Class Transformation and Work-Life Balance in Urban Britain: The Case of Manchester

Recent years have seen an expansion in the work on the attitudes, beliefs and preferences of those middle-class groups that have accompanied the return of capital to many North American and western European city centres and their surrounding urban suburbs. Yet despite this, it is argued that there is little research linking gentrification to wider processes of social transformation, particularly debates over housing market decision-making, the balancing of work and life, and the gender division of labour within the household. It is to examining the interaction of these aspects of everyday life in a gentrifying area that this paper turns, using the example of Chorlton, a southern urban suburb of Manchester.