This article explores the debate in both parliament and the British media over the UK government's attempts to repeal Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act. It places Section 28 in the context of a broader history of sex education in British schools, and more general anxieties about the future of the child and the nuclear family over the last few decades. Fears about the end of childhood `innocence' also overlapped with a notion of adolescence as a crucially formative period, an increasingly unstable notion because of the conflicting pressures of education policy and the targeting of young people as consumers. In the Section 28 debate, this belief in childhood and adolescence as protected spaces has allowed homophobic arguments to be articulated when other ways of framing them - through metaphors of disease and promiscuity - have lost some authority.
This article investigates the early period of “gentrification” of the inner residential districts of London, when the process was particularly rich in cultural meaning and symbolism. It focuses on the distinctive culture of the gentrifiers, including styles of house refurbishment, interior design, gastronomy, entertaining, networking, and amateur property speculation, and suggests that this culture allowed the middle-class incomers to make sense of their new life choices and social identities. The gentrifiers promoted an idea of the “urban village” that enabled them to be both part of the inner city and separate from it, close to its amenities but cut off from its social problems. As the process developed momentum from the late 1960s onward, they used their influence as cultural producers and opinion formers to comment on the process of gentrification in a way that combined self-promotion, satire, guilt, and exculpation.
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