9 - Changing Spaces of ‘Englishness’: Psychogeography and Spatial Practices in This is England and Somers Town

Summary

Shane Meadows is a filmmaker whose use of space reflects the changing state of English society and culture. Following the British cinema tradition of social realism represented by Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Alan Clarke, Meadows makes use of organic, improvisational filmmaking to explore the effects of multiculturalism in the working class, focusing predominantly on its youth. All of Meadows' films are driven by location and space, but in particular, two of Meadows' films, This is England (2006) and Somers Town (2008), contend with the issue of hybridity, or the melding of previously separated cultures, via the experiences of their young English protagonists, played in both cases by Thomas Turgoose. Though further work should certainly be done combining post-colonial and spatial theory and examining the relationship between space and character in all of Meadows' work, this essay is limited in scope to investigating this psychogeography in just two of Meadows' films and asserts that the contested ideological and spatial elements presented in This is England are transformed into a more fully and successfully realised hybridity in Somers Town.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel De Certeau suggests that ‘Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’ (1984: 115), and this is certainly true for Meadows' films, nearly all of which have spatial titles. In addition to Somers Town and This is England, Meadows' works include Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and A Room for Romeo Brass.