This thesis explores how young people from Greater London and Merseyside engage with street cultural lifestyles and negotiate identity within contexts of social exclusion, spatial marginality, and digital hyper-visibility. Against a backdrop of gentrification, deprivation, and declining youth provision, the study investigates how young people construct meaning through street culture, particularly in relation to masculinity, violence, and cultural expression. The merging of physical and digital spaces provides an additional layer of exploration for the study inquiry, as the reciprocal nature of the two is considered in the experience of the street. The research is driven by two core aims: first, to explore how youth perceive and perform street cultural identities across physical and digital space; and second, to examine the extent to which street-related violence is shaped by territoriality. To achieve this, the study adopts a qualitative, semi-ethnographic methodology, combining individual interviews, focus groups, and field-based engagements with young people aged 16–25 in community settings. Participants included those with lived experience of marginalisation, youth ambassadors, and cultural intermediaries positioned significantly in spaces of Drill music and social media consumption. The principles of liberal paternalism, and the ideas of spatial theorists Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, are utilised as the study’s theoretical framework. Centred around participant lived experiences, the findings highlight that street culture is not only a survival response to exclusion, but a site of identity-making, performance, and leisure-based recreation. Young people articulate the street as both symbolic and material, a space shaped by urban regeneration, economic struggle, digital visibility, and commodification. The findings also reveal that against a broader relational abandonment in the lives of young men, traditional notions of postcode territoriality have given way to more individualised motivations for participation in street violence as a phenomenon rooted as much in performative cultural pressures as in the pragmatic navigation of limited socio-economic opportunity through involvement in drug gang activity. The study’s original contribution lies in offering a multi-dimensional account of how street culture is lived, consumed, and regulated across converging physical and digital spaces. It challenges dominant narratives around violence and the street, calling for relational approaches to take place in youth work, policy, and the cultural criminological study of urban marginality.
- Cultural criminology
- street culture
- social exclusion
- youth violence
- Masculinity
- drill music
- social media
- Territoriality
The Street and The Studio: Exploring Street Culture Through Young People’s Experiences of Masculinity, Social Exclusion, and Violence Across Digital and Physical Space
WATKINS, L. (Author). 2025
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis