Respectable: The Experience of Class

Lynsey Hanley talks about her new book, 'Respectable: The Experience of Class with Mike Savage, author of 'Class in the 21st Century'

Class remains resolutely with us, as strongly as it did fifty years ago, and with it the idea of aspiration, of social mobility, which received wisdom tells us is an unequivocally positive phenomenon, for individuals and for society as a whole. Yet for the many millions who experience it, changing class is like emigrating from one side of the world to another: a lonely, anxious, psychologically disruptive process of uprooting, which leaves people divided between the place they left and the place they have to inhabit in order to get on.

In this empathetic, wry and passionate exploration of class in Britain today, Lynsey Hanley looks at how people are kept apart, and keep themselves apart – and the costs involved in the journey from ‘there’ to ‘here’.