I first posted about this in 2004, but it’s just as relevant nowadays, if not more so.
Creative communications agency The Fish Can Sing have been publishing a guide to the new middle classes for a few years now, and while their guide to the class of 2007 isn’t yet available (coming sometime soon, chaps?), their last report on the class of 2006 makes particularly interesting reading, especially in hindsight.
In their words:
…we discovered that the old notions of upper, middle, and working class had become redundant and that in contemporary Britain, almost everyone, from the Chelsea dilettante to the Chav delinquent, can now be said to be middle-class. But we also found that the notion of middle-class was more ambiguous, more mercurial, harder to define than ever.
We learned that, contrary to popular opinion, snobbery - inter-middle-class snobbery, that is - was more rampant than ever. We noticed that the new middle classes were seldom defined, as of old, by background, education, accent, profession or skin colour. Instead, they were characterised, and characterised themselves, almost exclusively with regard to taste. In particular, taste as defined by consumer choice.
So they came up with some new classifications of social types which they revised again for 2006:
- Doing Very Nicely Thank Yous
- Posh Chavs/Aga Louts
- White Vain Man and No Sugar Babe
- Normal Actuallys
- (Jamie) Oliver’s Army
- Loft Wingers
- The Hornby Set
- Fair to Middlings
The downloadable PDF guide on the site has details of each, and a quiz which reveals which you are most like. As with last time I did the quiz, I’m part of the Hornby Set, rather unsurprisingly, despite never having read anything written by NH in my life. But it’s not about what you read - it’s about your opinions and taste and outlook.
So which are you? I’m interested to know…
(incidentally, the original guide is much more comprehensive and is still available to download via the magic of the internet wayback machine. Maybe there’s a definition in there which suits you better?)
The females will understand the Hornby Set to refer to those books they pick up in the Tesco’s dump-it-quick book aisle, but all the blokes are thinking model railway. How can you define a class of people by Hornby Train-set?
Anyway. I have neither, so I’m orf to see where I score on their scale. (Scale! ha! “o” gauge or “N” gauge?)
My results are as evenly spread as it’s possible to be with seven classifications and ten questions: two points for three of them and one point for the four others.
Doesn’t surprise me, since I found it hard to care about many of the questions. I scored slightly more highly for Oliver’s Army, the Hornby Set and the Fair To Middlings.
Looking back at the 2004 report, I wonder what’s happened to the alt.middles over the past couple of years. I think I’m probably one of them instead, with maybe slightly less grumpiness.
Hey lovely -
‘Working class’ is ‘redundant’, say the chaps at Fish Can Sing. Well, I don’t that they can, but they can’t have talk out of their watertight arses. Intentional irony?
Hope you’re well. Beers? x
IANAB, but scored mostly D and C, which makes me a Loft Winger/Oliver’s Army. Which makes perfect sense.
Well, it must be the January slump. I went and read their entire 2004 booklet from start to finish yesterday, and then did the quiz. My results lacked emphasis on any group, and often coincided with a group for the wrong reason - eg, my T shirt is plain not because I’m an alternative but because I hate T shirts with stuff on them!
But this isn’t really about class. It’s a marketing tool, made to show potential clients what they could be missing out on through their preconceptions of how various groups consume. (Marketing only works on groups - hence the need to make us into groups. And the more we perceive ourselves as aprt of a group, or “urban tribe” or whatever, the more we can be made to think we want the thing that group consumes.) It’s not that we’re all “middle class” in our values, it’s that we all (except for those “sink estate” people they dismiss so airily at the beginning as not really counting, because they can’t be marketed to, because they have no money) have disposable cash - or credit, anyway. It’s a guide to “what you can sell to whom, and how.”
The other notable thing was that people’s “types” and preferences were all seen to be so very age-related. Sorry! I haven’t changed that much over the years, & if anything I’m a little more frivolous.
No diagnosis.
The quiz tells us more about singing fish than ourselves.
I kept answering ‘None of the above.’ or ‘Not applicable’
The quiz is, not surprisingly, Londocentric. None of the described groups is mine.
So, Fish, carry on singing -and watch out for the marinade.