Masculinity, Nostalgia and Polishness in Somers Town

Abstract

The Office for National Statistics estimates that between December 2003 and June 2009 the Polish-born population of the United Kingdom increased from 75,000 to 503,000. These statistics provide a contextual background for Shane Meadows’ Somers Town (2008) , a film which portrays a British teenager, Tomo (Thomas Turgoose) who befriends a young Polish photographer, Marek (Piotr Jagiełło), and his father, who is a guest-worker at the King's Cross reconstruction site. This article explores the ways in which Somers Town responds to increased transnationalism and mobility (be it migration or tourism) both in its thematics and through its context of production, and explores the effects of globalisation on British working-class masculinity. In particular, this article looks at how the film offers Polish migrant working-class masculinity as a nostalgic pre-modern foil, which embodies many characteristics of the old British working class. While Meadows' films consistently suggest that British working-class fathers have been harmed irretrievably by the Thatcherite years and post-industrial decline, the working-class community of migrant workers (defined primarily by its strong work ethic) seems to offer a (mythologised) model of good fatherhood and stable masculine identity. In so doing, the film explores what Anthony Giddens calls the move from modern to late modern society, and confirms the preoccupation of Meadows' oeuvre with nostalgia.