Within my analysis, I identified three interpretative repertoires of ‘learning to cope’, ‘you get used to it’ and ‘not noticing it’ which functioned to portray living alongside railways as something that people can adapt to over time. The repertoires enabled participants to negotiate their agency in the context of their continued residence alongside railways with environmental conditions that are often considered ‘disruptive’. The railway’s fixedness was negotiated by the interpretative repertoires which enabled environmental conditions to be presented in different ways for untroubled identities of ‘place’.
These interpretative repertoires of adapting to ‘disruption’ can also be argued to represent a ‘lived ideology’ (Billig et al., 1988) of adapting to ‘place’ and further, adapting to life more generally. ‘You get used to it’ was particularly prevalent,
179 and as such, I considered this repertoire as hegemonic in terms of upholding ‘adapting to place’ as a culturally dominant position of fact (Gramsci, 1971). Where participants’ talked about adapting to environmental conditions, expressions of annoyance about living alongside railways appeared constrained. The interpretative repertoires of adaptation enabled participants to present untroubled identities of ‘place’. The alternatives to adapting would be to not cope or move to another location, which was often not a viable or desirable option for participants, particularly those who situated themselves within structural constraints. As an example, I have included an excerpt from Jim below who encapsulated the difficulties of being annoyed and ‘choosing’ to live in a place near a railway.
Excerpt 69
Jim: I mean you got, you’ve got a railway line there, you’re going to move into that
property you can see that railway line, you know you’re going to get noise so you expect it when you move in, it’s no good moving in and complaining afterwards is it really
Jim emphasised the fixedness of the railway, which is often there before the person moving in, and therefore noise is to be expected. Hugh-Jones and Madill (2009) noted this in their research with residents living near a quarry, where complaining was dependent upon temporality based rights, “that is, that the right to complain depends on what occupied the space first: the person or the problem” (p. 14). Jim also positioned the “complaining” person as agentic in that they can choose whether to live alongside railways or not. However, within this research, I have argued that whilst positions of choice were available to some, all of the participants positioned themselves as constrained in relation to ‘place’. The excerpt above demonstrates how being annoyed presents ‘trouble’ for identities, particularly where the person positions themselves as choosing ‘place’. Interestingly, Michaela and Roxanne were both unaware of the railway, which could offer further explanation as to how positions of annoyance appeared more available to them. However Roxanne, and Michaela to a
180 certain extent, also presented railways as something to which they are or have adapted.
Throughout the duration of this research, I became aware of the prevalence of the interpretative repertoires identified outside of the research context. In particular, ‘you get used to it’ was drawn upon to provide explanations of situations and circumstances which can be considered problematic or difficult in relation to the ‘other’. ‘You get used to it’ appeared in a novel, on a television programme, and in conversations with others, some of which related to where people live and what people live near. I have included a number of examples from popular literature and from other research where I have found the ‘you get used to it’ repertoire. The first example is from the BBC1 ‘The Graham Norton Show’, on which the singer Justin Bieber was a guest. The box below has a transcript of a conversation between Graham (host) and Justin (guest):
[Justin enters stage, greets Graham and his other guests while the audience scream and chant]
Graham: sit yourself down, sit down, sit down, sit down [Screaming and chanting continues in the audience]
Graham: does that not drive you insane
Justin: what [Audience screams]
Graham: that noise
Justin: no it doesn’t I, I got kind of used to it
Graham: I bet you have, it must be like living next door to a railway, you know, in the beginning [Audience laughs] because every window you open, that must be the sound [Audience screams]
Box 3: Transcript from The Graham Norton Show (2010)
This was a particularly important instance of ‘you get used to it’ as it specifically related to living alongside railways. The audience recognition of Graham’s talk supports getting used to living alongside railways as a widely held, common sense understanding. Another example related to environmental conditions is from the novel ‘One Day’ by David Nicholls (2009).
181 At street level on the Cally Road, Ian’s studio flat was lit only by the sodium of the street lamps and the occasional searching light of the double-decker buses. Several times a minute the whole room vibrated, shaken by one or more of the Piccadilly, Victoria or Northern lines and buses 30, 10, 46, 214 and 390. In terms of public transport it was possibly the greatest flat in London, but only in those terms. Emma could feel the tremors in her back as she lay on the bed that folded into a sofa....
‘What was that one?’
Ian listened to the tremor. ‘Eastbound Piccadilly.’
‘How do you stand it Ian?’
‘You get used to it. Also I’ve got these-’ and he pointed towards two fat maggots of grey wax on the window ledge. ‘Mouldable wax ear-plugs.’
Box 4: Excerpt from the novel ‘One Day’ by David Nicholls (2009, p. 151)
Central to both examples is the notion of getting used to something negative or unfamiliar, which offers further support for my interpretation of adapting to ‘place’ as hegemonic and as a ‘lived ideology’.
The ‘you get used to it’ interpretative repertoire has also appeared in data in other research studies. For example, in Mason’s (2004) research on residential histories, a participant called Gwen talked about her living situation where, along with her husband and children, she co-resided with her parents for thirty years. This was something that started out as a temporary arrangement and in Box 5 below, Gwen talks about getting used to living together.
182
Gwen: We found we didn’t want to move. We liked the house, and we’d got
used to it. The kiddies had got used to it, and we stayed there and eventually bought the house from my parents. They were going to look for a flat but then I went back to work and it was handy for my mum to be there to look after the kiddies. There was plenty of room for us and we had an extension built so we just all stayed together...It would have been different if we hadn’t all got on but we did, we always did, so we didn’t want them to move either quite honestly. (Gwen Mercer, aged 53, married)
Box 5: From Mason (2004)
Mason’s (2004) analysis focused on Gwen’s construction of place as ‘taken-for- granted’ in that she wanted to live near her parents. Mason (2004) did not analyse the construction of getting used to the living situation in detail, potentially because her work employed a narrative analytical approach. Within the analytical approach adopted in this research, getting used to living with her parents appeared to justify living in a way that could be considered ‘disruptive’ or ‘unusual’ by the other. Gwen’s use of having “got used to it” addressed the unusualness of her living situation whilst enabling her to justify her continued residence within her parental home.
Stewart (2003) identified ‘getting used to it’ as the process through which children described adjusting to cancer. In doing so, the children were able to “keep their focus on the ordinary nature of their everyday lives within the uncertain context of their illness” (Stewart, 2003, p. 394). Although used in an entirely different context, Stewart (2003) noted three elements related to the process of getting used to cancer, two of which relate to getting used to living alongside railways. The first was the passage of time where children used very similar repertoires to the participants in this study (e.g. “With time, I got used to it”). The second element was repeated experiences which appeared as an inevitable consequence of the passing of time, but children emphasised the effort required on their part to get used to cancer.
183 Within this research, William also presented ill health as something which “you get used to” to convey a sense of acceptance in terms of how his life had turned out and how he had come to live where he does. In the excerpt below, William drew upon the ‘you get used to it’ interpretative repertoire to present a negative “grim” account of his life.
Excerpt 70
William: but you get into a situation you know I mean its grim, but it’s not that
bad it’s just you get used to what you’ve got in a manner of speaking you always get what you want because you know apart from being born and dieing, everything else is just gradual you know and things happen along the way and you go with it you know
The interpretative repertoires of adaptation perhaps demonstrate a commonly held ‘lived ideology’ that “people can get used to almost anything” (Weinstein, 1982, p. 87). In relation to noise, Weinstein (1982) argued that “it is commonly believed that people adapt rather easily to noise” (p. 87). Adapting to ‘place’ works centripetally as a pervasive ‘lived ideology’ that is flexible in terms of its application for making sense of a wide variety of circumstances.
However, adapting to place also answers the anticipated voices of ‘others’ and thus can be considered as centrifugal in challenging other prominent lived ideologies: ‘the rural idyll’ and ‘a peaceful and quiet place’. Whilst getting used to railways negotiated the presence of railways in ‘place’, it also highlighted their disruptiveness in terms of challenging the ‘lived ideologies’ of residential places in relation to the ‘other’. As questions of ‘place’ are questions for ‘identity’, the railway arguably presented trouble for ‘identity’, which was reflected in participants’ talk. Presenting living alongside railways as something to which people adapt also minimises the disruptiveness of railways. Adapting to ‘place’ as a ‘lived ideology’ contributed to normalising living alongside railways in that such places are no more different or unusual than others. Thus, adaptation enabled railways to be presented as ‘commonplace’ which was important to participants’ ‘identity work’ in the context of ‘disruption’.
184 Adapting to environmental conditions has implications if these findings are to be applied within the wider contexts of policy making. For example, moving away from an annoyance framework to one of adaptation has ethical implications in terms of the construction of new developments. Adaptation could offer a justification for new transport infrastructure such as high-speed rail networks and light-rail systems, whilst offering a counter argument to new environmental conditions as ‘disruptive’. As Burningham’s (1998) study on the development of a new road demonstrated, of all the anticipated issues, environmental noise was presented as a pervasive problem for residents who lived in close proximity to the road. The participants in Burningham’s (1998) study were not employing interpretative repertoires of adaptation. Although this research highlights how residents made sense of environmental conditions through a ‘lived ideology’ of adaptation, the application of these findings to other physical features and environmental conditions should be done so with caution.
However, the research findings may offer a practical solution in other instances such as where urban Brownfield28 land has been allocated for re-development. Such land can be located in close proximity to existing physical features such as transport infrastructure, commercial properties and industrial works. Drawing upon the insights of temporality based rights (also see Hugh-Jones & Madill, 2011), where environmental conditions from physical features pre-exist housing, interpretative repertoires of ‘adaptation’ may be available for future residents to make sense of living with ‘disruption’ in talk around ‘place’ and ‘identity’. Further discussion of the practical and ethical implications of this research is included later in this chapter.