Respectable in the Nineties

Journalist Lynsey Hanley's personal exploration of the experience of class in Britain over the past four decades.

Growing up in Chelmsley Wood, a vast council estate near Birmingham, she found school to be a mostly disappointing experience. Instead, she found solace in the local library and gained knowledge through the pages of music magazines and broadsheet newspapers.

"Getting hold of the NME for the first time was one of the best investments in my future cultural capital I could have made: another of those threads I'd grabbed unwittingly, making a connection between the world I lived in and another world of which I was barely aware."

Hanley struggled with the move from comprehensive school to a well-regarded suburban sixth-form college and had to fight the urge to drop out. Received wisdom tells us social mobility is an unequivocally positive phenomenon, for individuals and for society. Yet changing class can be a lonely, anxious, psychologically disruptive process, which leaves people divided between the place they left and the place they have to inhabit in order to get on.

Written and read by Lynsey Hanley.

Abridged by Sian Preece.

Produced by Kirsteen Cameron.