ve been to court [for theft]. I’ve been telling my Mum I am going to get a job.

It seems clear that ‘dangerous behaviour’ is not an indisputable correlate of youthful working class masculinity but rather a reflection of local and national structural circumstances, including the state of the labour market and the education system. Without exception the young men told us they had had difficult school careers, often excluded for anti-social behaviour and for, as Tyler put it, ‘playing the class clown’. As we demonstrate in the next section, involvement in anti-social activity is often on streets outside, rather than within, their own neighbourhood.

Out on the streets

The five most dangerous streets in Hastings according to the local police are all in or around the town centre. Describing these streets, Jordan, aged 19 and unemployed, told us:

It’s not very pleasant. Like I’ve walked round the corner a few times and seen people taking drugs and that with like needles on the floor and the public toilet down there’s where I usually see it like. Thirty homeless people drinking beers every day and you walk around there at night and it’s all cans, needles, baggies on the floor – it’s horrible.

Jordan himself was a user, although he resolutely denied using hard drugs. He did, however, often drink to excess and when inebriated tended to fight in street scraps:

I’ve been in trouble with the police, um twice. One was a fight. I got in a fight with a man and I didn’t wanna stop. So I just carried on and on and on and I got into trouble for that and another one was, um uh I can’t remember the other one.

Conor had also been in trouble with the police for street fighting:

It’s just mainly when I’m out and about I cause trouble. To be honest I’ve been arrested maybe three or four times. They’re to do with girlfriends I’ve threatened. I’ve threatened to beat up my girlfriends because they’ve made me angry. They’ve pushed me too far and it’s not good because, you know, if I keep getting arrested or keep getting myself into trouble. It’s not good because you know when I get older I want to be a personal trainer and if I keep getting into all this trouble it’s not going to happen is it? No one’s gunna employ me.

Reflecting Connell’s definition of protest masculinity, Conor also talked about the need to build a reputation as ‘hard’, but in a more self-critical move also suggested that he regretted his decisions:

Hastings is only a small town. Let’s show them who’s boss. I’m thinking I’m big, starting fights, starting dramas, getting myself into trouble. But you know I’m not. It just shows me that I’m just, you know, stupid because, you know, where is it getting me? It’s not getting me anywhere. Life is just taking me down the wrong paths.

It is hard to assess whether the suggestion in his final sentence in this extract is an abrogation of personal responsibility or a realisation of the structural inequality that restricts opportunities for young men like Conor. Ryan, however, was clearer that the lack of employment was a central factor in his involvement in anti-social behaviour:

I’ve been looking for a night shift because that’s mainly the time I get in trouble because I ain’t got nothing to do. So if I do, what’s it called, warehouse work at night time at least I know I’ll be off the streets and during the day I can be indoors or sleeping.

The young men to whom we talked were often out on the streets in the central area of Hastings, both during the day and for some over-night. Several were forced to stay outside all night, lacking alternatives; others were part of the hidden homeless, sofa surfing with friends for short periods, until their welcome wore out. The less fortunate slept outdoors ‘near the pier, in shop doors’ or just walked around for hours. As Ryan noted, ‘I know we look rough, like threatening. We scare people’. But he also suggested that the night streets were threatening for him too: ‘If he [a friend] stays on the street all night, I will too because then if anything happens, there’s two of us there’. As studies in other cities have shown, young homeless people are often at risk and may be victims rather than perpetrators of crime (Jackson, 2012; Pain and Francis, 2004; Wardhaugh, 2017). The complexity of fear of crime is revealed here, as young men who may seem threatening to ‘respectable’ members of Hastings’ bourgeoisie themselves feel at risk when forced to sleep rough, vulnerable to forms of violence and abuse.

In earlier work, McDowell (2003, 2014) argued that an intergenerational social contract between young men and their mothers was an important part of helping men like the ones in this study find and keep a job. Irregular hours and casual contracts required maternal assistance in developing a workplace routine. For many of the men in this study, however, the support of their mothers was not available. Youth homelessness is growing as some families, stressed by personal circumstances and struggling because of cuts in social support, have little option but to evict their children.

Jordan, currently sleeping on a sofa at a friend’s place, had been asked to leave by his mother some months previously:

I never got along with my mum and six months’ yesterday, I think it was yesterday, my dad passed away and I went kind of weird in terms of depression when he died and I went away for a couple of months up to London. I worked for a fun fair and when I come back, I wasn’t there for my mum. My mum told me I had to go.

Others moved between their parental home, friends or an independent family member. Ryan, for example, had left home at 15 as his stepfather was violent: ‘I sometimes stay with my sister. I’m just sofa surfing at the moment. I did have the council helping me but I missed going to the meetings and so my bidding number went’. Ryan was referring to a scheme to provide shared accommodation with a warden for vulnerable youth. He had also lived on the streets: ‘I have been homeless. I was homeless for six months living under the pier, in a field, and the police would come every day like “yeah you need to pack up your tent” and it was annoying’.

It is clear that street life for these young men involves not only participation in forms of aggressive and anti-social behaviour that may annoy the town’s more respectable residents but also real hardships and danger, living in a public space.

Warrior Square: A dangerous enclosure or home from home?

All the young men we talked to mentioned Warrior Gardens and Warrior Square as a significant place where friendships and support networks were developed but also as having a particular reputation as dangerous or disreputable.

Warrior Square consists of three streets of Georgian houses, surrounding a garden laid out to grass and flower beds, facing the English Channel. The large houses with bay windows and iron balconies deteriorated during the 20th century, often sub-divided into flats by absentee landlords or occupied by small businesses, but are currently experiencing some degree of gentrification. However, the Square currently has a reputation at odds with its potential elegance, as a place for drug dealing, youth violence and a general hang-out spot for troubled young people.

The young men to whom we talked warned us not to go there after dark. As Ryan explained:

Warrior Square is like everyone does crack and heroin selling and that round there. Basically everyone like crack heads round here come up to you like ‘Oh can you get any light or dark?’ The only drugs I will touch is weed or sniff [cocaine].

Despite the potential danger, for many of the 10 men Warrior Square was a haven, a place they found companionship, notwithstanding its reputation. As the extracts below illustrate, these young men were remarkably clear-sighted about the consequences for them of the association between a ‘dreadful’ space and ‘despicable’ behaviour.

Most of them spent a good deal of time in the Square. As Dale told us:

I feel safe there, yeah, because I know what’s right and what’s wrong and I’m not gunna get myself into stupid shit. I’m not gunna get in debt with anyone; I’m not gunna start fights with anyone. I mean I know pretty much every older person, like 20, 25, down there and they look after me. So it’s like my family are down there because I know a lot of people.

But Tyler recognised that:

The town’s worst place is Warrior Square but obviously that’s where I hang around but that’s, that’s what’s got me into stupid shit, that’s what’s got me the reputation that I have … being involved with people who are involved in that kinds of stuff – drugs, car robbery, fights, weapons. I’ve seen a few people carry guns, real guns. I’ve seen someone be kidnapped; I’ve seen someone beat up a police officer and steal their car. Once you have the chance to venture out and stay up at night, you see it all come out and you get in with one bad person you meet all their friends and they’re worse and everything starts opening up and you realise what Hastings is really like.

He told us that, in part as a consequence of spending time in the Square, he had been in trouble with the police:

Yeah, quite a lot. I mean only really from hanging round in Warrior Square but it’s not like, it’s not big things. It’s smaller things like hanging around like with the wrong people or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all I’ve ever been caught up with the police for but I haven’t got a criminal record … I know I’ve got a strong will, so say if someone wanted me to carry drugs for them or do something stupid, I would say no. I wouldn’t get peer pressured into doing anything … like I said, I gotta be strong. I don’t want to fuck my life up …

Two of the men to whom we talked disliked Warrior Square, scared by its reputation. Conor considered that it had become too dangerous to spend time there:

There is one area [in Hastings] that I think is bad and that’s Warrior Square cause that’s quite bad. That’s where most of the killings and stuff happen which I think because you know I’ve been down there several times and heard about it so, you know, I don’t go down there no more … I don’t go down there because it’s a troubled place. It’s only a small place but it’s a troubled area.

These men, under-educated, from deprived backgrounds and without regular employment, are nevertheless well aware of the ways in which wider society stigmatises them. Here we give the last word to Tyler. He may look aggressive and act tough, but he was also smart and articulate. He spoke with passion about the ways in which young men like him get labelled as they spend days, and sometimes nights, in the gardens of Warrior Square:

I don’t think it [the media] is really fair because they make it seem like every person who wears a tracksuit is a criminal or things like that. I mean just because you wear Nike or Adidas doesn’t mean you’re gunna be causing trouble or anything but that’s what the police sort of portray it as. I made a point to the police … I said ‘just because we cause trouble now and again doesn’t mean the clothes we wear makes us do that’. And I said to them ‘if we wore suits would you still stop us?’ and they said ‘no, probably not’ and I mean there you go. Are you trying to say if everyone in the world wore a suit that there wouldn’t be any more crime? I think kids, well kids and teenagers, get, well I don’t know the words to explain it, but like victimised just because of the things they wear. Well, that’s what I think anyway.

In these few sentences Tyler identified the role of the media in stigmatising young men, the significance of embodiment and clothing and the differences between hegemonic and protest masculinity, between working class young men and middle class respectability.

Conclusions

The contradictions of urban life are demonstrated here through a snap-shot providing a limited but significant insight into the everyday lives of 10 young men from deprived backgrounds, with little opportunity to earn an income other than from a variety of semi-legal and illegal activities. Excluded from regular employment by their lack of educational credentials and an appearance that might be considered threatening by putative employers, they walk the city streets by day and night, as well as, too often, sleeping in the open. To the more fortunate residents of the town, jostled in the streets, perhaps hassled by begging, their pockets perhaps picked, these men may seem out of control, in need of restraint, rather than victims of increasingly difficult circumstances as austerity measures in place since the financial crisis in 2008 have reshaped and restricted their opportunities. Casual employment in seasonal jobs in the tourist industry is seldom open to them, as they are disqualified by their lack of deference. Jobs in the gig economy demand the possession of consumer durables they cannot afford – a smart phone, a bicycle – and an aptitude to self-organise that few possess. These young men, unsupported by adults with more resources, skills and time, often miss their appointments with the officials who regulate the welfare system; some are not sufficiently well-organised to apply for or meet the conditions of various schemes to provide housing for homeless young people, and so become a type of ‘urban outlaw’, a despised Other, visible on the streets, which, as Dale noted, gives him a sense of belonging, but which reaffirms stereotypical associations between dangerous spaces and abject bodies.

Day (2005), in her study of racialisation, public space and fear in Orange County, California, drew on Young’s (2002) notion of a ‘city of difference’ as a way to challenge the exclusion of multiple ‘others’. Young’s optimism, shared by Day, led her to suggest the development of spaces in which the co-presence of assimilated and unassimilated otherness might be accepted, leading to the reduction of boundaries. While geographers Massey (2004) and Amin (2006) are also optimistic about unassimilated otherness in cosmopolitan urban public space, Valentine has (2008) provided a salutary note of caution, with a reminder of the structures of power that affect accessibility and limit the shared use of space.

When the practices of exclusion are based on fear of young men, as well as literal and metaphorical fights for the right to occupy city streets and squares, albeit often on a temporary basis, it is hard to see a reliance on mutual acceptability and co-presence as a resolution. Instead, young men like the ones in this study typically are met with intolerance and moral censure. Heavy-handed practices of reclaiming the streets for the ‘acceptable’ majority, ranging from increasing a visible police presence and arrests, to removing homeless young people from doorways and seats in urban parks, are common responses. These reactions, especially in a period of austerity and cuts in local authority services providing spaces that address their needs, such as clubs and temporary housing, are more likely to exacerbate conflicts than support marginalised young men. It is hard to remain optimistic about the opportunities for young workless and homeless men in towns such as Hastings as the current Conservative Government not only continues to implement cuts in public services but fails to address the specific needs of young people and their families who are struggling to survive in adverse circumstances.