Virtual and Physical: Vintage Places and Spaces

In this, the final empirical chapter, I discuss the broad unifying themes related to practices and spaces outside the home; such as the vintage community, both online and in ‘real life’. What are the leisure practices of the participants related to their vintage identities? The chapter, then, looks at online communities and forums, and whether friendships and networks are established online (which links to buying vintage online, which I talked about in Chap. 5 ). I then go on to discuss events such as vintage fairs and festivals, for the different eras and generally for vintage; are such events inspirational (even aspirational)? Do they link to ideas about heritage? ‘Heritage’ is a buzz word, referring to anything from tomatoes (Jordan 2015) to pop music—for example, my friend was in a successful 1990s band called The Popinjays and she was recently informed that their music is now (already) ‘heritage pop’. Heritage has a range of meanings, from inheriting and passing down property to a place which is managed and conserved. There are intangible practices of heritage such as language, dialect, or culture. It is about practices as much as places and things—oral traditions, languages, songs, crafts—and reflects perfectly the practices and preoccupations of the participants. ‘Having a heritage is not only a marker of having an identity, but is in a sense another materialisation—an embodiment even—of one’s (collective) self’ (Macdonald 2013, p. 258). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.