Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain c. 1870–1939

Dangerous Amusements is a complex and thought-provoking exploration of the leisure of working-class youth in Britain between 1870 and 1939—a period that saw the first stirrings of a definable youth culture. Drawing together eclectic and extensive archival research, the book traces the leisure experiences of working-class youth across a range of public and semipublic spaces, considering how young people's experiences and identities both shaped and were shaped by the meanings of the spaces they inhabited. Harrison's case study of the institutional sites, neighborhood spaces, and public thoroughfares of York is particularly rich and brings to life the complex ways that young people interacted with and negotiated urban spaces at a local level. By emphasizing a spatial approach to the study of youth culture, the book complicates our understanding of young people's experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing the agency of individual young men and women in negotiating constraints on their leisure lives and behavior. In doing so, Harrison emphasizes striking continuities in the experiences of youth in the period, suggesting that, rather than springing to life at one defined moment, British youth culture emerged on the streets of Britain organically and over a significant period.The book is divided into two key sections. The first sketches out the variety of leisure and courtship opportunities that working-class youth had in the period and the response of social reformers and other contemporaries to the perceived dominance of passive and “unwholesome” leisure in the lives of the young working class. The second section explores the variety of urban public spaces that working-class youth occupied and navigated. Harrison emphasizes how young people developed a sense of identity with their home neighborhoods and, in doing so, created a culture different from that of their parents or younger siblings. Through a study of the York neighborhoods of Walmgate and Hungate, Harrison highlights the importance of liminal spaces such as the backyard, the coal house, passageways, and street corners, which were used for a variety of activities including socializing and gossiping, courtship, and gambling. Building on this, Harrison focuses on streets and leisure venues in town centers that provided accessible spaces for youth to interact and take advantage of a growing number of commercial leisure activities. Their presence within these spaces, however, was not without concern, and Harrison documents frequent attempts to regulate the behavior of youth within public spaces. Yet such spaces could also be sites of resistance. The book investigates the Monkey Parade, a popular activity among courting youths, and argues that central urban thoroughfares, such as Coney Street in York, were contested spaces in which working-class youth challenged dominant meanings of space and created their own culture distinct from their parents’.One key strength of this work is how Harrison builds an evocative picture of working-class street life through a creative examination of a range of archival materials. The use of newspaper reports, court proceedings, institutional records, and social surveys, alongside significant oral history material, allows Harrison to map the comings and goings of working-class youth across a range of places, revealing how urban spaces were multifunctional sites for youth to “walk, meet, socialize, fight and flirt” (218). Yet these sources also reveal how the presence of youth within the public sphere led to concern about, and attempts to control, their behavior. Detailed investigations of constructive recreation provided by the York Railway Institute and Rowntree and Company, alongside attempts at policing and regulating street behavior (which saw youth charged with a range of offenses including obstruction, obscenity, drunk and disorderly behavior, and assault), highlights how adult control shaped young people's experiences of public space.Harrison also convincingly emphasizes that attempts at regulation and concerns about youthful leisure were highly gendered: young working-class women were a central point of anxiety. Indeed, while women were less likely to be formally charged, their behavior was more likely to be closely monitored by reformers and voluntary agencies, due to the perceived corrupting influence of urban space and concerns about sexual delinquency. Meanwhile, working-class young women often found their spatial freedom limited by expectations of their role in family life and domestic duties, as well as parental control. Yet the book convincingly argues that such limitations on behavior were actively resisted by working-class girls who challenged parental authority and defied the expectations of reforming institutions. Indeed, more broadly, Harrison's use of oral testimony illuminates how young people negotiated and claimed authority over the meaning of public spaces, challenging dominant expectations about public behavior. For example, the case study of the Monkey Parade in York's Coney Street emphasizes how young people “consumed space according to their own needs” (188), despite adult concerns.In using personal testimonies to emphasize the agency of young people in shaping the meaning of public space, Harrison reveals how working-class youth interacted with and navigated a range of different spaces, for a variety of reasons, ranging from the necessary and practical (such as commuting and shopping) to those perceived as more frivolous (consumption, leisure, and courtship). In doing so, the book emphasizes how the everyday or constructive use of public space and seemingly “delinquent” or rebellious behavior were not exclusive: in “different spaces and times, young wage-earners could explore and negotiate multiple identities” (88). Yet while this argument was convincing, the sheer number of oral testimonies made it difficult for the reader to track individual life histories throughout the book, meaning that the richness of the life stories was sometimes lost.Overall, this book provides a fresh and illuminating view of the experiences of working-class youth from the late Victorian period to the beginning of World War II. In doing so, Harrison emphasizes the long history of the development of a distinctive youth culture in Britain and emphasizes the agency of the young working class in developing and asserting their own distinct culture. The book is thus a must-read for historians and students interested in the history of youth culture and urban space in the modern period, as it highlights the benefits of spatial analysis in helping us understand the complexity of lived experience in the past.