Ten years ago I decided to rewrite the general history of British sport I had researched and written in the 1980s in order to take account of the vast amount of new material within sports history to take account of 'the cultural turn' in the general social and cultural history of modern Britain. The original text has focussed srongly on questions of class identity,and exclusion. Whilst class remained a key factor in participation, the new text gives much greater emphasis to other forms of discrimination and access. The gradual and uneven opening up of different sports to different groups of women a different points in time now forms a much more significant element in the book, looking first at he pioneering period of Victorian female emancipation followed by a more extensive analysis of Edwardian and inter-war female sport culminating in 'break through' in athletics from the 1960s. There is also greatly increased coverage of the integration and exclusion of immigrant groups, especially Jewish immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century, and Carribean and south Asian immigrants in the second half of the century seen in the wider context of a new state policy of 'Sport for All' and 'the General Household survey' which provided reliable statistics of participation from the 1970s.