Citation

Taylor I. Br. J. Criminol. 1995; 35(2): 263-285.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1995, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Publisher Oxford University Press)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The paper presented here lakes the form of a series of essentially personal, interpretative, and analytical reflections on one particular suburb in South Manchester, where the author has been living for the last three years. The organizing motive is to attempt a close and detailed reading-a thick description', in Clifford Geertz's words (1983)--of the social character of this local suburb, its landmarks and symbolic locations', the topics of conversation that occur among small gatherings of residents (in the Post Office, the supermarket check-outs etc.) and the news stories that dominate the local newspaper press, and then to offer out a hermeneutic' account of the dominant themes and topics so uncovered. The paper benefits from conversations with the small number of friendly neighbours and friends made in this area as well as from listening to the talk of two teenage daughters and their friends. The paper is not the result of any systematic, formal survey work as such, although interviews have been carried out with local police, private security companies, local councillors, and crime prevention volunteers.1 Neither is the concern of this particular paper to impose a particular theory, from somewhere in the existing literature, on these materials, or in some way to test' the findings of the several studies that have been completed by geographers, urban sociologists, or criminologists on the quality of life in particular localities, on patterns of local crime or local fears (for example, of the differential impact of the mass media in particular localities). We have referenced some connections between our hermeneutic reading of Hale and existing literatures in footnotes, but the organizing concern here is to try to capture and understand the detail of everyday life (including the significance of the fear of crime) in a relatively affluent, but undeniably anxious, suburb in a major conurbation in England half way through the 1990s where the author currently resides.