Asdatown: The intersections of classed places and identities

This chapter explores the intersections between classed places and identities, focusing on the UK and examining the ways in which the figures of the ‘chav’ and the ‘pikey’ have been represented in British popular culture and in official policy discourses. It argues that these representations conflate the racialized identity of the Gypsy Traveller with white working class identities and draw on the presence or proximity of Irish or Gypsy Travellers to the white ‘underclass’ in order to metonymically racialize the white working class as a whole. The politics of space is central to this process. Existing sociological and cultural geography literature hints at the active role of the spatial imaginary in classing people (Charleworth 2000, Robson 2000, Haylett 2000, Hewitt 2005, Skeggs 2005). This chapter argues that particular spaces and places – housing estates, and places described as ‘chav towns’ – are used discursively as a way of fixing people in racialized class positions.