(Dis)Orientations in Past,Present,and Future Encounters

Introduction

In the context of de-industrialization and the transition to a postindustrial economy, the broader Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) research project argues that processes of “fitting into place” ¹ are subject to complex contestation (Taylor, 2012b; Taylor & Addison, 2009). In aiming to capture manifold intersections of history, geography, and economy, a multidimensional approach was adopted to explore middle-class and working-class women’s lives between the ages of 16 and 85 years, using in-depth interviews and focus groups with 97 women across class backgrounds living in a range of urban, suburban, and rural locales across the North East of England (see Taylor, 2012b and Taylor & Addison, 2009, 2011, for more thorough methodological detail). This article explores the lived and reported realities of young women who composed approximately one third of the sample, ² 16- to 24-year-olds (n = 11) and 25- to 35-year-olds (n = 19) from both working-class and middle-class backgrounds.

Put simply, the research argues that change differently impacts on people and places: Such changes occur and are contested over time and across space, affecting overlapping arenas such as labor, leisure, and residency, all spheres in which young women can be rendered “out of place.” Change impacts on feelings of belonging, in moving forward or being “left behind,” as desires, hopes, and resentments intersect with material (im)possibilities. The broad concern is with the reconfiguration of class and gender inequalities in relation to spatialized urban–rural “publics,” which open up and close down encounters between those who “travel” as mobile future-orientated subjects and who “stay” or are “stuck.” Whereas “future selves” are constructed in specific settings, managed and negotiated as people live out shifting geographies and temporalities, this process of mobility and fixity does not simply refer to journeys between places, for example, movement from one neighborhood to another. Rather, to “travel” or to “stay” evokes a sense of access, entitlement, and even accumulation of space as a resource functioning across time to propel certain bodies forward as “fitting” (Charlesworth, 2000; Haylett, 2001; Hewitt, 2005; Robson, 2000; Taylor, 2012b). In this project, women across the age range very differently responded to, took up, or “lost out” in the regeneration of the North East of England. Often, processes of change were framed as a degeneration when attached to working-classed subjects and spaces, where “in contemporary Britain, geographical referencing is one of the contemporary shorthand ways of speaking class” (Skeggs, 2004, p. 15).

“Shorthands” abound in wider classed representations, intersecting with, for example, race, sexuality, and gender (Taylor et al., 2010). “Displacement” has become a significant trope with regard to working-class masculine “crisis,” depicting yet containing all that is changing if not lost, in relation to forms of employment, community, and belonging. Working-class masculinity, in the context of de-industrialization, receives increasing academic attention (Charlesworth, 2000; Strangleman, 2004) and popular culture representation (e.g., the widely screened film and musical “Billy Elliot,” 2000) while, in contrast, femininity is positioned as a reserve, a labor market supply, which can now be capitalized on, even as this has been named as a classed resource (Skeggs, 1997; Taylor, 2007). Nayak (2003) suggests that working-class boys in the North East still perform traditional working-class masculinity, even in the absence of traditional jobs, subjectively making claims to a class-inflected “Real Geordie” North East identity (Coll & Lancaster, 1992). Young working-class masculine identities are positioned between the past and the future: “The ‘Real Geordies’ were like flies in amber, having become petrified in the hardened solution of an older period from which their values descended” (Nayak, 2003, p. 63).

Industrialization has been supposed as good for men—and de-industrialization bad for men (and, following Nayak, boys)—but there has been little attention to women’s positioning within economic regeneration/degeneration, elided as an expected fit into a “feminized” labor force (Adkins, 2002; Armstrong, 2010; McRobbie, 2009). Despite an often assumed “fit” within a “feminized” economy, it is working-class women who will bear the brunt of the U.K. government’s cuts to welfare and public services, whether as users of public services or as public sector workers (Kenway & McLeod, 2004). Different registers of time and place collide in troubled and insecure financial times of vast public sector cutbacks, and recognizing the gendering of austerity measures is an important corrective against “can do girl” discourses of futurity and mobility (Harris, 2004; McRobbie, 2009).

Generational dynamics of “now” and “then,” “here” and “there” pull young bodies forward when these are seen as “fitting” middle-class trajectories and regional potentials; other young bodies are situated as wasteful and even redundant, unable to locate, accumulate, and fully claim a presence (Allen & Taylor, 2013). Here I am concerned with encountering the young bodies that “travel” and the bodies that “stay,” viewing this as not so much an incidental stumbling on space or subjects, but rather as complexity structured and contested across the past, present, and (imagined) future. Those who always belonged were frequently pitted against those who never had or never would, the “new arrivals,” with limited histories, while this intersected class, gender, and race (see Taylor, 2012b) to be “young” was often sufficient enough to be positioned as “new.” Such divisions were generationally fraught with young people both making claims on a history that was not wholly experienced as theirs and refusing the “old” landscapes in a “new” North East. Some middle-class women are able to appropriate and propertize the past, present, and future, where placed personhood is read on the body (Allen & Taylor, 2013; Gidley & Rooke, 2010; Skeggs, 2004). The process of reading bodies in and out of place makes and limits entitlements, “enabling some groups to propertise their personhood and others to be beyond appropriation as the foundational ground of valuelessness from which others can mark and know their distinctions” (Skeggs, 2004, p. 26). Distinctions occur in time and place, meaning some cannot easily “move forward” or travel to a “new” future place as imagined through neoliberal urban governance, regeneration, gentrification, and an appropriation of specific “pasts.”

Whose Future, Present, Past? Registers of Time and Place

Questions of the future of cities, residents, and city subjects pose questions of who, where, and when: Who is “stuck” in the past, who is capacitated as taking “us” forward, and what embodied, spatial, and material collisions occur in these renderings of past–present–future? As some are recognized as activating their own future landscapes, others are condemned as failing, irresponsible, and out of place (Allen & Taylor, 2013; Paton, 2010). Poverty is often located as entirely residing in places/people often without attention to what and who is displaced: Young people in particular are imbued with a regenerative/degenerative (in)capacity seen as bringing forward or failing certain place-based futures (McRobbie, 2009; Taylor, 2012c; Taylor & Allen, 2011). ³

Young people’s present educational and employment success is also seen to secure and safeguard an older population’s future/life (where their own pensioned futures are in crisis): Such presences are awkwardly placed and of heightened significance in the North East, which has a higher than average U.K. unemployment rate as well as a higher aged population (National Statistics Office, see http://www.statistics.gov.uk). At the same time, young people are often outside of the official measures of “becoming” regenerated/capacitated (situated on, for example, sites of cultural capital—museums, art galleries, restaurants—and residential property). Some bodies get to “travel,” to become mobile global city subjects, while others are seen to stick and stall community-regional and (inter)national progress: Their “stay” in place is seen as a lag and a lack. Impermanent and vulnerable claims on the past, present, and future sit in opposition to a mobile claim that transcends and accumulates time and place as one’s own.

Many feminist researchers highlight the gendering of social futures, as women are welcomed and celebrated as now-included in the worlds of work and education, supposedly becoming unstuck from family cares and all-consuming parental practices. Young women in particular are called on to be present, to be new future subjects standing in as visible signs of gender equity (McRobbie, 2009). At the same time, many have queried this celebrated postgender arrival, given that inequalities move about rather than disappear within the still profoundly gendered sites of family, education, and employment (Armstrong, 2010; Evans, 2010). As some women are recognized as activating their futures, others are condemned as failing, irresponsible, and out of place (Parker, 2010). This is a distinctly classed process. In these encounters, class “sticks” as waste and as wrong, as a past residue attached to those behind the times and without worthy futures (Taylor & Allen, 2011). Certain bodies “stick” (Ahmed, 2006) in these shifts, where the corporeality of women’s lives exemplifies the embodiment of different gendered identities as daughter, young woman, mother, grandmother, and so forth (see Taylor, 2012b). Ahmed urges consideration of the normative effects of “the repetition of bodily actions over time, which produces what we can call the bodily horizon, a space for action” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 66). This repetition and inculcation is influenced by social position, so that it depends on the context of whether one will feel out of place. Generational, gendered, and class contexts inscribe the aging of women’s bodies and embodied sensations, as the (mis)placed and (dis)located body navigates the right and wrong time/place as “traveling” and/or “staying.” To state this is to acknowledge generational (dis)continuity rather than position young people in a snapshot of time.

Communities cohere around particular identities (including place or social group identities) and are simultaneously “unworked” by processes of differentiation that involve and place “bodies” and inhere in identity formation (Secomb, 2000). In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Ahmed (2006) uses “offline” in the sense that bodies are disoriented in space, not following directing “lines” automatically. The words “angle” and “slanting” also convey a sense of not fitting in with a straight alignment. As we always are in space through our bodies, our bodies can be the starting point to locate ourselves in relation to others. In contrast to orientation, as being at home or feeling “in place,” disorientation occurs when people are uprooted, the objects around them change, or they are unable to take up space. ⁴ These experiences do not happen on a random basis to individuals but are structured by the norms that govern public space; those who do not fit in with these norms are often positioned as “out of place” or as not belonging.

Many researchers have turned to the concepts of “habitus,” “field,” and “capital” (Bourdieu, 1984), as a framing that opposes a free-floating mobile version of chosen self-hood, speaking instead to how particular paths are shaped as directions, resources, senses, and everyday maps, with signposts and sidelines to classed, gendered, and racialized terrains (Erel, 2009; Reay, 1995; Reay et al., 2007). Habitus can be understood here as an interplay between past and present, permeable and responsive but setting limits on “traveling” through place. Territorial proximities and distances are embodied by those in and out of time and place, who are differentially (dis)advantaged due to classed and gendered locations. Certain places and certain people are not meant to “become” or arrive in place while some are able to acquire and accumulate place as their own: This is a classed misfit, felt intimately and embodied through the rhythms, sounds, smells, and sights of past and contemporary landscapes—where some are unable to grasp, feel, or embody new selective future orientations (Pini, Mayes, & McDonald, 2010; Walkerdine, 2009).

One inherits “way of being” from one’s community or location, but at the same time, one may be marked as different even in the “same” community because of physical appearance or habits. Meaning can be thought of as “inherited” and “prereflective,” arising through “habituated dwelling” (Diprose, 2003; Merleau-Ponty) and shaping the “horizon of social meaning,” which is also embodied. There are histories of “past encounters” that travel with and between us in occupying space, where it takes time, energy, and resources to move (Adkins & Skeggs, 2004; Bourdieu, 1984; Taylor, 2012a). Myriad senses of past, present, and future are sustained and fractured through “multiple space-times” (Tolia-Kelly, 2010), and many have posed the question of what it would mean to open up communities to these registers that shape daily interactions and habits in place (Amin, 2004; Massey, 2004; Thrift, 2004). The focus on historicity, temporality, and interrelationality is invoked in “past–present–future” encounters, embodied in those who can and cannot move through shifting times and places.

Placing the North East of England: Encountering, Traveling, Staying

One North East believes the biggest asset of the region is its people. This is a region where exceptional creativity and innovation takes place . . . It is a region whose people are imaginative, resourceful and ready to face the challenges of the future. (Passionate People, Passionate Places, http://www.onenortheast.co.uk/page/index.cfm)

The North East of England is the empirical fieldwork site used to discuss (dis)orientations in people/places. It is a fraught location at once propelled into the future, through residents and policymakers’ claims of regional resiliency, and economic and cultural capacity, while being “stuck” in the past. It is frequently positioned as behind the times, out of place, and caught up in old redundant legacies as a sharp Northern point on the U.K. North–South divide. ⁵ Like other U.K. regions, the North East of England has faced enormous transformation in response to global change, impacting on the urban landscape, old manufacturing towns, ex-shipbuilding communities, and rural mining villages (Parker, 2010; Paton, 2010). While the region was once built on shipbuilding, coal mining and heavy engineering, it now relies on service and knowledge-based employment. Manufacturing, business services, and the public sector are dominant sectors of the contemporary North East economy (see Taylor, 2012b, for a more thorough description and historicization of regional change). There has been long-term economic underperformance in some rural areas of the region, which are defined as “lagging behind” in relation to the South of England. Yet, the main cities of the region have undergone considerable redevelopment with tourism becoming important and Newcastle increasingly represented as the center: The proximity between urban and rural destinations is highlighted in marketing locations such as the Pennine Hills, the Cheviot Hills, and Northumberland National Park as a touristic draw. ⁶

The quest for culture, employment, and overall “livability” is based on attracting and retaining the middle classes, instigating a “coming forward” by the responsible active citizen with the right capacities and potential to regionally regenerate. Working-class residents are implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—coded as residue, the source of place-based problems, waste, and regional lag (Clavering, 2010; Paton, 2010; Walkerdine, 2009). Regeneration and gentrification have been woven more tightly together with city competition, welfare, and workfare policies, as part of neoliberal urban governance. Within such logics, areas and their inhabitants have been deemed in need of “place shaping” to become part of a future and saved from a failed past or social-spatial “death” (Taylor & Allen, 2011). This is evident in policies of city councils acting as “place-shapers,” actively seeking to rebrand and “place-shape” the North East as a place of “Passionate People, Passionate Places.” ⁷ The structural politics of territoriality is signaled in the calls for regional competitiveness that seek to strengthen the (right kinds of) attachments, but that actually bring forth further regional-local disparities (Taylor, 2012b; Thrift, 2004).

In these policies, adult residents are responsibilized as active citizens, through, for example, Neighbourhood Watch schemes (Gidley & Rooke, 2010; Paton, 2010). The appraisal of “those who can” move forward and improve place frequently implies that some cannot: Residents are accordingly implicated in their own decline and are responsible for their own “degeneration,” and young people are entirely left off the map in this centering of residents and consumers, only existing as potential “future citizens” (Parker, 2010). The “local” comes to stand for cosmopolitan potential as well as an anticosmopolitan regionalism signified by and embodied in traveling/staying. Such misplacement resonates with long-standing discourses that pathologize the poor as irresponsible, beyond (self)help and at odds with contemporary “city publics” done by desired citizens who are able to activate, claim, and improve space (Haylett, 2001; Taylor & Addison, 2011; Watson, 2006).

Alignment with regional reframings can propel spaces and subjects forward, as (urban, middle class) becoming, rather than backwardness. This can be contrasted against a sense of being “stuck” in past places often characterized negatively as (rural, working class) residue. Local geographies do not just exist “out there” in the authentic residence addressed by local agencies; rather these forms of residency and articulation are appropriated, marketed, and circulated, rematerializing who can and cannot “fit into place.” Laura invokes a North–South economy of belonging as she attempts to reclaim value and “travel” in managing her embodied performance through accent as a return to and escape from place:

London is used to having people who are young and ambitious and moving around all over. It’s been . . . I think Newcastle sort of had a period of time where there’s been a huge swathe of people who have left and not come back. I was quite shocked by that at first and I’ve got used to it and I kind of have ways round it now. I do have to really make an effort not to, you know, my voice not to be too girly or to really make sure that I make a comment that can’t be laughed off or people don’t take you seriously. And I presume that will change. I think it will. Well, it’ll have to. (Laura, working class, 26)

As with Laura’s fraught articulations of the “young and ambitious” who go—and the others who stay, yet have to change—various geographies of affinity and distance were invoked demarcating who was “like us” and who was decidedly different—both “then” and “now.” These everyday temporal-spatial segregations challenge and verify “insider” and “outsider” inhabitants, evoking “fellow feelings,” empathies, and hostilities, in classifying residents, neighbors, locals, investors, “Northerners”/“Southerners”/“strangers” (Ahmed, 2000; Dillabough & Kennelly, 2010; Savage, 2010; Tolia-Kelly, 2010).

As with Laura’s “too girly” embodiment, Sophie and Lauren discuss value exemplified through (in)appropriate expressions of femininity, in two very different places. Both places—and embodied performances—are subject to mockery, with perhaps more sympathy conveyed for “rough” women who are still “really nice though.” The mother figure becomes a loaded symbol for community (dis)investment and (dis)identification (Byrne, 2006). Here “poshly spoken” women in middle-class Jesmond are described as “more classy,” yet they are still subject to ridicule situated against their working-class Byker counterparts. Nonetheless, this evaluation is partly one of recognition and proximity, where Sophie is keen to retrieve some of the associations that do attach to—and are claimed by—her:

This evocation of who is “streetwise” differs from the claiming of (North East) “commonality” but both involve distinctions negotiated “at home”:

As Gaby and Jody signal, regional value is recalled, utilized, and capitalized on by differently classed subjects in claiming ways in and out of time and place (by, for example, “putting up boundaries” or dismantling these through affective practices such as “having a laugh”). These evaluations do have material effects, as certain areas are avoided, known as troubled, where this sticks to the bodies of those from “over there,” as a fixing measure of difference and disorder. The body is interpellated in relation to dominant class and gender ideals (McRobbie, 2009). Bodies are socially constituted and life is experienced through the body, where “embodiment” signals “the physical and mental experience of existence” (Cregan, 2006, p. 3; cited in Jackson & Scott, 2010). As Jackson and Scott (2010) discuss, “a body can never be just a body abstracted from mind, self and social context,” highlighting the proximities—and social distances—that are created between bodies; meaning is generated through the “social context, which profoundly affect [sic] how we experience our own and other’s bodies” (p. 149).

This is a question of time as well as place, where the temporal dimensions of representing and feeling in place are apparent in embodied feeling of “coming forward” or being “left behind” (as “common,” “hard,” “professional,” “girly”): “The identities in question, including those of place, are forged through embodied relations which are extended geographically as well as historically” (Massey, 2004, p. 5). Different “locals” are positioned at a distance, with the emotionally charged politics of place involving complex regional and (inter)national claims. Attempting to open up to registers that shape interactions and embodied feelings, the next section “Moving Forward: ‘Then’ and ‘Now’” captures classed, gendered, and generational lamentation and celebration as the past, present, and future are differently imagined, lost, or recuperated.

Moving Forward: “Then” and “Now”

Within interviewees’ accounts, and indeed in official policy discourses, the region is repositioned temporally, pointing at the future place of innovation and tradition in reconstituting class and gender, region and nation. The landscape of the North East—and the respective class status of “Geordies”—was discussed in terms of future-orientated potential, as well as current losses from past times. Such sentiments highlight tensions in being “out of place” and “behind the times,” where the region is seen as both moving on and stagnating (depending on where one stands). Regional changes were often declared as the sweep of history and geography, from the coal face and shipyards of the past, to a still changing landscape mapped out in residential, leisure, and workplaces. Many interviewees wrestled ambivalently with the pull of the past, and the distance between “now” and “then,” refusing a neat repackaging through upgraded urban landmarks. These are the embodied gateways in (not) “arriving.”

Young women’s ability to stay in place is frequently positioned as a projection of future worth and investment, against a loss and escape to other locales—they are “weighty bodies,” weighed down by positive expectations and negative associations (which are differently felt, claimed and rejected by young people themselves). ⁹ The complexity of place, and place-based identifications around “tradition” and “innovation,” is captured by one young person’s focus group whose members were mostly from working-class areas. The images and descriptions produced by the young women highlight how, over time, young people make place their homes without necessarily fully knowing or experiencing histories as “theirs” (Back, 2007; Taylor, 2012b). Thoughts were listed as “Now” and “Then” on a sheet of A3 paper that also signaled continued histories and the intersection of linguistic, political, economic, embodied, and emotive place-based (dis)identifications (see Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Young Person’s Focus Group Illustration—“Then” and “Now.”

Good	Bad
Then
Old Geordie words such as “hinny”	Coal mining
The World Cup	Unhealthy
Horses	Old
Old English	Dirty
Talking and writing	Clothes that had to cover you
Northumberland Street (in Newcastle)	It was sad
Vickers (factory)	Wars
Trusting	Shillings
Safer back then
A lot of smoke and industries
Now
Still places to remind you of the past	Expensive
Swearing	Crime has increased, there is more trouble
Common speaking	Underage sex
More freedom	Teenage pregnancies
Underage smoking	Trampy areas
Shorter skirts	Drinking
Better football team	People and places are disrespectful
Better tramlines	Unsafe
Better monuments	Dangerous
Healthier people	Posh
Better education	Immigrants
It is fun	Scary
	No smoking

These young working-class women’s accounts highlight complex reevaluations as they try to assert some claims on space. Devalued common words (“hinny”), practices, and places are claimed as good, with contemporary times providing some opportunities, to be carefully navigated alongside new “dangers” (“teenage pregnancies”) and presences (“immigrants”). What these accounts also show is the multifaceted placement of young people in the “here and now,” as they provide maps through different urban and rural landscapes across time (Skelton & Valentine, 1997). Young middle-class women did not have to negotiate danger or vulnerability in the same way as their working-class counterparts, where classed histories (e.g., of industry) were not necessarily remembered or recounted.

One young women’s focus group conveyed the distinctions within and between spaces, in expressing their hopes, desires, and imagined futures manifest in the desire to be a “top ender.” The question of “what,” asked in relation to future educational and employment hopes, quickly turns into a question of “where” as different distances are evoked in getting away and staying put:

In the spatial scales evoked in the aforementioned account from young working-class women, the local terrain of the “right end” of the street is both near and far, desired and yet impossible. This is in sharp contrast to the physically removed “global” terrain seen by Suri (16), as a young middle-class woman, as possible and perfectly plausible as she expresses her desire to “live in the States, somewhere in America so I will probably end up there.” Suri already imagines herself as a future global citizen: She occupies a space of choice and seemingly effortlessly anticipates the actualization of future becoming (McRobbie, 2009; Skelton & Valentine, 1997; Vittelone, 2008). Plans were made against contrasting firm expectations and hopeful crossed fingers whereby the young working-class women in another focus group expressed being “stuck” in residential locations, while negotiating educational trajectories into the future workplace if General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) could be passed (Evans, 2010). The sense of more demanding journeys, of “escape” rather than “choice,” is captured in the phrase “on the run”:

This being “on the run,” while perhaps used for dramatic effect, is obviously different from a sense of security, expectation, and entitlement. This “traumatic” movement cannot accumulate as resourcing and there is a sense of violence in being moved on as opposed to being mobile.

For many interviewees, much history and presence was invoked through generational association rather than as individual biography alone, though there were classed differences in navigating these associations as “fixing” and static or chosen and mobile. Time and space were bound up in the narration of (not)belonging as told through what had been, accounted with regret as well as disavowal; “old” geographies and histories were recuperated as signaling a continuity between landscape and inhabitants, while also being renounced as failing to capture complex movements and contradictions in who could “fit” both “then” and “now.” Having a history was evidenced in the connection to place, through heavy industries, material objects, and artifacts, as well as in subjective senses (the remembered and reimagined sights, sounds, and smells of places; Pini et al., 2010).

To “have a history” could be orienting, as a claim for visibility, permanence, residency, and an entitlement to place (Savage, Bagnall, & Longhurst, 2005; Tolia-Kelly, 2010). Such articulations featured in personalized histories of childhoods, combining real memories and imagined “myths” where communities, families, and workers had disappeared off the (gendered) map, to reappear in a deficient form from the “good old times.” The juxtaposition—and suggested continuity—between the past, present, and future, is embodied in Laura and Sheila’s narration of history and place. Here, Laura and Sheila remember times and places now gone, recalled through their granddad’s and uncle’s “stories.” For both young women, these stories serve to create a fixed sense of place where absent people and places are rewritten into the landscape, fostering a sense of belonging, a commitment to stay “in place,” to stay “out in the sticks.” Indeed, Laura refuses the promise of (urban) mobility stating that she would “never move to a city”:

Changes are variously anticipated, rejected, desired, and capitalized on. Alongside the (re)positioning of the past, present, and future existed a sense of the speed of change, as right-in-time or out-of-control and racing ahead (or stuck, frozen in time): People and places were seen as more or less able to capitalize on future directions. Capacities, mentalities, and dispositions were spoken of as a future-orientated mood, conveyed in place, and in people who could “aspire” and look to the future, whereby dispositions become spatialized, and spaces become embodied. Gaby and Jody’s orientations, as young middle-class women, are toward a more recognizable urban service-cultural sector as savior, taking the North East out of its smog-filled industrially polluted and rural past (Coll & Lancaster, 1992; Miles, 2005; Nayak, 2003):

As young middle-class consumers of centralized urban space, Gaby and Jody note the beauty of certain historical presences, which they walk through, remark on, as they take up their urban space, noting too that “there’s a lot of history here.” History is available to them in their present travels through the city and, at the same time, the Quayside is frozen in the present as a site of leisure and consumption as opposed to a past place of work (shipbuilding).

Writing on images of the iconic Angel of the North, the Baltic, the Sage and the Millennium Bridge, which exemplify the North East regeneration as celebrated by Gaby and Jody as well as more widely (see, for example, Hollands & Chatterton, 2001; Nayak, 2003), the young working-class women in one focus group commented on the “beautiful,” “coolest bridge in the world,” as viewers, while also feeling unwelcomed as potential visitors (“never been,” “rubbish art but good view”). Yet this didn’t stop one young woman commenting on its “ugliness” and “posh slug” likeness (of the Sage Concert Hall). When asked about the Sage, the young women replied “It’s just too posh for me,” becoming a space in which she didn’t belong, “I feel like an outsider. They’re like, ‘Aaah!’”(Jenny). This feeling was endorsed both internally (“Because . . . I don’t like art. Just like what the hell?’ . . . But I’ve never been, I just think I’d feel like an outsider,” Jo, 16) and externally by staff and other visitors who asked the young girls outright, “What are you doing here?” Sophie goes on to explain their reactions to their feelings of exclusion: “The Baltic? It’s so tight, like if you do something like start laughing then you get told off for it! And we’re like ‘yeah? Do you have a problem?’” Within such space, the young women preferred instead to use the lift and view the external rather than internal surroundings, acutely aware of being seen as wrong:

It is not simply the expense that is exclusionary, but also the literal and imagined silencing presence of others. These young women challenge the judgment of the gaze (“Everyone looks you up and down”) but cannot completely deflect this negative attention; they may well “hate” those who exclude, but this sentiment in itself is unable to displace the structural dynamics through which their exclusion is reproduced.

Such articulations cast light on classed sentiments as a structuring feeling where

categories of class operate not only as an organizing principle, which enable access to and limitations on social movement and interaction but are also reproduced at the intimate level as a “structure of feeling” (c.f. Williams, 1961, 1977) in which doubt, anxiety and fear inform the production of subjectivity. (Skeggs, 1997, p. 6)

The significance of habitus as embodiment, the social in the body, is evident in these senses of place as bodily perception, incorporation, and responsiveness, expressed as ways of “standing, speaking, walking and thereby of feeling and thinking” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 70). These bodies are embedded in social environments rather than standing apart from them, and they are steeped in past memories that are transmitted to present bodily surfaces and felt intimately as being “at home” (or not).

Certain residential and commercial areas—and their occupants—were seen as affluent, up and coming, and regenerative, as against those off the map, as backward, redundant, and not quite as developed. Such assessments intersected moral and material geographies, as residents and inhabitants of certain classed spaces were seen as “stuck,” responsible for decline, and lacking a future orientation (Evans, 2010; Gidley & Rooke, 2010). The linearity of improvement from then–now, them–us, is implied in looking “lower down” the sociospatial scale, where value is attributed and denied in becoming developed and capacitated in specific ways:

Like Byker, even I would say, it’s like a world apart, from Jesmond. In Jesmond, there’s big houses, big cars, private schools, private hospital, nice bars. . . . Byker represents the old Newcastle, it’s not quite as developed, even the city centre. . . . Byker’s a lot lower down than the city centre, the people there are still . . . like the houses are old fashioned. (Gaby, middle class, 24, Jesmond)

The trailing off of Gaby’s comment “the people are still . . .” hints at the judgment of people and places as somehow unfinished, incomplete, and behind middle-class regenerators. At the same time, a lack of change could be valued as a retention of history, value, and special difference, to be not forgotten within the still acquisitive urban market. For differently classed young women, the ability to consume space cemented and undermined claims to belonging in the here and now and also in imagined futures of consumption and residency, as articulated through “nice bars” and being a “top ender.”

In some places, a parody of a former past was claimed as an alternative capital now available to the middle classes in occupying traditionally working-class areas. The past could be stripped of value and re-presented selectively for a new kind of presence. Questions of who “fits” in changing place raise concerns about the ability to move within and between spaces, where to claim space as a geographical range rests on specific classed resources and histories that travel into the present. Class and gender are bound up in these negotiations and reclamations of the past, present, and future even as they are disguised as personal “choice,” individual extensions, and regional expansions.

Conclusion

In seeking to strengthen and capitalize on local attachments, a particular North East character and regional resilience is presented as regenerative; in times of austerity, the good worker/resident/consumer is positioned as responsible for riding out tough economic times. Official registers of region interpellate young women as future orientated and mobile but young women’s experiences of place are coded and understood through classed and gendered embodiment and experience that “sticks,” as well as “moves.” Class intersects with gender to shape access to and experience of place, and acts as a (dis)orientation through past–present–future encounters. The temporal dimensions of (re)generation disrupt a linear chronological experience of space as class and gender impact on the ability to travel through, orientate, and claim space as one’s own as a “fit” with (regenerative) futures, as opposed to a misfitting (degenerative) “failure.” In mapping the past, present, and imagined future encounters of younger respondents, it is important to carve out a claim for plural futures. Not everyone can flexibly cast themselves through trajectories of regenerative potential, “properly” orientating toward residential consumer space—and not everyone wants to. I made a case for the importance of class and gender in consolidating and diminishing the chances of becoming “future subjects,” asking who can travel through and make space their own? Who can stay and who is stuck in place? What would it mean to be responsive to those not identified as the “right kind” of future subjects/workers/citizens and not capacitated as “coming forward” into place? Past constellations shape present and possible futures and the kind of “Northerner” or “Geordie” that young women can and cannot become.