Marie worked in publishing and marketing for a time but after having a family set her sights on starting her own business. ‘I realized that I couldn't carry on doing what I was doing and have a baby,’ she said. ‘I thought, “alright, I’m going to open this shop, and it's going to be.” ‘ Marie opened what soon became a popular children's clothing shop in West London, in the early 2000s.

The day her business was hit by rioters, Marie received a couple of messages including one from the local council to say that the riots might be heading her way. Despite her feelings of disbelief, she contacted neighbouring businesses and, like them, removed items from her store front window, turned off the lights and went home. Later that evening, around 10 pm, she got a call from her alarm company. ‘It's such a horrible feeling. It's like if your purse has been nicked and you feel helpless.’ Her husband jumped into the car but didn't get as far as the shop. He turned around, according to Marie, because it was complete ‘chaos’, ‘too many people around’ and he felt ‘unsafe’.

A couple of hours later, a friend rang Marie: ‘I’m outside your shop now and it's totally trashed. There's nothing in there. It's just trashed,’ he said. Marie set out to investigate but it wasn't long before approaching the shop that she saw ‘people streaming everywhere’, some of which surrounded her car. ‘It was like I was in a dream. A really bizarre and frightening and bewildering dream.’

Two years on from the London riots, Amir spoke about his persistent concerns and anger. He felt let down in the aftermath of the riots by the lack of support. ‘I worry about the insurance, I worry about the Government,’ he said. As discussed, his clothing business in North London had been seriously vandalized, looted and flooded when rioters attempted to set fire to it. His local councillor, Member of Parliament (MP) and insurers were not as helpful as he believed they could have been, adding to his stress. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you pay so much [business] rates, you know? … My local council could have helped us further.’ Following the riots, he had ‘no money to start with’ and it took six months for him to be compensated. This was a difficult time: ‘I’m down so much mentally, I’m just, it affected me mentally.’ The inaction of his local MP continued to irritate him:

When Sam and I first met he was in his early 50s. Sam had moved to the UK a couple of decades prior, working in offices before starting his own businesses in the hospitality sector. He had built his North London pub from scratch a few years prior, something he was immensely proud of. On the first night of the London riots, he had heard earlier in the day from customers that ‘there was some kind of protest taking place in front of the police station’ and ‘a police car burning there’. Sam closed the pub around 10 or 11 pm and went home. On returning to the pub a short while later he said:

Sam then noticed something or someone that really startled him. ‘Because it was dark and one of the guys was coming through this window, I think he has a weapon in his hand and I say, “now I have to go and hide myself” ‘.

You do not have to look far to see how ageing is built into the world of work, from images of the workforce in recruitment advertisements, industrial action on pensions eligibility, and reports of productivity diminishing as the population grows older. These are not only underpinned by ideas of the working life course, but also a compulsion to be able to view ageing as a source of possible control and mediator of value or meaning. Yet age as a workforce concern has become more complex during the historical present as we see the move towards more fluid patterns of entry and exit, more flux in the workforce, and global changes in terms of how economies are structured. Systems of workplace forecasting are central to people management policies and are still predicated on the idea of a ‘hard stop’ at a certain point in time, usually based on chronological age. In some professions, this has been supported through using occupational pension eligibility to symbolically ‘mark’ the end of work. Other mechanisms may seek to control pathways around work, such as transition to retirement programmes, often called ‘phased’, which are increasing in popularity across the public and private sectors.

Such challenges are often felt most acutely at a local level, as revealed in a conversation I had with one senior manager in the National Health Service (NHS) on workforce planning. At this point, post-COVID-19 job vacancies were at crisis point, not only due to Brexit but also to employees choosing to retire around 18 months earlier than had been forecast, and a fear that the NHS was not able to protect older bodies at work.

A new book by Kathleen Riach is a major event and a gift for those of us with interests in ageing and work. When we started the Rethinking Work, Ageing and Society series, we wanted to publish books that shine a critical light on the issues that affect people as they age. Significant changes in the landscape include extended working lives and rising state pension ages, changes to job transitions in later life, an increasing recognition of health transitions in the workplace, and shifts towards individual responsibility and risk in private pensions saving. Volumes in the series have successfully explored some of these issues through critical, theoretically informed social science research. However, there is an important broader issue to be explored about how people experience ageing today and how we can make sense of this. This is not about focusing on a particular life stage, on older workers per se, or working in ‘later life’, although this remains important; rather, it relates to ageing as a process that proceeds and is experienced over the life course.

In this context, we are delighted to welcome Kathleen Riach's excellent new book, Working through Ageing. Throughout her distinguished career, Professor Riach's research has encouraged us to think more deeply, and differently, about ageing and work. This ambitious new project presents the theory of ‘working through ageing’, which seeks to avoid the common imbalance of focusing exclusively on ageing as something imposed upon individuals within organizational contexts or as something that is purely the locus of the individual.

In the spring of 2001, Brian, the 30-something-year-old owner of a design consultancy for commercial interiors in Northeast London, was forced to make redundancies. ‘I was hopeful that we would be able to capture all the business that was delayed as a result of COVID-19. Now I realize that's impossible, and we just need to be the right size’ to ‘capture’ what business we can ‘for the next 18 months’. He added, ‘A year is a long time in crisis. So, there is a level of acceptance about the situation.’ This was not something Brian wanted or saw coming three days before the first lockdown came into effect, when he told me about his ‘contingency planning’. ‘There are so many moving parts around whether there is a lockdown or not, the financial assistance on offer from the state and the duration of any measures,’ he said. ‘We are a well-run business and so there has been no need of panic,’ he added optimistically. But a few weeks into the lockdown, Brian was finding the situation quite ‘challenging’ personally, particularly ‘the emotional aspect of dealing with people’ due to concerns around health and financial security.

Taking a step back, Brian reflected in his diary on how he had been managing his team so far, despite the mounting financial and regulatory constraints: ‘I’ve proved myself on being caring, putting people first and building a great culture. I passionately believe this is what a business should be.’ Brian positively assessed his performance as CEO.

While my aim has been to provide new ways of thinking about our experiences of ageing and work through empirical attention to one particular group of people, researching ageing is inevitably an intimate undertaking, as became clear seven years into this study. In 2017 my daughter was born prematurely at 25 weeks gestation in Barcelona on the day after the Catalan Independence Referendum. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, not only ‘hatching’ too early to allow my family and I to go back to our lives in Australia but also landing herself in an alien healthcare system and country, given I had only been there for a period of study leave. Crowned by her nurses as ‘The Youngest Member of the New Republic’ at minus 15 weeks old, she spent 86 days in the neonatal ward with myself and partner doing alternate eight-hour shifts while my own mum flew over from the UK to proxy parent my three-year-old son for three months.

Every few weeks felt like the turn towards transcendence I had been previously reading about where her before-born body was ‘moved up’: shuffled from one end of the ward, reserved for the earliest or most unwell babies, towards the door, where you eventually got your freedom away from institutional care and towards a projected – though not promised – ‘normal’ life for all of us. I had an enviable panorama of Barcelona FC's Camp Nou football stadium from my chair in the neonatal ward and spent my days waiting for this view to change as her incubator moved closer to the exit.

Robert left university in his early 20s to pursue his passion for coffee. On 16 March 2020, a week before the first COVID-19 lockdown was imposed by the British government, the now 30-something-year-old owner of a popular café in Southeast London shared with me his growing concerns. ‘We didn't build being shut for 2, 3, 4+ weeks into our plan for the year’ or ‘an overall slowing down of our regular customer base’. Robert felt his anxiety becoming more palpable by the day:

Three days after the first lockdown announcement on 23 March 2020, he wrote in his diary that it had been ‘unbelievably, unbearably stressful’ for him, with ‘people crying’ and asking him ‘constant questions about pay’, which were difficult to answer. Robert was pensive, deliberating over whether to close the café temporarily or carry on, while adhering to social distancing requirements:

When Vivek and I met for the first time it was a typical late autumn day in London, cool, grey and raining heavily. Sitting in his white van parked just outside of his crowded convenience store, Vivek used the street as a canvas to paint a picture for me of the rioters’ movements that night and police cordons. He pointed out a couple of locals who happened to be walking by, one whom CCTV footage captured looting his shop in the early hours after it was destroyed by the rioters, and the other who had given him money in the days following, to help with his recovery. Both were older women.

Vivek was in the shop on Monday 8 August, a day he was quick to describe as ‘normal Monday trading’. He said it wasn't until ‘Monday afternoon we hear, around 2:30, say 2:00, there's going to be riots in [the borough]. You know local people. The news was spreading already. Tottenham was done on the sixth, seventh, and this was the third day’. By this time, he said people ‘knew already’ what could happen, and the main street was closing down. ‘I thought, “Okay, I go. This is my chance to go home on Monday.” So, me and these two’, he gestured to a couple of employees, ‘was there and my brother was here so we just go, shut the shop, put the shutter down. At 2:30 we left the shop’.

Kate, who was in her 50s when we met, trained as a dancer from a young age and worked with many of the greats over her long career. Dancing was all she ever wanted to do. After a few injuries and stops and starts, she started her North London dance studio well over a decade ago. When the announcement of the first lockdown on 23 March 2020, was officially made, she felt a deep sense of ‘shock and concern’ and quickly moved into ‘problem-solving mode’. With performances scheduled for April, rehearsals had already begun. To reassure herself she thought, ‘It's only going to be a few months’ and so ‘it just means that we can't do this now and they’re going to reschedule’. But this was not to be the case, and over the next year there was much for Kate to figure out and do. At times, it was all a lot to bear and taking a toll on Kate and her energy levels:

Luke, one of the programming team in HFUK, wryly called commuting ‘the most democratic thing about London’, in that public transport is by far the easiest way to make your way around the city. And at first, it seems a democratic space where anyone can potentially temporarily inhabit or move through a train, bus, tube, road or pavement. However, after travelling to an interview from a friend's flat on the outskirts of London, my naivety as to where, when and how labouring bodies occupy such spaces became clear. By 6.03 am, I was at the station at the start of one of the main underground lines into London. This was early for me, but hours later than the first shift of service and domestic workers who had already travelled in to prepare the city for others. I boarded the train, half noticing I was the only women there, then that I was the only person that looked under 50. By the second stop into London, a majority of the seats were already taken by people, again mostly older than me and certainly looking more tired.

As we moved into the zones closer to London, I witnessed each stop populating the carriage with younger and younger passengers, until the carriage was a patchwork of suited bodies of all ages. People bunched together, but usually making sure to do so next to similar bodies, with men's and women's bodies sometimes contorted to make a gap between them, or likewise, women turning towards other women when (more) men piled on at another stop. Occasionally seats were offered to older ‘civilians’ such as tourists, but rarely to fellow ‘suits’.

Mark, the owner of an electronics business in South London, was in his early 60s. During our first meeting following the London riots Mark came across as shy, a little quiet and reserved. When I entered his shop, it was filled with boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, with a couple of television monitors on display to the right-hand side. Mark had worked in the shop for more than 40 years and it was the only job he had ever known. He was employed there as a teenager and then took it over many years later. His plan was to run the business up until his retirement: ‘Although,’ he said, ‘the riots might have been the catalyst to stopping me altogether and I did think, should I or shouldn't I?’

On the night the rioters came, Mark believed his shop was secure, unlikely to be targeted. ‘I thought being in the side street here with a shutter, I thought, “I’m going to be alright”, so I wasn't particularly worried.’ Unfortunately for him, he didn't manage to escape it: