Lancashire Life Magazine, 1947-73: A Middle-Class Sense of Place

Abstract

This article is the first academic study of a significant twentieth-century periodical genre, the county magazine. Through a content analysis of a successful example, Lancashire Life magazine, it introduces regional differentiation into current scholarship on the middle classes in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis, from the magazine’s launch in 1947 to the end of the post-war boom in 1973, identifies changes over time in editorial attitudes to class, the South of England, modernity, and the past. These changes correlate closely with wider national images of northern England, with the most confident self-images—of Lancastrians as wealthy, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated, and proud of their history and traditions—coinciding with the popularity of northern culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These distinctive regional self-images add to the work of Russell in challenging over-simplified conceptions of twentieth-century middle-class culture as homogenous and ‘national’.