From Nottinghamshire to Notting Hill: Contemporary Lessons from Pearl Jephcott’s Ethnographies of ‘Troubled Areas’

Abstract

The work of largely forgotten sociological researcher Pearl Jephcott is increasingly being recognised for its methodological complexity and innovation, and community-orientated approach. Here we revisit two of Jephcott’s lesser-known works. Yet again both working around issues that attracted great sociological interest in the 1950s and 1960s but were in many ways pioneered by Jephcott. The authors begin by exploring her study of youth delinquency in a Nottinghamshire village, Hucknall, and move on to revisit her work on North Kensington in the late 1950s, widely viewed at the time as what she called ‘a troubled area’. This closes with a review of the ‘lessons’ contemporary researchers can learn from Jephcott’s two studies.