As it emerged from the First World War, Britain entered what was often described as a dance 'craze.' Over the next three decades dancing became one of the nation's most influential leisure practices. Dancing in the English style explores this process, charting the development, experience, and cultural representation of popular dance in this period. It describes the rise of modern ballroom dancing as Britain's dominant popular style, as well as the opening of hundreds of affordable dancing schools and purpose-built dance halls around the country. The book focuses in particular on the relationship between two commercial producers - the dance profession and the dance hall industry - and the consumers who formed the dancing public. Together these groups negotiated the creation of a 'national' dancing style. This was most evident in the re-creation of foreign dances such as the tango and the foxtrot as the English style of ballroom dancing, and in the themes of successful novelty dances like the Lambeth Walk. Through these processes, popular dance created, circulated, embodied and commodified ideas about British national identity.

Dancing in the English style illuminates popular dancing's important domestic impacts, but it also emphasises the global. It highlights the influence of international cultural products on national identity construction, the complexities of Americanisation, and Britain's place in a transnational system of production and consumption that forged the dances of the Jazz Age. It will be of strong value to students and scholars of twentieth-century British history, cultural studies, and dance studies, and to those with interests in the histories of popular culture, women and gender, or war and society.