When we think of British realist cinema we think of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke and the British New Wave, among others, and it is testament to the importance of the subject of this collection that – for someone who has only been making feature films since the late 1990s – we now think of Shane Meadows. Meadows has emphatically continued the progression and diversification of arguably Britain's richest cinematic tradition. He is a unique filmmaker who can be understood both within the lineage of the realist mode and as a maverick who breaks as many moulds as he shapes. By analysing these two characteristics in unison, we are able to assess more clearly the director's influence on British cinema, and British culture more generally. Meadows retains key aspects of Britain's realist heritage while redrawing the mode's stylistic and thematic boundaries, practices which can be understood more clearly by investigating the work of other contemporary filmmakers whose films have parallels with those of Meadows, and who together illustrate the emergence of this new British realist address.

Since Shane Meadows' feature film debut in 1997, the likes of Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher [1999] and Morvern Callar [2002]), Paweł Pawlikowski (Last Resort [2000] and My Summer of Love [2004]), Andrea Arnold (Red Road [2006] and Fish Tank [2009]), Duane Hopkins (Better Things [2009]), Samantha Morton (The Unloved [2009]) and Joanna Hogg (Unrelated [2007] and Archipelago [2010]) have produced films that have marked the reconfiguration of the realist paradigm in Britain.