Back to the Future: The Impact of Perceptions and Experiences of Time on the Lives of British Lifestyle Migrants in Spain

Abstract

Increasingly, lifestyle migration research has focused on the ways that social categories like race, gender and sexuality, as well as concepts from post-colonialism to spatialisation, intersect and impact on lifestyle migrants’ everyday experiences, in an attempt to complicate its theoretical foundations. Adding to this body of work, this article explicitly investigates post-migration perceptions of time among lifestyle migrants, which have previously been more implicitly explored. It does so, by showing how British migrants in the Catalan tourist town of Sitges remained orientated towards the future in a way that conflicted with the temporal rhythm of the town itself, which was determined by a calendar of cultural festivals and events that was repeated annually, with minimal variation. As a result, participants soon felt so stuck within a seemingly unchanging present, which they were unable to transition fully into, that it often precipitated (or contributed to) return migration to the UK.