Abstract
The Worktown archive offers a unique insight into the contribution of leisure to well-being as part of the everyday life of the individual and the neighbourhood community. It shows how in a new phase of modernity of the cinema and wireless, people were not passive consumers but retained agency in the construction of their own leisure lives. This chapter provides an outline commentary on inter-war practices and understandings of leisure and compares them to those of the present as digital media create new means of forming on-line communities and social identity through leisure.