Most historians who have written about the British working class during the late 19th and 20th centuries have emphasized the increasing importance of class consciousness. Outside the sectarian redoubts of Liverpool and Glasgow, they assume that this sense of class had largely transcended the remnants of a separate Irish Catholic ethnic identity by 1914. Steven Fielding challenges such a view. He argues that in many of Britain's industrial towns and cities, in the very heart of working-class culture, a distinctive Irish Catholic ethnic consciousness lived on up to and beyond the Second World War. He reveals the resulting tensions within this consciousness by focusing on the experience of Manchester's large Irish Catholic population. This demonstrates in vivid human detail the particularity of the Irish Catholic experience in urban England.