¹ These conceptual issues are explored by Robert Putnam in his study of both Italy and America. See Putnam, R., Making Democracy Work: Civic Tradition in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar, and Putnam, R., Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

² Morris, R.J., ‘Introduction: civil society, association and urban places: class, nation and culture in nineteenth century Europe’, in De Vries, B., Morris, R.J. and Morton, G. (eds.), Civil Society, Association and Urban Places: Class, Nation and Culture in Nineteenth Century Europe (Aldershot, 2006), 1–16Google Scholar, provides an overview of the emphasis often placed on Britain as a country deeply connected to associational affiliation as a means of constructing civil society.

³ Masterman, C.F.G., The Condition of England (London, 1960), 60Google Scholar.

⁴ Daily Telegraph, 28 Nov. 2006.

⁵ Metro, 26 Jul. 2010.

⁶ Guardian, 7 Nov. 2006. When reading this article, it is important to understand the different types of organizations that are included within the study. For instance, the survey made no distinction between free and paid-for memberships. The survey also included groups connected to retail organizations, i.e. Tesco club card. There is an important distinction to be made here between organizations people are members of and organizations that promote citizen engagement and contribute to the stock of social capital in towns and cities.

⁷ Masterman, Condition of England, 58.

⁸ Putnam has explored the issue of declining civic participation in America. For examples, see Putnam, R., ‘Tuning in, tuning out: the strange disappearance of social capital in America’, Political Science and Politics, 28 (1995), 664–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Putnam, R., ‘Bowling alone: America's declining social capital’, Journal of Democracy, 6 (1995), 65–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Putnam, ‘Bowling alone: America's declining social capital’, in particular summarizes his much publicized book Bowling Alone.

⁹ Collins English Dictionary (Glasgow, 2004).

¹⁰ Rodger, R., Housing in Urban Britain 1780–1914: Class, Capitalism and Construction (Basingstoke, 1989), 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹² In Rodger, Housing in Urban Britain 1780–1914, 39, the author discusses the specialized zoning of urban centres during the nineteenth century, referencing in particular the work of Whitehand. For examples of Whitehand's work see Whitehand, J.W.R., ‘Building activities and intensity of development at the urban fringe: the case of a London suburb in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 1 (1975), 211–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitehand, J.W.R., The Making of the Urban Landscape (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; Whitehand, J.W.R., The Changing Faces of Cities: A Study of Development Cycles and Urban Form (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Whitehand, J.W.R. and Carr, C.M.H., Twentieth Century Suburbs: A Morphological Approach (London, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹³ Rodger, Housing in Urban Britain 1780–1914, 39.

¹⁴ See Howard, E., Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London, 1945)Google Scholar. Additionally, for an effective summary of the concepts behind ‘urban utopias’, see Fishman, R., Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Thompson, F.M.L., The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester, 1982), 155Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Ibid., 2.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Orwell, G., Coming Up for Air (London, 1939)Google Scholar.

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²¹ An article in the Daily Telegraph, 28 Nov. 2006, referred to the threat middle-class suburbanization placed on race relations in Great Britain, potentially damaging the 30 years of progress that has seen Britain described as the best country in Europe for ethnic minorities.

²² Corbin Sies, M., ‘North American suburbs 1880–1950, cultural and social reconciliations’, Journal of Urban History, 27 (2001), 317–18.Google Scholar

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²⁵ Thompson refers to the Chicago model as a generalized description of the spatial distribution of the industrial, commercial and residential sectors of a particular city, Thompson, Rise of Suburbia, 153. For additional references on the Chicago model see Davis, M., The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (London, 1999)Google Scholar. Also, Garreau, J., Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Goss, J., ‘“The magic of the mall”: an analysis of form, function and meaning in the contemporary retail built environment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 83 (1993), 18–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sudjic, D., The 100 Mile City (London, 1992)Google Scholar, provide interesting accounts of the changing use of urban space in twentieth-century cities. Specific to suburbanization, Gans, H.J., The Levittowners (New York, 1967)Google Scholar, represents a key text in participatory suburban research in the early post-war period.

²⁶ The Journal of Urban History, 27 (2001), 259–377, provided a special issue on suburbanization in America and acts as an excellent introduction to suburbia in the US. The journal examines themes and issues specific to the experience of twentieth-century suburbanization. Essays include R. Harris and R. Lewis, ‘The geography of North American cities and suburbs 1900–1950: a new synthesis’, 262–92; T. Gardner, ‘The slow wave. The changing residential status of cities and suburbs in the United States’, 293–312; Corbin Sies, ‘North American suburbs 1880–1950’ 313–46. More recently, Harris has also emphasized the importance of ‘global suburbanisms’, undertaking research to clarify the varying cultural meanings of ‘suburban residence’ in a global context. An overview of his new project on ‘global suburbanisms’ can be found at www.yorku.ca/city/Projects/GlobalSuburbanism.html.

²⁷ Gardner, ‘The slow wave’, 311. The Ph.D. thesis, from which this article emerged, examined such issues through a comparative analysis of the larger city of Leicester and the smaller town of Loughborough. For examples, please see L. Balderstone, ‘Semi-detached Britain? Analysis of social networks in the suburban fringe of Leicester and Loughborough, 1950–2005’, unpublished University of Edinburgh Ph.D. thesis, 2010.

²⁸ Corbin Sies, ‘North American suburbs 1880–1950’, 317.

²⁹ Lupi and Musterd, ‘The suburban community question’, 2.

³⁰ See Clapson, M., Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Post War England (Manchester, 1998),156–95Google Scholar; Whitehand, The Changing Faces of Cities; Whitehand, J.W.R. and Carr, C.M.H., ‘Morphological periods, planning and reality: the case of England's inter-war suburbs’, Urban History, 26 (1999), 230–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitehand and Carr, Twentieth-Century Suburbs. Clapson has also written a comparative book on England and the US, entitled Suburban Century, Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the U.S.A (Oxford, 2003). An early analysis of post-war, working-class suburbs can also be found in Peter Willmott and Michael Young's seminal study Family and Kinship in North London (London, 1957).

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³⁴ The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. III, provides an excellent collection of essays on urban governance. These include J. Davis, ‘Central government and the towns’, 261–86, B. Doyle, ‘The changing functions of urban government: councillors, officials and pressure groups’, 287 314, R.J. Morris, ‘Structure, culture and society in British towns’, 395–426.

³⁵ Morris, R.J., ‘The middle class and British towns and cities of the industrial revolution, 1780–1870’, in Fraser, D. and Sutcliffe, A. (eds.), The Pursuit of Urban History (London, 1983), 287.Google Scholar

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³⁹ Reference taken from Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class, 5. For an example of Sennett's work, see Sennett, R., The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Bailey, P., ‘“A mingled mass of perfectly legitimate pleasures”: the Victorian middle class and the problem of leisure’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1977), 26.Google Scholar

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⁴⁴ Trainor, ‘The middle classes’, 673–713.

⁴⁵ Bailey, ‘A mingled mass of perfectly legitimate pleasures’, 17.

⁴⁶ See Masterman, Condition of England. Trainor also provides a good introduction to the theory of middle-class detachment in his article ‘The decline of British urban governance since 1850: a reassessment’, in Morris and Trainor (eds.), Urban Governance, Britain and Beyond since 1750, 28–46.

⁴⁷ For examples, see Morris, ‘Structure and culture’, 395–426; Smith, ‘Urban elites c. 1830–1930 and urban history’, 255–75; Thompson, Rise of Suburbia.

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⁵⁰ Savage, M., Tampubolon, G. and Warde, A., ‘Political participation, social networks and the city’, in Savage, M. and Blokland, T. (eds.), Networked Urbanism: Social Capital and the City (Aldershot, 2008), 171–96.Google Scholar

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⁵² This article offers an overview of one approach adopted for the Ph.D. For more details, including an analysis of individual suburban areas, see Balderstone, ‘Semi-detached Britain?’.

⁵³ www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/leicester-to-be-first-city-where-white-people-are-minority-401968.html.

⁵⁴ Nash, D. and Reeder, D., Leicester in the Twentieth Century (Leicester, 1993), 93.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Marwick, A., British Society since 1945 (London, 2003), 19.Google Scholar

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⁵⁷ Nash and Reeder, Leicester in the Twentieth Century, 158. For additional research into the popularity of associational activity in Leicester during the inter-war period, see S. Begley, ‘Voluntary associations and the civic ideal in Leicester, 1870–1939’, unpublished University of Leicester Ph.D. thesis, 2009.

⁵⁸ Corbin Sies, ‘North American suburbs 1880–1950’, 320.

⁵⁹ The infolinx website was a community information site covering Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland and provided a database of local organizations, clubs, societies, organizations and self-help groups based in the region. The information was collected from numerous sources including members of the public, commercial directories and council departments. www.infolinx.org/infolinx/infolinx.infolinx_xml.search.

⁶⁰ For more details and specific examples see Balderstone, ‘Semi-detached Britain?’.

⁶¹ Sociologist David C. Thorns cited in Clapson, Suburban Century, 2.

⁶² It is also worth noting that outlying areas have historically been incorporated in data collection. For an example, see Birmingham and Glasgow in Mitchell, B.R. and Deane, P., Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1971), 24–7.Google Scholar The examples highlight the historical legitimacy of including satellite villages as they provide backward projections from 1911 which illustrate what towns and cities would have been like if their satellite areas, subsequently absorbed within the city boundary, had been taken over at an earlier stage. In this respect, the source emphasizes the importance attached to satellite areas in terms of their potential for future absorption.

⁶³ Distances calculated refer to straight lines. For more detail, see Balderstone, ‘Semi-detached Britain?’.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Oadby Community Association provided an individual case-study for the Ph.D. thesis as it presented a thriving community organization at the heart of a middle-class suburb. For more details on Oadby Community Association and life in the suburb of Oadby during the 1960s, please see Balderstone, ‘Semi-detached Britain?’.

⁶⁶ For maps and statistics see the Leicestershire statistics and research online website, www.lsr-online.org/. For an extensive analysis of the statistics relating to the residential areas of the city with the highest concentration of unemployed, most qualified citizens and senior official and managers, please see Balderstone, ‘Semi-detached Britain?’.

⁶⁷ As previously mentioned, for examples see Gunn, ‘Class identity and the urban: the middle class in England 1800–1950’, 1–19; Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle-Class, Morris, ‘The middle class and British towns and cities of the industrial revolution’, 286–305; Morris, ‘Voluntary societies and British urban elites’, 95–118; Morris and Rodger (eds.), The Victorian City; R. Rodger, ‘Slums and suburbs: the persistence of residential apartheid’, in Waller, P.J. (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Landscape (Oxford, 2000), 233–68.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Newton, K., ‘Trust, social capital, civil society and democracy’, International Political Science Review, 22 (2001), 206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁹ Trainor, ‘Neither metropolitan nor provincial’, 25.

⁷⁰ For a more in-depth analysis of such issues, see Balderstone, ‘Semi-detached Britain?’.

⁷¹ Corbin Sies, ‘North American suburbs 1880–1950’, 319.