Robert Deakin

The film has been screened at a number of academic conferences, classrooms and also a pub in east London, with Jimmy and I participating in a Q&A. If anyone would be interested to screen the film, we’d be very open to that – please get in touch.

And just as importantly, to give Jimmy a much-desired audience with which to share his thoughts, feelings and good humour.

Meanwhile, critical writing responds with suspicion of nostalgia and melancholia. In contrast, Jimmy’s Archive does not try to make an overt political argument. Instead as a piece of ethnographic documentary film it invites the audience to get to know Jimmy – the person, the character.

TV depictions of ‘the last whites of the east end’ present east London as a former bastion of a White Working Class that has lost out through policies of multiculturalism, feeding the kinds of righteous anger found in contemporary right-wing populist politics.

Indeed, many of the people that Jimmy grew up with left the area long before gentrification arrived in Poplar. Such questions of home, place, demographic change, and belonging are vexed in east London and Britain more broadly - often tied up with forms of racialised resentment.

whereby working-class neighbourhoods are transformed into more upmarket areas and many of their existing inhabitants displaced - but also, in relation to longer running processes of deindustrialisation and demographic change.

The film emerged out of a broader filmmaking collaboration which explored Jimmy’s difficult and ambivalent emotional relationship to urban change. Jimmy's complex feelings need to be understood in relationship to gentrification -

It explores Jimmy's relationship to home, place, class, music and ageing through a collection of objects and memorabilia kept in a cupboard in his one-bedroom flat.

'Jimmy's Archive' - the short film I co-directed as part of my PhD - has just been published open-access in the Journal of Anthropological Films: doi.org/10.15845/jaf...

The film centres on Jimmy -a long-term resident of a social housing estate in Poplar, east London, currently being redeveloped...

Our latest long-read is up!
The White Horse in Kimpton, Hertfordshire closed in 2014. For over a decade, residents have campaigned to reopen it as a community-owned pub rather than see it converted into a private residence. Read the full story here:
after-last-orders.lboro.ac.uk/the-white-ho...

Great to hear from you Kelly. Thanks for your interest!

This is a fantastic project, and these case studies and accompanying illustrations are wonderful. There are so many bad takes on pub closures, so these careful, thoughtful studies are really important. Looking forward to more of this work being published and shared @drinkingstudies.bsky.social

Thanks James!

Our case studies attempted to capture some of the diversity of pubs and the communities that they serve, across rural-urban geographies and regions. Stay tuned for future long-reads regarding closed pubs in coastal South Wales, city center Manchester, suburban Birmingham and rural Hertfordshire.

McGlynn's, Kings Cross.

An Irish pub which closed suddenly in 2023 after the death of its long term licensee. Celebrated in the media and popular with a wide-range of people, we explore the convivial qualities of this much lamented pub.

after-last-orders.lboro.ac.uk/mcglynns/

The Litten Tree, Coventry.

Part of a 1990s hybrid pub-bar-nightclub chain which collapsed in 2007, it was run independently as a budget-friendly boozer before closing in 2023. To be demolished in a city-centre regeneration scheme.

after-last-orders.lboro.ac.uk/the-litten-t...

The Three Lions, Meden Vale.

A large, multi-room 1960s pub in a former Nottinghamshire mining village, it was the village's last informal meeting space. Closed on New Years Eve 2021, it is due to make way for a 41 unit housing development.

after-last-orders.lboro.ac.uk/the-three-li...

We've just launched a website showcasing our research on pub closure!

Each 'long-read' explores the story of a closed pub and its social and cultural significance, drawing on field visits, archival research and extensive interviews with those connected to it.

Links below!

Pubs are closing at a rate of 1 per day in the UK.
@thurnellreadsoc.bsky.social and I wrote an article for @uk.theconversation.com on the negative impact of closures and what might be done to prevent the loss of these important community assets.

Consolation, community, national identity: what is lost when pubs close – and how they can be saved The cost of running a pub has risen dramatically.

Drawing on our research for the @leverhulmetrust.bsky.social funded After Last Orders project, @robertdeakin.bsky.social and I share some insights into the impact of pub closures in this new article for @uk.theconversation.com theconversation.com/consolation-...

Really happy that our @jmmnews.bsky.social special issue 'conversation' is now out "A pint-sized conversation: publicans, brewers, and academics on the UK beer, pub and brewing industry" - first 50 downloads free- www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6UIG6...

Hadn't noticed this - great!

Great to see the new paper by @thurnellreadsoc.bsky.social and @robertdeakin.bsky.social covered in this weeks round up! Always good to see academic papers getting out of universities!

the pub is more often represented as a space of national cohesion, without which the ‘social fabric’ of the nation might fall apart. (4/4)

as well as their multiple forms of exclusion and inequality across distinctions of race, class and gender. Whereas previous research has highlighted the ways pub closure has been articulated in relation to a figure of an aggrieved ‘white working class’ our research finds that (3/4)

Using Billig's concept of 'banal nationalism', we highlight how these emotive stories seek to include the reader within an imagined national community of loss, rhetorically transcending the diverse realities of pubs and the communities they serve, (2/4)

This paper explores how pub closure portrayed in British print media from 2000 to 2023, revealing a consistent narrative that frames these losses as a threat to the British nation. (1/4)

New article on the 'banal nationalism' of pub closure media narratives with @thurnellreadsoc.bsky.social, now out in the British Journal of Sociology: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Drawing on still images and video created by and with a long-term resident of an estate undergoing redevelopment, it explores the anxieties provoked by gentrification and how these interact with longer-running injuries of class.

A multimedia article based on my PhD research in east London has just been published by the open-access journal Roadsides. It's part of a collection on 'infrastructural anxieties'.

roadsides.net/deakin-012/