BRIT.J. CRIMINOL. VOL 38 NO. 3 SUMMER 1998 NARRATIVES OF DECLINE Youth, Dis/order and Community in an English 'Middletown' IAN LOADER, EVI GIRLING and RICHARD SPARKS* The paper is concerned with how adult residents of one medium-sized, moderately affluent English town which is generally regarded as having a relatively low crime rate interpret and respond to teenage 'incivilities'. We begin by locating the conflicts over teenage mis/behaviour that occur across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how the intensity of adult response varies according to people's relationship to place. We then examine the kinds of discourse that such mis/behaviour prompts, discourse that frequently slips away from the locality as such and speaks to the condition (and decline) of the 'national community'. Finally, we consider some of the responses people make to teenage mis/behaviour in their own immediate neighbourhoods. By connecting people's 'crime-talk'to their sense of place, we tease out a contradiction between the obligations that people acknowledge to troublesome local'youth and their more punitive, exclusionary utterances about youth in general'. It has in recent years become a criminological commonplace to assert that petty crime and low-level disorder are in the main activities of the young and that what has come to be called 'fear of crime' attaches itself in large measure—among adults at any rate—to these 'incivilities'. The gathering of male and female teenagers, unsupervised, in public spaces—on front walls, street corners, in town centres, by the local shops—is said to prompt anxiety and unease among local residents and other (potential) users alike. Such a preoccupation with the activities of the young (and associated calls for somebody to take 'tough action') certainly comprises the staple diet of much party political and media discourse on 'law and order'. In revisiting this well-trodden ground, we want in this paper to re-orient both the substantive and theoretical terms that have hitherto tended to dominate popular—and to some extent criminological—discussion of relevant issues. 1 In respect of the former, we want to shift the focus of attention away from the familiar criminological territory of the metropolis (and its crime-blighted inner-cities and peripheral estates) towards the rather more neglected terrain of the English 'middletown'. 2 We set out to investigate the place that crime occupies in the social relations of one such town: Macdesfield, in Cheshire. A place of some 49,000 inhabitants tucked away in the north-east of the "Department of Criminology, Keele University, England. 1 This paper arises from a two-year nudy supported by the Economic and Social Reteardi Council as pan of iu 'Crime and Social Order* Research Programme (award no. L210252032). We wish to thank Joanna Shapland and two anonymousjournal referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the papeT. 1 Following Mannheim'! (1948) example, from which we draw part of our title, a number of recent criminological studies have extended their reach beyond the metropolis, albeit not always in ways that are explicitly grounded in, or theorized in terms of, place (see, for example, Shapland and Vagg 1988; Stanlu> 1990). We have also been able to draw on recent US anthropological work on informal neighbourhood social control (Merry 1981; Baumgartner 1988); and, more broadly, on a rich tradition of'community studies', both in Britain and the US, many of which have focused on small or medium-sized towns (for English instances, see Stacey 1960, Strathearn 1981 and the recent overview in Crow and Allen 1994; for the US see, Lynd and Lynd 1929 and Cans 1967). 388 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article/38/3/388/410380 by guest on 22 September 2021