Neighbourhood Change, Deprivation, Peripherality, and Ageing in the Yorkshire Coalfield

Abstract

Low‐income neighbourhoods in contemporary England continue to be buffeted by roiling economic inequalities and social policy absences. Long‐term residents have a unique perspective on this socio‐spatial stress. This article zooms in to examine the condition of one spatial manifestation of these broader forces: peripheral council/public housing estates in the deindustrialised North of England—in this case the ex‐coalfields of West Yorkshire. Neighbourhood conditions are seen through the eyes of residents aged between 60 and 85 years. The article explores their accounts of the local economic, social, and political changes which have interlaced their experiences of work, community, and place over six decades. It also examines how irregular regeneration projects, emergency initiatives and local organising have tried to address and ameliorate structural marginalisation in recent years, not least during the Covid pandemic. The article provides a historically contingent account of contemporary socio‐spatial stress, one that emphasises the significance of long‐term residence and feelings of not only loss and nostalgia, but hopeful and resilient attachments to place.

Keywords

• coalfields
• deindustrialisation
• housing estates
• marginality
• neighbourhoods
• oral history