Kevin Schurer
“Children stuck living with parents until 24 after house price surge”
“Number of adults living with parents in England and Wales rises by 700,000 in a decade”
These headlines appeared, respectively, in the Daily Telegraph and Guardian newspapers in May 2023. They were prompted by a report issued the Office of National Statistics (ONS) which announced that more families in England and Wales had adult children living with them in 2021 compared with a decade earlier. The total number of adult children living with their parents increased 14.7 percent between 2011 and 2021, from around 4.2 million to around 4.9 million. The average (median) age of adult children living with their parents in 2021 was 24 years, one year older than in 2011.
Kevin Schürer
“When you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a long time past... The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy – that at any rate is the theory.”
Thus wrote the Eton-educated George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) in The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937.
Kevin Schürer
John Leech, ‘Bits from the mining districts‘ (1868).
The John Leech cartoon above, published in 1868 and entitled Bits from the mining districts, bears the following caption:
First polite native – ‘Who’s ‘im, Bill?’
Second polite native – ‘A stranger!’
First polite native – ‘ ‘Eave ‘arfa brick at ‘im’.
Whilst obviously sarcastic, the underlying context is clear. Outsiders – those not from these parts – are treated with caution, if not distrust and open hostility. Yet mining communities, often being mono-cultural in terms of employment, were known for being tight-knit, closed, maybe inward looking, and the stranger of this cartoon was not only ‘not from these parts’, but also clearly socially distant judging from the way he is dressed. Yet, how wide-ranging were such notions of xenophobia – literally fear of strangers – in the past?
Kevin Schürer
“Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country…” Thus starts Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village, published in 1824, a bestseller in its day. It continues to describe this idyllic village as a place “with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive… where we know every one, [and] are known to every one”.
The message is loud and clear. Prior to the coming of the railways and mass transportation, rural villages were slow-moving, tight-knit communities – places where people rarely came or went, and where the likelihood was that the majority of the population would live and die in the parish where they had been born and baptised. To all intents and purposes, they were stuck in the mud.
Kevin Schürer & Simon Szreter
Today the small nuclear family dominates across much of the world. Following World War II this prevailing family form was associated with modernity – the product of a post-industrial society. But just how modern is the modern nuclear family?
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The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure