Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

Yesterday I drove down the A68 and then A696 since I had an appointment at Borders General Hospital (should have just been a phone call to say no issue but not my consultant’s fault) and had to get down to Tyneside. Normally I come down the A697 and A1 and thus by- pass Morpeth or I may have already seen what struck me on this trip. The A696 goes through Ponteland so I saw what Ponteland is now. I used to go through Ponteland a lot. I worked harvests on a farm near Belsay further up the A696 in the 60s and used to go walking in Northumberland with a friend who lived up there in the 1980s. Ponteland was originally a small farming centred town in South Northumberland but with the building of Darras Hall as an exclusive and excluding housing estate full of detached houses on large sites with enforcement  of standards by the notorious Darras Hall Committee it became an exurban place for Tyneside.  It is one of the poshest locales in North East England, notoriously occupied by residents who wear fur coats but no knickers (a comment on spending rather than sexual conduct, but who knows?). The A696 goes through the centre of Ponteland, not through Darras Hall, and my observations are about that area rather than posh (or perhaps more often now just rich) people land.

Ponteland always had a few pubs and normal shops. Now it is full of restaurants, clubs and posh bars as well alongside a new shopping centre typical of sub or rather exurban spaces. Notoriously Ponteland posh people were able to exert enough power in 1974 to prevent it being brought into the Newcastle City boundary where it certainly belonged for local government purposes.  So as a rather slow moving flaneur – traffic was bad – I could see how it had changed.

This set me off yet again on the appalling absences in contemporary ethnographic studies in  contemporary Britain (and probably in Ireland as well) of how the people in the upper half of the income distribution actually live. I have written about the missing middle (Byrne, D., 2005. Class, culture and identity: a reflection on absences against presences. Sociology, 39(5), pp.807-816) That led to an excellent study by McEwan (McEwan, K., 2021. Drinking Carling out of Stella glasses: people and place in the missing middle. Frontiers in Sociology, 5, p.534-515) of the very large owner occupied estate of Ingleby Barwick on Teesside. However, that is an outlier in contemporary ethnographies. Of particular significance is the minimal attention paid to the Outer South East of England, the largest area of residence of people in the UK as it also includes much of the Eastern Region as well.  I guess an ethnography of Darras Hall might be hard to bring off unless an almost certainly female contemporary equivalent of Lady Bell studied her neighbours instead of her husband’s workers and their families. However, an ethnography of Ponteland or Morpeth or Hexham or of similar locales of residence of the affluent in much of the UK (Dunbar or Haddington for Edinburgh would work as well) would actually be invaluable. These places are a step up from Ingleby Barwick. For Teesside that would be locales in North Yorkshire – say Northallerton. There is nothing new about the affluent moving to the countryside. The Tyne Valley was the locale of the really rich of Tyneside and Alnmouth  was a favoured spot. However, these sorts of exurban places are the residences of the very affluent as opposed to really rich. Sure, there are middling entrepreneurs in property, hospitality, IT and so on – the still important real not so petit bourgeoisie of the contemporary world, but many are simply high earning couple households including those with high public sector salaries. Having a decent housing wealth (usually housing) inheritance from parents or grandparents helps. I want to know about these people in the way a proper ethnography can tell me.