Book review: Worktown

IN the late 1930s, the Lancashire mill town of Bolton was the subject of a new kind of research to see how its inhabitants worked and lived.

An unconventional anthropologist who’d started by studying indigenous tribes in the South Pacific, Tom Harrisson decided to treat the working class in a similar way by studying their habits. The book details how 90 observers recorded minute details of everyday life.

The book also details how his experiment grew into the wider Mass Observation study.