By Sophie Lively
The mine has gone.
The shipyard has gone.
The jobs have gone.
There’s nothing left.
We tend to tell deindustrialisation through these absences. Something was there and then it wasn’t. Industries closed, employment disappeared, unions weakened, communities changed. There is a temptation too, to think that the cultural worlds organised around these places disappeared with them.
But walking around Tyneside with men talking about their lives, I kept finding that something had remained.
Work.
Not always the job itself. Sometimes there was no job, Othertimes there had been many jobs, or jobs that barely seemed to count, fleeting jobs, informal jobs. What remained was the feeling that work mattered. That it says something about you.
George told me, “Always worked, always, since I was 15”
It is an ordinary sentence. But it is also a small piece of autobiography arranged as moral proof. I worked. I didn’t sit around. I did my bit. Work becomes a way of making yourself recognisable as a particular kind of person.
This was something I encountered repeatedly in my research with 20 working-class men in post-industrial Tyneside, north east England. Through biographical walking interviews, I became interested in the ways work became a language for talking about much more than employment.
Men talked about being useful. About knowing how to do things. About whether their knowledge counted. Whether they had done enough. About being someone people could rely on.
One man described knowing how to make significant savings in his workplace but being told, as a trainee, to “keep ya gob shut”.
Another told me that although he worked alongside people with degrees, he felt he had learned enough through experience to make his point.
There was something at stake in these stories beyond workplace hierarchy. They were stories about recognition.
About the strange feeling of knowing that you know something and finding that the world you inhabit does not recognise that knowledge as valuable.
Perhaps this is part of the afterlife of industrial work.
The men I spoke to were not simply nostalgic for the mines or shipyards. Some were quite clear about the dangers and exclusions of those worlds. What they missed, or inherited, were particular ways of understanding value: competence, contribution, dignity, usefulness.
The work has changed. The moral language has been harder to get rid of.
But that language is now operating in a different world.
Where there was once a workplace, a union, an occupational community, there is increasingly the individual worker who must remain employable, adaptable, resilient. The old demand to work hard has not disappeared. It has become, in some ways, more intimate. If you cannot find secure work, you must adapt. If your work disappears, you must retrain. If you fall behind, you must recover.
The conditions are structural, but the failure becomes personal.
This is where I have been thinking with Raymond Williams’ idea of the residual. I use the term ‘residual masculinities’ not to describe some leftover industrial man but to think about values that continue to live after the world that produced them has changed.
They persist because they still do something for us.
They tell us how to be respectable. How to be useful. How to have contributed.
And yet, occasionally, the story slipped.
Men talked about music. Theatre. Community work. Things they had wanted to do or still wanted to do. Things that mattered to other people but did not necessarily look like ‘proper’ work, they weren’t measurable.
These moments were often brief. The conversation would return to employment, responsibility, money, getting on with things. But I became interested in these small interruptions because they seemed to ask a different question.
What if being useful does not have to mean being economically productive?
What if the desire to contribute, to matter, to be recognised, could be organised otherwise?
I don’t think the answer is to romanticise the industrial past, or to search for a ‘better’ masculinity to replace the old one. The question is more uncomfortable than that.
Why have we made paid work carry so much of the weight of being a worthwhile person?
Deindustrialisation is not only about the disappearance of industries. It is also about what happens to the meanings that grew around them. The jobs may go, but the desire for dignity remains. The workplace disappears. But the need to feel useful does not.
The mine has gone.
The shipyard has gone.
The jobs have gone.
Perhaps the political task is not to restore. Not to rebuild what was there, in the same place, with the same promises.
Perhaps it is to make it possible to want something else.
Sophie Lively is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University. Her research sits at the intersection of masculinity, the mainstreaming of the far right, class, racism and national identity. Her current research draws on walking interviews and ethnographic observations in post-industrial Tyneside, with a particular interest in how these broader political and social processes are lived, negotiated and made meaningful in everyday life.
