Gardiner V., Matthews H. The changing geography of the United Kingdom
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Chapter 14
Cultures of difference
Peter Jackson
Introduction
During the 1980s, geography (along with most of the other social sciences) underwent a
‘cultural turn’, involving a widening of its academic horizons and an increasing openness to
a range of intellectual movements including feminism and post-colonial studies. As a result
of the growing dialogue between social geography and cultural theory, the study of cultural
geography was transformed to emphasise a plurality of cultures and the multiple geographies
(landscapes, spaces and places) with which those cultures are asscociated (Jackson 1989).
Rather than approaching culture in narrowly aesthetic terms, cultural geographers embraced
a much wider agenda, exploring the many ways in which people attach meaning to places,
investing the material environment with cultural significance. As meanings and values vary
over time, from place to place, and between groups and individuals, geographers quickly
became immersed in complex issues of cultural politics, whereby dominant ideologies are
negotiated and contested by those in less powerful positions.
This chapter applies these ideas to the changing geography of the United Kingdom
during the 1980s and 1990s. It suggests that these decades have been characterised by a
growing sense of multiculturalism, when what it means to be ‘British’ has been undergoing
rapid change. While some have welcomed these changes, acknowledging a growing tolerance
of cultural difference as a positive feature of contemporary British society, others have seen
them as undermining what they regard as the core values of ‘Britishness’ or as a threat to
older forms of solidarity that appear to be fragmenting into ever more complex and plural
identities. This chapter will argue that cultures cannot be contained within narrowly defined
national boundaries. Notions of ‘Britishness’ are unstable and unbounded, a hybrid blend
of diverse cultural influences that originate from (and extend) well beyond the national
boundaries. An openness to cultural difference therefore implies a shifting sense of national
identity which many find threatening. Some of those who align themselves politically on
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the Left have seen the rise of ‘identity politics’ as a threat to the allegedly ‘universal’ appeal
of class-based politics, while many on the Right have sought a return to an apparently more
stable sense of national identity. This chapter aims to chart this dynamic cultural geography
through an exploration of the UK’s increasingly complex ‘cultures of difference’.
The chapter begins with an example of those who would deny or seek to limit the
extent of cultural difference. It goes on to map various forms of multiculturalism that
characterise the UK’s changing geography, exploring the extent to which cultural differences
have been subsumed within the market through the process of commodification. The chapter
ends with a discussion of the limits of tolerance, arguing that ‘living with difference’ will be
a major social and political challenge as we enter the new millennium.
The denial of difference?
According to Lord Tebbit, speaking at a fringe meeting of the Conservative Party conference
in October 1997, multiculturalism is a divisive force in British society. No one, Norman
Tebbit argued, can be loyal to two nations. Immigrants should be taught that the Battle of
Britain is part of their history. The alternative, Tebbit warned, is the kind of ethnic and
cultural division that led to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. His words recalled earlier
interventions from right-wing politicians, including Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech
in 1968 which warned of the inevitability of violent conflict if immigration was permitted
to continue unchecked. Lord Tebbit had himself made several earlier speeches on the subject
of multiculturalism, including his infamous ‘cricket test’ speech in 1990 when he argued
that the loyalty of ethnic minorities should be judged by whether they supported the English
cricket team: ‘Which side do they cheer for?’ he asked. ‘Are you still harking back to where
you came from or where you are? I think we’ve got real problems in that regard.’ Suggesting
that many British Asians continued to search for husbands and wives in the family’s native
country, he concluded that ‘you can’t have two homes. Where you have a clash of history,
a clash of religion, a clash or race, then it’s all too easy for there to be an actual clash of
violence’ (The Times, 21 April 1990).
Unlike these earlier speeches, however, Tebbit’s comments at the 1997 Conservative
Party conference received very little public support. The Tory leadership rapidly distanced
itself from his remarks, claiming that Lord Tebbit was out of touch with the mood of the
country, while the Queen spoke out in praise of ethnic minorities. The recognition of cultural
difference is no longer the unique preserve of left-leaning cultural critics. Even the right-
wing press has come to accept a more ‘hybrid’ view of British national identity. While the
Daily Mail printed Tebbit’s speech in full, the Daily Telegraph took a very different tack,
arguing that ‘A child with a Welsh father and a mother from Ulster can eat Indian food,
listen to reggae, and watch Italian football without experiencing cultural confusion and
political alienation’ (9 October 1997). As Stuart Hall argued in a Guardian interview, the
denial of difference is no longer tenable: ‘You can’t go on, generation after generation,
denying immigration’ (11 October 1997).
While it may no longer be a popular public position, Lord Tebbit’s denial of difference
has deep roots within British society. For a nation that prides itself on its tolerance and
sense of fair play, British history is marred with recurrent outbreaks of anti-Semitism, racism
and xenophobia (Holmes 1991). Given this persistent ambivalence about multiculturalism,
defining ‘the nation’ has often been problematic. When T.S.Eliot (himself an American
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émigré) sought to define the ‘national culture’ shortly after the Second World War, he reeled
off a bizarre list of ingredients: ‘Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August,
a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dartboard, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage
cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of
Elgar’ (1948:31). This exclusionary vision of Britain was later parodied by Hanif Kureishi,
reflecting Britain’s increasing multiculturalism. For Kureishi, British culture would now
include: ‘yoga exercises, going to Indian restaurants, the music of Bob Marley, the novels
of Salman Rushdie, Zen Buddhism, the Hare Krishna Temple, as well as the films of Sylvester
Stallone, therapy, hamburgers, visits to gay bars, the dole office and the taking of drugs’
(1986:168–9).
It is not simply that ‘British culture’ has been enriched by ‘ethnic diversity’. The
very existence of separate (national or ethnic) cultures is now in doubt. Popular music is
a particularly good instance of this kind of ‘hybridity’ with bhangra frequently cited as a
key example of such intercultural fusion. Performed by artists such as Apache Indian,
bhangra blends a range of sounds from Punjabi folk styles to African-American house
music and is listened to by a variety of audiences from Bombay to Brixton. Acording to
one observer:
Bhangra created an over-arching reference point cutting across cleavages of nationality
(Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other), religion (Sikh, Muslim and Hindu) and
caste and class…[Its emergence] in the 1980s signalled the development of a self-
conscious and distinctively British Asian youth culture.
(Back 1996:219–20)
Or in the words of one young person from Bradford:
We’ve got bhangra happening. It’s amazing. I love listening to people like Apache
Indian because that’s literature and music and dance all together and it’s a mixture,
it’s all in fusion. He’s saying Urdu, Punjabi, English, everything thrown together.
He’s rapping away…and he’s going on about arranged marriages, and there’s Indian
instruments in the background, there’s western instruments. And when you see him
on TV, there’s Indian dancers and there’s Afro-Caribbean men doing his stuff, Asian
kids doing their stuff, and there’s white kids doing their bit. I just think, ‘Wow!’ I just
think all this fusion will throw up new art forms. New things will come, they’re already
happening and it’ll be really nice to see where we end up in a few years to come.
(Bradford Heritage Recording Unit 1994:164–5)
It is possible, of course, from a position of cultural privilege, to romanticise the blending
of cultures and to champion the emergence of ‘hybrid identities’ with too little concern for
the material conditions that enable a positive fusion of cultures to be achieved. Picking and
mixing is certainly easier for those with sufficient economic and cultural resources. But, at
least in some instances, it seems clear that academic understanding of ‘multiculturalism’ is
being outstripped by people’s everyday practices. Producing and consuming such hybrid
cultural forms transcends established boundaries of taste and nation, compelling social
scientists to coin new terms such as ‘inter-being’ and ‘multiculture’ in an effort to map the
contours of the UK’s changing cultural geography.
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As these examples suggest, the United Kingdom is now a thoroughly multicultural
place, though one might question how deeply the tolerance of cultural diversity extends.
Even a cursory reading of the national newspapers shows plenty of evidence of continued
intolerance towards minorities of every kind, underpinned by legal and other forms of
institutional exclusion. Examples include recent debates about lowering the age of consent
for homosexual sex, persistent evidence of sexual and racial harassment in the police and
armed forces, and the orchestration of recurrent ‘moral panics’ against single mothers
(McRobbie 1994). Differences of ‘race’, religion, sexuality and gender still provoke prejudice
and evoke widespread hostility. Mapping the extent of ‘British’ multiculturalism allows us
to reflect on the limits of tolerance as well as on the possibilities of mutual recognition and
understanding.
Mapping multiculturalism
‘Britishness’ can no longer be confined (if it ever could be) within the boundaries of the
nation-state. Britain’s imperial past established a series of transnational connections that
continue to be reproduced through the economic networks of multinational corporations,
amplified by the flow of capital, the migration of labour and the transmission of ideas and
other kinds of information. While some movements are controlled by nationality and
immigration laws, other boundaries are more permeable, such as the relatively free movement
of information and ideas across the Internet. As a result, ‘British culture’ has, for many
years, exceeded the political boundaries of the United Kingdom.
In terms of international migration, for example, Britain has been a net exporter of
labour for most of the post-war years. The single most important source of immigration has
been the Irish Republic. Yet it has been immigration from the New Commonwealth and
Pakistan that has generated the most intense public debate, fuelled by concerns over the
‘assimilation’ of ethnic minorities. As overt racism has become less publicly acceptable it
has been transformed into a more subtle cultural form. A polite concern for cultural difference
may then disguise much more sinister racialised fears. Margaret Thatcher’s comment in
1979 about the country being ‘swamped by people with a different culture’ has often been
interpreted in this light as has the racialised subtext of concerns for the ‘inner city’, for ‘law
and order’ and other apparently ‘non-racial’ subjects (Jackson 1988).
From this perspective, debates about ‘race’ and racism can be seen as central to British
political debate rather than of only marginal concern. This helps explain why public anxiety
about immigration often seems so out of proportion to the actual numbers of ‘immigrants’
(and their descendants) who have settled in the UK. According to the 1991 Census, less
than 5 per cent of Britain’s population were from ‘non-white’ ethnic groups, with the Muslim
population generally estimated at around 2 per cent.
1
The ethnic minority population is,
however, far from evenly distributed across the country, with the heaviest concentrations in
urban areas, particularly in London, the West Midlands and the older industrial cities of the
North and North West (see Figure 14.1). Localised concentration in areas of declining
economic opportunity has given rise to the potential for conflict, creating in Lord Scarman’s
analysis of the Brixton riots ‘a predisposition towards violent protest’ (1981:2.38).
The migration of people has also led to a flow of commodities and cultures. British
multiculturalism is often referred to in these terms, with references to ‘samosas and saris’ or
a blending of ‘roast beef and reggae music’ (Sarup 1986; Jeater 1992). This may, however,
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FIGURE 14.1 Distribution of ethnic groups, 1991
Source: OPCS, Census of Population, 1991.
Note: The Census category ‘Black’ includes Black-Caribbean, Black-African and Black-Other.
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involve only a superficial involvement with other cultures as opposed to a more fundamental
acknowledgement of the political rights of minority groups and the provision of equal
economic opportunities. An understanding of the ‘culture of commodities’ allows some
further reflections on the nature and limitations of British multiculturalism.
The tendency to engage with other cultures on a purely superficial level is nowhere
clearer than in relation to culinary culture. Researching the consumption of ‘ethnic’ food in
North London, two geographers provide this wonderful illustration from the listings
magazine, Time Out (16 August 1995):
The world on a plate. From Afghan ashak to Zimbabwean zaza, London offers an
unrivalled selection of foreign flavours and cuisines. Give your tongue a holiday and
treat yourself to the best meals in the world—all without setting foot outside the fair
capital.
(Cook and Crang 1996:131)
But what exactly are we consuming when we indulge our tastes for such ‘exotic’ food and
what other cultural meanings are at stake?
Research in the gentrifying inner-city neighbourhood of Stoke Newington in North
London suggests that food consumption is related to a whole range of social issues, including
the formation of class-based identities. Residents in this study were shown to be using their
economic and cultural capital (money and educational resources) to indulge in ‘a little taste
of something more exotic’, including a preference for ‘exotic’ dishes such as Thai food,
pizza or curry rather than an ‘ordinary sandwich’ (May 1996). But the cultural politics of
food is far more complex than we might at first think. The British taste for curry, for example,
can be traced back through generations of colonial exchange between Britain and India.
Taken from a Tamil word (kari), ‘curry’ originally referred to a range of local masalas,
prepared for consumers ‘back home’ via the British invention of curry powder (Crang and
Jackson in press). Some of the most basic signifiers of British culinary taste, such as the
good old ‘English’ cup of tea, also have more complex cultural roots. As Stuart Hall has
demonstrated, the ‘English cuppa’ may be an accepted symbol of national identity but its
origins are anything but British:
Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists
within the United Kingdom…. Where does it come from? Ceylon-Sri Lanka, India.
That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English
history without that other history…. People like me who came to England in the
1950s [from the West Indies] have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have
been there for centuries…. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am
the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s
teeth. There are thousands of others besides me that are…the cup of tea itself.
(Hall 1991:48–9)
The quintessentially ‘English cuppa’ is, then, the product of globally extended commodity
networks. Yet these complex cultural origins are conveniently forgotten in countless daily
acts of domestic consumpton. A similar process of selective forgetfulness applies to the
foreign (immigrant Jewish) origins of high street favourites such as Marks & Spencer, now
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widely regarded as purely and simply ‘British’. Even the ‘national dish’ of fish and chips
conceals a hybrid cultural history involving French styles of preparing fried potatoes and an
East European Jewish tradition of frying fish (Back 1996:15).
A similar argument can be applied to our understanding of ‘English’ literature,
where even the most revered works, such as Jane Austen’s novels, can be shown to exhibit
complex multicultural geographies. Though now regarded as a staple feature of our national
culture (with film and television adaptations attracting millions of viewers) and as an
outstanding representation of ‘British’ culture abroad (via exports worldwide), the
geography depicted in the novels stretches well beyond the UK. As Edward Said’s work
on Culture and Imperialism (1993) demonstrates, the plot of Jane Austen’s Mansfield
Park (1814) revolves around Sir Thomas Bartram’s absence from Britain, attending to his
plantation in Antigua. His departure allows for a temporary absence of moral restraint
which is only restored by his timely return at the end of the novel. Said charts a complex
cultural geography of overlapping territories and intertwined histories where, even in the
apparently tranquil world of Jane Austen’s novels, events ‘over here’ are crucially
connected to distant events ‘over there’.
The flow of people, information and goods has, of course, increased dramatically
since the nineteenth century with the process of ‘time-space compression’ now characteristic
of our post-modern world (Harvey 1989). In such circumstances of change and instability it
should be no surprise that representing the ‘national culture’ is becoming evermore
problematic. The world of advertising is a particularly good illustration of this tendency,
with its need to boil down complex ideas into brief, concentrated messages. Long-established
symbols of national identity no longer have unambiguously positive meanings. The Union
flag, for example, has been endowed with right-wing associations, including some of the
most virulent forms of exclusionary racism such as those associated with the National Front
and the British National Party (Gilroy 1987). How, then, are more recent appropriations of
the national flag to be interpreted? What does it signify about our ‘national culture’ when
the Spice Girls drape themselves in the Union Jack or when Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher
wrap it around themselves on the cover of Vanity Fair? Why, too, have British Airways
dropped the flag from their airline livery in a multi-million pound refit, designed to help
retain its position as ‘the world’s favourite airline’ via a more outward-looking multicultural
image, while the Labour Party included the flag in its New Labour, New Britain, New Vision
electoral campaign in 1997, along with the British bulldog?
Other symbols of ‘national unity’ have also been refigured in recent years. The Royal
Family, for example, no longer evokes an unequivocal sense of national loyalty. Despite the
nationwide outpouring of grief over the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, revelations
of Prince Charles’s adultery, together with the Queen’s reluctance to pay income tax or to
curb expenditure on ‘luxuries’ such as replacing the royal yacht, have all damaged the
credibility of the Royal Family (though there is as yet no serious discussion within Britain
of an alternative to the monarchy).
Imagining the nation is now much more complex and cannot be represented in
unambiguously ‘heroic’ terms. One response has been the emergence of a nostalgic concern
for ‘national heritage’, accompanied by the proliferation of industrial museums, heritage
sites and commercial ventures such as the Past Times chain of high-street stores—a
romanticisation of the past that is inevitably associated with a sense of national economic
decline (Wright 1985). Another response has been the emergence of more critical ‘visions
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of Britain’. In the cinema, for example, such a view can be traced back at least to Steven
Frears’s bleak representation of the inner city in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987). But it
is now a much more widespread and acceptable way of seeing, with images of urban decline
now a central motif in some of the most popular British films such as Trainspotting, Twin
Town and The Full Monty, set respectively in Edinburgh, Swansea and Sheffield.
The sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) refers to the weakening of long-established
sources of identity as the advent of ‘post-traditional’ society, characterised by a plurality of
new sources of identification. Traditional class-based identities, for example, rooted in stable
working-class communities, with the expectation of a job-for-life, clear gender divisions
and a relative lack of social and spatial mobility, have been thoroughly disrupted by the
process of industrial restructuring and the move to more flexible modes of capital
accumulation. New sources of identity have emerged, associated with the politics of health
and the body, gender and sexuality, environmentalism, nationalism and a host of other social
movements.
In many cases, these new forms of politics have come to be associated with particular
local geographies or ‘sites of struggle’. Think, for example, of the way that ‘race’ politics in
Britain were shaped by the Brixton riots, or how recent developments within the women’s
movement came to be associated with the protests at Greenham Common. Similarly, the
development of environmental politics using various forms of non-violent direct action
have come to be associated with the protests over live animal exports at Brightlingsea and
with opposition to the construction of the Newbury bypass or the extension of the runway at
Manchester airport.
For some activists on the Left, these multiple forms of ‘identity politics’ are, at best,
a mixed blessing. At worst, they are interpreted as a threat to traditional forms of class-
based solidarity. Writing in the New Left Review, for example, Eric Hobsbawm (1996)
contrasts the particularism of ‘identity politics’ and their appeal to sectional interests of
gender, ethnicity and sexuality, with the alleged universalism of class-based politics. While
it could be argued that class politics in the UK were far from ‘universal’ in their very partial
incorporation of women and ethnic minorities, for example, Hobsbawm warns that identity
politics will never be able to mobilise more than a minority of the population. Others have
taken a more optimistic view of the ‘New Times’ (Hall and Jacques 1989), arguing that new
social movements have the potential to include many of those who were excluded from
traditional forms of labourism.
Commodifying cultural difference
One of the most significant responses to the proliferation of cultural difference has been the
attempt to commodify the process, to exploit its exchange value within the marketplace.
For some observers this is a cynical move within contemporary ‘consumer culture’, designed
to capitalise on difference, using ethnicity, for example, as a kind of ‘spice’ to liven up the
dull dish of mainstream white culture (hooks 1992). From this perspective, the
commodification of difference threatens to undermine the ‘authenticity’ of autonomous
cultural production and dull the radical edge of oppositional cultures. What happens, such
critics ask, when Malcolm X’s political vision is appropriated by Spike Lee and transformed
into a range of merchandise, from tee shirts to baseball caps, designed to promote a major
motion picture? Does it matter that the movie-maker is African-American or that the tee
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shirts and baseball caps are worn by teenagers across the world, many of whom have only
a limited understanding of Malcolm X’s politics?
It is certainly possible to think of ways in which ‘the united colours of capitalism’
(Mitchell 1993) lead to a diminution of cultural autonomy and involve only the most
superficial commitment to multiculturalism. But notions of ‘authenticity’ are of
questionable significance if we accept the earlier arguments about the increasingly ‘hybrid’
character of contemporary culture. Rather than searching nostalgically for the roots of a
lost ‘authenticity’, geographers are now seeking to explore the routes of different forms
of cultural production and their associated ‘displacements’ (Crang 1996). In the previous
example, this would mean examining the way that Malcolm X’s message was transformed
as it moved through different media, being adopted and deployed in different contexts
and by different groups, all of whom are situated differently in terms of the social relations
of ‘race’, class and gender. A ‘horizontal’ logic of connection and differentiation comes
to replace the ‘vertical’ logic of depth and authenticity that has dogged cultural studies
for so long.
To pursue these ideas, let us examine a couple of examples in more detail: the first
concerning the commodification of ‘youth culture’ in the Manchester club scene during the
1980s; the second concerning the commodification of contemporary masculinities through
the growth of the UK’s men’s magazine market.
The ‘Madchester scene’
Following the post-war decline of manufacturing employment, Manchester (along with
many other northern industrial cities) made a concerted effort to reposition itself to take
advantage of the expansion of job opportunities in the service industries (retailing, financial
services, tourism, etc). Besides the attraction of external economic investment, this has
also involved an attempt to raise the city’s cultural profile through a series of initiatives,
including a bid to host the Olympic Games, the construction of an exhibition centre (the
G-Mex), an arts centre (the Cornerhouse) and a new concert hall (the Bridge water Hall).
Another aspect of this ‘cultural renaissance’ was the development of the ‘Madchester’
club scene, built on the success of local ‘independent’ bands like The Smiths, Inspiral
Carpets, the Stone Roses, the Charlatans and Oasis. Commenting on the distinctiveness
of the city’s independent music scene, Halfacree and Kitchin provide this (highly
contentious) chronology:
First, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was the distinctive post-punk sound
of Joy Division, which mutated into the slightly more cheerful tones of New Order.
Bedsit blues returned in the mid 1980s with The Smiths and James, whilst the tempo
and mood was revived around 1988, in the wake of ‘Acid House’, with the arrival
of the club-and-Ecstasy sounds of ‘Madchester’ led by The Happy Mondays, The
Stone Roses and Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets…Madchester was pronounced ‘dead’
by 1991–2.
(Halfacree and Kitchin 1996:50–3)
As Ian Taylor’s recent study has shown, however, the transformation in Manchester’s cultural
life resulted not only from ‘the raw populism of the music and the creative energy of a series
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FIGURE 14.2 Canal Street: ‘before’ and ‘after’ reinvestment in Manchester’s Gay Village
Source: Peter Jackson.