This paper revisits sociological studies of Liverpool between 1956 and 1964 to challenge the prevailing emphasis on affluence in histories of post-war Britain. Vulnerability to poverty continued to shape working-class life, and the sociologists and their respondents drew on class to account for this. However, while the researchers used class as a social description, their respondents suggested that class was a dynamic social relationship within which they operated a degree of agency, albeit mediated by gender and locale. Their agency was not only facilitated by the development of a post-war welfare state, rather than by personal affluence, but also relied on older household economic strategies that highlight continuities with the pre-war period.