Robert Snape

Re-thinking sport: physical activity and healthy living in British South Asian Muslim communities

An increase in the participation rates of British South Asian Muslim communities in sport and physical activity is a high priority in both the sport and health sectors. Interventions emanating from the sport development sector have to date achieved little significant growth of activity. However, interventions within the health sector appear to be more successful in engaging South Asian communities in activity. This paper is based on field research in a Healthy Living Centre in Blackburn, a town with a large South Asian Muslim community. The research suggests that within such communities a mode of delivery grounded in physical activity and personal health is likely to be more successful than one based on sport and competition. However, it also identifies other cultural factors that will need to be addressed if participation rates are to be further increased.

Betting, billiards and smoking: Leisure in public libraries

Rate-supported public libraries were established in Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth century with mixed objectives of educational progress and recreational reform. Although librarians upheld the concept of public libraries as educational establishments and normally deprecated the recreational uses of libraries, the public demand upon libraries was principally of a leisure nature. This article traces the origins of public libraries in the nineteenth-century campaign for recreational reform and evaluates the reaction of librarians to the uses of two specific leisure forms in public libraries, namely newsrooms and games rooms. It shows that public libraries were significant providers of leisure facilities, but that their potential to develop a leisure function was curtailed by the library professions desire to change the image of the library from a leisure orientated institution to one of educational and information priorities.

Theorisations of leisure in inter-war Britain

The National Conference on the Leisure of the People in 1919 marked the emergence of a public discourse on the nature and purpose of leisure in inter-war Britain. One strand of this discourse saw leisure to be problematic as new forms of mass and passive entertainment, the ‘enforced leisure’ of unemployment and the right use of leisure became areas of social concern. Perceptive critics, however, conceptualised leisure as a social sphere in which a new and better post-war society could be built through a democratic ‘new’ leisure and the use of leisure as a vehicle for education in citizenship. Leisure was widely documented in contemporary social surveys and became valued by local councils of social service in developing social life and community identity on new housing estates. This paper argues that a new ontology of leisure was forged between the wars as the Victorian emphasis on rational recreation and private morality was superseded by an understanding of leisure as a social product of late modernity.

The Co‐operative Holidays Association and the cultural formation of countryside leisure practice

The Co‐operative Holidays Association was founded in 1893 by the Rev. T. A. Leonard, a Congregationalist Minster in Colne, Lancashire. Its aim was to provide organized holidays in the countryside for working‐class people as a moral and cultural alternative to the commercial seaside resorts. The Association was not simply a holiday club but a voluntary leisure organization committed to the promotion of specific cultural values. Adopting the work of a number of nineteenth‐century cultural critics, notably Arnold, Ruskin and Morris, the Co‐operative Holidays Association was grounded upon the concept of the countryside as not only a physical but also a cultural and spiritual alternative to the city and industrial materialism. Its holidays thus sought to recreate the primitive communal lifestyle idealized in Romantic interpretations of pre‐industrial pastoral society and to educate participants in the cultural interpretation of the countryside and landscape. Its antithetical approach to conspicuous consumption and material comfort became a focus of conflict as the proportion of middle‐class members increased after the turn of the century and led to the formation of a schism in 1912. This paper assesses the significance of the Co‐operative Holidays Association to the development and consolidation of a dominant cultural mode of countryside leisure practice and also explores the extent to which its self‐identity was formed by taste and cultural values rather than social class.

Steps to health: an evaluation of a project to promote exercise and physical activity amongst Asian women in a post-industrial town in England.

This paper presents an evaluation of Steps to Health, a project undertaken in Bolton to improve the health of Asian women through the creation and promotion of opportunities for participation in exercise and physical activity. Asian communities in the United Kingdom tend to experience significantly poorer health than White communities and to exhibit lower rates of participation in exercise and sport than the majority population. The project thus offered an opportunity to explore methods through which community sport development managers might support the governments aim of increasing physical activity amongst Asian communities as a means of improving health. The research was conducted primarily through semi-structured interviews with female Asian volunteers who undertook to train as fitness instructors and coaches and to develop sport activities within their communities. The success of the project was attributable to a number of factors, most importantly the ethnic status and educational background of the volunteers.

The New Leisure, Voluntarism and Social Reconstruction in Inter-War Britain

In post-World War I social reconstruction, leisure acquired a new meaning as a social good with the capacity to contribute to the building of a new post-war society. A discourse of citizenship and leisure emerged which drew from Christian socialism and the works of John Ruskin, William Morris, and the social idealist thinking of T. H. Green and J. A. Hobson. The classical Athenian model of leisure was re-worked by Ernest Barker and Cecil Delisle Burns who argued that the function of a leisure class could become that of the whole community through a democratic redistribution of leisure. Although efforts to realize idealist visions were rarely successful they were nevertheless important to twentieth-century understandings of leisure and citizenship and brought leisure within the framework of social policy.

Leisure in a post-work society

ABSTRACT Modern understandings of leisure have formed in terms of its relationship to work. The effects of industrialization in the western world are well known, regulating time for leisure and, through urbanization, producing social scientific definitions of leisure as either a civic good or a social problem requiring surveillance and regulation. Current predictions of a rapid quantitative decline in work are therefore of serious social, economic and psychological concern, raising questions about the meanings of leisure without work. This paper reviews the historical formation of work–leisure relationships. It then considers predictions of the impact of further technological change on the future of work and proposals for a universal basic income, and the implications of these for free time and leisure. Finally, it reviews the new focus on well-being in academic research and in government policy in the UK, and discusses the importance of leisure in terms of enjoyment of life, meaningful activity and social participation.

All-in Wrestling in Inter-War Britain: Science and Spectacle in Mass Observation's ‘Worktown’

All-in wrestling was established as a spectator sport in the 1930s and appealed primarily to a working-class audience. All-in was controversial because of its excessive violence and its blend of the spectacular and dramatic with sport, which led to accusations that it was not really a sport. Nevertheless, it retained many characteristics of sport, and audiences consumed it as such. All-in wrestling was an outcome of the evolution of a traditional ancient sport into a commercial entertainment and represented an extreme conflation of sport and drama. Using records of All-in wrestling in the Mass Observation Archive, this paper explores the ways in which audiences negotiated the tensions between sport and spectacle.

Continuity, change and performativity in leisure: English folk dance and modernity 1900-1939.

In post‐industrial countries, folk dance may be considered as an embodied performance of a perceived tradition and is representational of values attached to an imagined past. The English Country Dance is one such form of folk dance, having been revived, or re‐invented, in the early twentieth century by Cecil Sharp who claimed it to be a national dance of England. However, Sharp re‐defined it not as a popular and spontaneous leisure activity but as a serious middle‐class art form representing an English sensibility and the virtues of a pre‐industrial pastoral collectivism. After the hiatus of the First World War, the English Country Dance continued to offer a resistance to the modern, this time in the form of a burgeoning popular dance culture which embraced urban sophistication and jazz dance. Using the concept of performativity, this paper attempts to demonstrate that the leisure context of the English Country Dance, in terms of spatiality, style, consumption and gender, enabled a continuity of resistance to the modern in a changing socio‐cultural environment. The paper draws upon primary research in the archive of the Manchester Branch of the English Folk Dance Society and upon records of contemporary dance in the Mass Observation archive.

An English Chautauqua: the National Home Reading Union and the development of rational holidays in late Victorian Britain

Abstract The success of the Chautauqua Assembly in providing educational holidays in North America in the final quarter of the nineteenth century raised interest in the development of a similar type of holiday in Great Britain. Following the establishment of university extension summer schools, which were themselves influenced by the example of Chautauqua, the Congregationalist social reformer John Brown Paton organised such a holiday in 1889 under the auspices of the National Home Reading Union in Blackpool, a popular seaside resort in the north of England. Adopting the values and practices of the Chautauqua Assembly, this combined informal education, non-conformist Christian morality and socially respectable leisure activities. Although not successful in establishing an English Chautauqua in Blackpool, Paton later mediated the Chautauqua ideal through his sponsorship of the Co-operative Holidays Association, a pioneer organisation in the development of rational holidays. It is argued that both the Chautauqua movement and the National Home Reading Union exercised a crucial influence on the development of rational and respectable holidays in Britain that has not previously been fully recognised.