Ebb and Flow: living a life with illness in a remote seaside town.

This study is an ethnography of a small, remote northern seaside town and its working-age residents with multiple health conditions. The site of the ethnography is Skelsend, a once-popular destination for holidaymakers across the region and beyond. However, the town has experienced decades of economic decline, losing much of its tourist industry, infrastructure, and railway. Most residents live in neighbourhoods statistically measured as significantly socially disadvantaged.The thesis aspires to elucidate how a specific location’s local social, cultural, and economic context might influence the experience of living with illness. Moreover, the intersection of exogenous social structures with local structures might impact the lives and agency of working-age residents with long-term health conditions as they strive to maintain their well-being in the context of illness.Fieldwork was enabled by volunteering at two local charities in the town and engaging in several community events, before conducting semi-structured interviews with residents and relevant health and community workers. The study uses a critical realist methodology to assist in revealing contingent structural relationships that influence the lives of working-age residents living with multiple illnesses. A critical realist reinterpretation of Bourdieu’s (1990) habitus, capital and field based on habitus as a reflexive disposition is also incorporated within the study to gain further insight.The study highlights the different needs of residents, which depend on how they use the physical space of Skelsend to optimise capacity for well-being, which is dependent upon field positions within the town. I conclude that access to the natural environments around Skelsend and its largely peaceful, friendly atmosphere benefits residents. However, security of access to capital, both social and economic, within the social space of Skelsend and spatial immobility are highly significant determinants of whether residents can realise projects of well-being in the context of living with multiple illnesses.