deano

A diminutive of the male given name Dean.

An archetypal young lower middle class British man living in a newbuild housing estate, stereotyped as culturally unsophisticated, lavish with money, heavily indebted and conservative-leaning.

To many, Deano is a figure of fun: a low-brow, low-status provincial man with bad taste and too much sway over the nation’s cultural life. But the more I read about him online, whether on Reddit, Urban Dictionary, Twitter or YouTube, the more I realise his was not a life to be mocked but cheered — and even envied. Deano owns his home, gets back from work early, and has enough disposable income for new furniture and nice food.

The possibility that Deano might be petty bourgeois rather than working class or middle class was not entertained, but it is precisely the sprawling lower middle class – and not the working class or established middle class – that dominates the new-build commuter belt, the places Duncan Weldon dubbed “Barratt Britain”: the new, dystopian British version of American white picket fence suburbia.