Beyond the Council Estate with Katerina Flint-Nicol and Deirdre O’Neill

A discussion of the themes raised in a new study offering a revisionist perspective on the representation of the working class on the screen. The council estate functions as a visual shorthand for poverty, criminality and deviance in political and media discourses. It constructs the working class as dangerous, while obscuring poverty’s causes. But what other spaces do the working class inhabit in British film and what spaces are they excluded from? How does gentrification’s refiguring of working-class spaces reveal space as socially produced? Beyond the Council Estate: Cinematic Space(s) of the Working Class (Edinburgh University Press) examines historical and contemporary representations of working-class space across fictional and non-fictional film, rethinking the British working-class on screen. Tickets £6.50.