The ‘British’ cultural studies tradition, taking its name from the foundational Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, is a rich source of polemical dismissals of Frankfurt critical theory. These form part of the former’s cultural populist tendency, an intellectual populism that celebrates all ‘popular culture’ as constituting the voice of ‘the people’. Adorno, most strikingly, is so framed as a place marker for the ‘elitist other’ of such populism. The demonstrable nonsensicality of such claims, however, risks obscuring more considered scholarship within that cultural studies tradition. This chapter situates this place marking problem but also goes beyond place marking characterizations of both these intellectual formations. Accordingly, three key figures in the serious reception of critical theory are investigated as their work achieves a degree of scholarly elaboration suitable for immanent critique: Stuart Hall (1932–2014), Raymond Williams (1921–1988) and Paul Gilroy (1956-). For the Welsh-born Williams and leading Black intellectuals Hall and Gilroy a ‘British’ identity is necessarily problematic. Each draws on the Frankfurt tradition productively, if unevenly, in establishing their own distinct stances as critical intellectuals.