In person, with lunch.

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Commuting and its discontents: the journey to work, health and wellbeing in late-twentieth-century Britain.

Over the past decade, headlines in the lay and medical press have regularly condemned commuting's effects on personal, social and environmental health. Commuting's attrition on physical and mental wellbeing, its strain on communal and kinship relations, and its contribution to climate catastrophe have been well-documented, whilst the coronavirus pandemic added biological contagion to the list of discontents and damages. In this session, I will discuss early research situating these concerns historically, and exploring commuting as a historically under-appreciated form of twentieth-century mobility. I will situate the origins of many of present-day complaints within post-war anxieties around new urban environments and pathologies of modernity, and outline latent counter-narratives around commuting that positioned particular forms of travel as contributing to social and subjective well-being. I will also suggest potential routes forward for furthering historical research into the connections between commuting and wellbeing, ones that account for the culturally complex relationship between British subjects and their commute to work.