Gentrification 6

Stoke Newington becomes the Cotswolds

Some time soon, London will be nothing but a playground for the wealthy that doubles up as a tourist attraction. (Bryony Gordon DT Dec 2014)

It was a lot more upmarket than where we lived. (Countdown to Murder)

Is France the new Tonbridge Wells? I now dread readers' letters that end with words like "Aix" or "Rochefort-en-Terre" the most. (‏@camillalong)

Overheard in Weybridge: “They’re opening a Morrison’s? Not very Weybridge!”

Trapped waiting in a Shoreditch coffee joint. Overheard convs inc mortgage options, 2nd homes in Cotswolds & green juice recipes. (James Wong @Botanygeek)

Would love it if, one day, the mystery house on Escape to the Country was a bedsit above a kebab shop in West Bromwich. (Sathnam Sanghera @Sathnam)

Times writer Robert Crampton used to think he could never own a mobile phone or live in a gated community or use a Filofax or drink imported lager or bottled water because that’s what 80s yuppies did. “What a dick,” he observes of himself. (April Times 2015)

Nothing says "I'm a member of the gentry" like "gentrification is a myth, but besides maybe it is actually good for places." (Chepotle Guevara ‏@AlJavieera)

I was quite as happy in Waddilove Street; but the fact is, a great portion of that venerable old district has passed away, and we are being absorbed into the splendid new white-stuccoed Doric-porticoed genteel Pocklington quarter. (The Christmas Books of Mr. M.A. Titmarsh, William Makepeace Thackeray)

There's always some naive artist saying 'We just wanted a warehouse to take over – I'm shocked, shocked to see gentrification going on here!' (‏@davidjmadden)


Yes, yes, I’m sorry for young people trying to rent or get on the property ladder. When we were young our salaries were tiny. It was very hard for a single young woman to get a mortgage. You had to save with a building society, in the hope that it would give you a mortgage when you found a tiny flat in an “unfashionable” area. (“Fashionable” areas are where richer people live.) There was no spare cash for renovations. There were no credit cards in them days. If you wanted to rent a flat, you had to hand over “key money” of about £500. This was illegal, but a fact of life. And people were quite shocked at different genders sharing a flat or house. Even if you shared with one or two other girls, this was seen as something you did for a few years before getting married, not as a lifestyle choice. And most flats above shops were empty and decaying, for some legal reason. It made streets look tatty and depressing.

Back then, some middle class people worked the system so that they had a cheap flat in central London – housing association, co-op, top floor of some rich person’s house, pretended they lived in Westminster and bought a flat off Shirley Porter. It meant they had more spare cash than the rest of us and could afford a low-paid but high-status job or occupation – usually something impressively creative that we all wanted to do. Sometimes they had quietly married somebody with private means.

And now I hear middle-class young people are being forced to live in tiny bedsits to save on rent! Just like the 50s! (See Cooking in a Bedsitter, The L-Shaped Room.)

The chatterati are wringing their hands and moaning that London will become a bland theme park for the rich, and all the shops will sell nothing but overpriced chandeliers – ignoring the vast swathes of London where poor people will presumably go on living, as long as nobody kicks them off their estate so that they can sell it to developers or private investors. (By “London” I think they mean “central London” – or even “West London”.)


GENTRIFICATIONGentrification no longer means a few hippies, writers and artists moving into a run-down area; it no longer means hipster cafés; it no longer means nice-middle class families buying up Victorian houses that are cheaper than the Crouch End equivalent – it now means destroying beautiful old buildings, building soulless investment flats and waiting for the money to roll in.

Gentrification proceeds like an amoeba – the first pseudopods are hippy cafes which are almost working class. Cheap and inclusive, with batty décor. They are soon followed by upmarket coffee shops. The hippies move further out. It all happens so fast now! But perhaps when you’re 60 everything seems to happen fast. Perhaps that’s why people talk about “the hectic pace of modern life” – they mean it changes much faster than it used to. When we were children nothing changed much! At least that’s how it seems to us.

Hippy café in Dalston Waste

We used to talk about areas “coming up”. Areas can also go down. I wish they would. Middle class people used to move into an area that was said to be “coming up” and hang on for years among the pound shops and wind-blown litter while nothing happened and none of their friends came to join them. In Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning, one of the newsmen has moved into a South London suburb, and is always rather desperately trying to get others to move there, as he and his wife are lonely. Another character owns a large Victorian house but spends her time improving it with tacky “modern” features made out of MDF and hardboard – such as a cocktail bar in the lounge.

Apparently incomers can always point out the building that used to be a crack house. (I can – at the top of Sandringham Road, Dalston. Now spruced up, with a French church and a net-curtain shop as neighbours.)

Former crack house

Landlords put rents up so that only the affluent young can afford the area. The poor move out. Ordinary shops become middle class cafes. Is the exterior of your local pub now painted with blackboard paint – and “chalk” menus promising locally sourced grub? It’s happening in Finsbury Park.

Many more people go to uni now, and then they all come to London to become artists and actors and writers and work in the media (or get arts-related jobs). What did they do in the olden days? Many stayed in the provinces and became bank clerks. They joined a manufacturing firm and rose through the ranks. But banks have fewer branches and fewer clerks. The manufacturers have closed down. The warehouses are now studios. But we can’t all be artists – is this sustainable? Like the hippies who sold sandwiches from vans at festivals, the other route is to run a café with a difference. There’s a pub in Islington called The Library, and a café in Hackney called The Advisory. In Balls Pond Road: Salvation through Noodles, Subtitles, Artichoke.

Hipster style is the same old Ye Olde Tea Shoppe artsy craftsy William Morris (but without the medieval look). Nostalgia for the old ways of carving teaspoons, writing with a fountain pen, commuting by bicycle, growing a beard, wearing the costume of a Victorian builder. Meanwhile we run our lives with sophisticated technology, and all around us lovely bits of old London are being razed in favour of glass towers out of Metropolis and dull imitations of Georgian townhouses. Perhaps the hipsters will protest, if they’ve got a moment. Can’t wait for the first hipster to commute to work on horseback.

"It can feel strange to be surrounded by the same person wherever you turn," said a Hackney resident about the hipster incomers. The hipsters held a street party and only invited their friends, no local people. The same woman commented: “If another culture did that they’d be accused of not integrating.”


The broadsheets talk as if Stoke Newington has been gentrified – done and dusted. They never mention the people living on the many council estates; or the Turkish, Greek, Jewish, Chinese and Vietnamese communities who have lived here for decades and still do. Gentrification happens around these people.

We thought Stokey would always be the home of dissenters – travellers who went to Nepal and brought back silver jewellery and handwoven textiles, which they sold at the Stokey Festival. We used to shut the street and sell our wares (or sing) on the pavement and listen to salsa bands. We thought it would be like that for ever and ever. We never thought Stokey would become Islington. And then Fulham. And then the Cotswolds. But why wouldn’t it?  The rot set in when the street was no longer closed, and the festival became an ordinary rock gig in the park (and we sang in a tent), and then fizzled. Now there’s a music festival centred on the churches, with string quartets and lute recitals. I never go, my heart is broken.

More here, and links to the rest.

Gentrification V

Church Street

Sure sign of gentrification is the anti-gentrification graffiti by the last generation of gentrifiers. (Huw Lemmey ‏@spitzenprodukte)

My Romanian taxi driver bizarrely complaining about... mass arrival of more Romanians next year. "They will work for less. Keep them out." (Sathnam Sanghera)

That’s me – complaining about all the middle classes moving into the area I… moved into 30 years ago. But I moved here because it was working class! Though looking back, there weren’t many decent pubs or cafes, there wasn’t much to do, and friends were scattered thinly.

We predicted the area would “come up”. And then it didn’t. Years passed. And now it has, but not in time for us. Damn!

And we were imagining a clean-up, a paint-job, some repairs, maybe a left-wing café/bookshop, a hippy vegan restaurant in a squat, and no more prostitutes in the park or crumbling houses full of crack addicts - not farmers’ markets in Clapton selling ethical escargots. Dalston has become Camden Market.

“The activists and hippies who once lived in cooperatives where everyone paid according to ability and parents sang Nkosi Sikelele Afrika to their white babies have largely gone.” (New York Times May 2014 on Brixton) In the 80s, the middle-class incomers were political activists, who deliberately took up activities that meant meeting working class people of all origins. It may have been a mixed blessing for the working classes, but I miss singing Give Peace a Chance in a marquee while everybody eats Caribbean food off paper plates.

People say Stoke Newington High Street is ALL gentrified now (a few cafes called “The Haberdashery”). But for the past 30 years the gentrifiers have managed to ignore the large Turkish community which is still the most prominent culture in Green Lanes and on the High Street. To my knowledge, Upwards don’t exclaim over darling little Lahmacun restaurants (and don’t go there), don’t learn the oud, don’t listen to Turkish music, don’t learn Turkish, don’t go to Turkey on holiday. They shop at Turkish corner shops and take trips in Turkish cabs but they study Buddhism, not Islam. And of course you couldn’t run workshops teaching easy Turkish songs when you’re surrounded by expert Turkish musicians (and Turkish music sounds pretty hard).

Hipster junk shops in Stokey have even caught up with 70s owls! That was MY thing.

If my 35-year-old self could see London as it is now, she’d be amazed to see flats above shops made habitable (they used to be left empty for some legal reason), coffee shops everywhere - and all the buildings so clean.

More here, and links to the rest.

Gentrification IV

Wise words from housing-watcher and London-lover @robbieds: "Emerging [neighbourhoods] means they've pretty much emerged already though." (‏@RobertaWedge)

The trappings of gentrification – expensive coffee and bike shops, junk sold at a premium as “vintage” and, soon after, bitterly resented chain outlets… The crowds these areas attract also look pretty samey, and… can also seem just as aspirational and judgemental of others as the primmest suburbanites… with each community maintaining separate cafés, pubs and even grocery stores. I didn’t see much inter-class mixing among my neighbors either, publicly or privately. (Feargus O’Sullivan) (But why does he assume suburbanites are aspirational, judgemental and prim?)

I was wrong about Stoke Newington – it hasn’t become Fulham (though London Fields may have become Notting Hill). Instead it is full of young men with short beards and their vintage-clad girlfriends. At weekends, they all like to go out to breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner and then to a club, so there are lots of cafés, pubs and clubs that cater to their tastes. At the moment they may outnumber the couples with large houses and children. They have taken over a lot of Dalston and Stoke Newington High Street. Every week another under-used pub gets a clean-up and a paint job and becomes a packed gastropub. The 30s tearooms are still a bit ironic - but Ladurie macaroons are plain luxury. We middle-class Upwards are ashamed of luxury so we disguise it as something else. We pretend we prefer the shabby and run-down because it’s all we can afford. And the last thing we want is for people to say “But they’re just you with more money.”

And God forbid anybody should suggest we are these young people, 30 years on.

Working-class Sharon Definitely and her partner Darren want to move to Australia where you can get your own house for far less and have lovely weather and a pool and be near a beach. They have transferable skills: Sharon works in a care home and Darren is a builder. Of course the kids will miss their friends, and they’ll miss their friends, and leaving their elderly parents will be a wrench… maybe they’ll stay put and just get a caravan somewhere.

Upwards don’t move to Australia or New Zealand despite the stunning scenery. No culture, no theatah, no decent telly, no art galleries – no Radio 4! No Archers! Except they could listen on iplayer… But basically, no People Like Us. Everyone can afford a more luxurious lifestyle in the former colonies – just like in the olden days.

When Upwards think “I deserve better than this poky flat!” they move to France.

Many more have bought lovely properties in rural France and then found themselves isolated, both physically and culturally, especially in winter when much of rural France effectively closes down. (Daily Telegraph July 2012)

It's the dream of every Samantha Upward to live in the country and support herself by writing and illustrating children's books. If Sam writes a novel, the central character will be a woman who does just this. No need to commute, or wear a repressive uniform (smart office clothes), no need to conform, no need to suppress your individuality, no need to Work For The Man… Some Upwards live their whole adult lives in London or another big city while thinking they really ought to be in the country. The empty countryside they think they want to move to is of course “tranquil” and “idyllic” and a “rural idyll”.

It's important to realise that while many people with jobs in cities feel like they absolutely must have a house with a big yard, it still is a choice. (Economist blog Nov 7 11)

More here.

Natural Beauty

How your attitude to personal grooming betrays your place in the class layer cake.

When lower middle-class Jen Teale talks about “personal grooming being so important” and “first impressions counting” she means being clean and deodorized, with brushed hair and clean, “pressed” clothes. She smoothes the back of her skirt before she sits down because her job requires a neat, trim appearance. Samantha Upward thinks this the equivalent of crooking your little finger when you drink a cup of tea.

Jen "presses" her T shirts and throws them out when they go limp. She does her own and Bryan’s “valeting”. Caro and Harry get their clothes professionally looked after. Caro “irons” clothes, Sam doesn’t bother and Jen thinks she’s terribly “scruffy”.

Grooming is something Caro and the Nouveau Richards do to horses. To Sharon Definitely, it means removing ALL body hair (ouch!).

Jen’s hairstyle is a tamer version of the current fashion. Sharon’s hair is a stiffer and more artificial variant requiring much fiddling about, curling, straightening and visits to the salon. In the 60s it was a huge platinum beehive; more recently, the Rachel cut.

Mrs Definitely has a bullet head and very thick hair pulled back in a tight pony tail (Hackney facelift). She never goes to a hair salon (Sam calls it “the hairdresser”) so she can save the money for fags. That means that she is the only woman you ever see with glorious red hair, as everyone else dyes (“colours”) or streaks (“highlights”) theirs. Even Sam may be persuaded to have “caramel lowlights”.

In the 80s Sam really enjoyed being high-minded about chemical dyes poisoning the fish, and only used white loopaper. Henna, being a vegetable dye, was supposed to be kind to your hair, but it made hers go terribly out of condition. (It’s probably the same chemical in a different packet.) It used to be beyond the pale to bleach your hair, but now everybody does it – in a “natural” way that’s meant to look as if it was bleached by the sun.

In Sam’s young day if you had mousy hair and ordinary features you were told that personality was more important and all you had to do was be nice, nice, nice. It didn’t work. Now the same girl would get her hair streaked and get a St. Tropez tan and look indistinguishable from any other celeb.

The Definitely boys have cropped heads, or gelled spiky hair. Bohemian Upwards cut kids' hair themselves and make a complete mess of it. (They can’t have their children’s hair cut professionally because a) bang would go sixpence and b) it’s common for children to have hairstyles.)

The Upwards only have one pair of scissors in the house which are ten years old and used for everything. When Sam finds the scissors (she never begrudges the time spent looking for things she won’t put away in the same place twice), she pulls the child’s fringe out horizontally and hacks off the end and then wonders why it doesn’t hang straight.

Jen gets her kids’ hair cut by a professional and WATCHES HOW THEY DO IT so that she can then do it properly at home. She may even watch a tutorial on YouTube. Sam doesn’t know how to learn a skill, only how to write essays and pass exams. And she can’t be told anything because she’s from the boss class.

Arkana Nightshade rinses her hair with plain water because it will clean itself. She smells faintly of sheep. Caro Stow-Crat gets her eyelashes and eyebrows dyed. Her mousy hair is given discreet blonde streaks and brushed off her forehead (fringes give you spots). It's layered and she gets it cut when it reaches her collar. She brushes it with a Mason Pearson brush. She remembers some lore about brushing it a hundred times a day but reckons this only applied pre First World War when you grew your hair long enough to sit on.

She doesn’t use foundation, it’s “bad for the skin”. (Or does it protect the skin against the weather?) Fortunately her "complexion" is very good.

Hair devices are Teale: heated styling wands, ceramic straighteners, crimpers, Carmen rollers (the names are a giveaway). As is calling a hair product a “hair product” or just “product”. As is buying a product to rejuvenate your hair after you’ve used a lot of products on it.

The Bohemian Upwards who live in Stoke Newington used to cultivate a prison pallor because tanning gives you skin cancer/is a capitalist plot and basically it’s terribly, terribly common. People who live in Knightsbridge - and footballers' wives - get an expensive St. Tropez tan, Ilfordians go orange whatever technique they use (sunbed, spray). Sam wouldn’t cross the threshold of anything that called itself a “tanning salon” but might try some ancient recipe like soaking teabags in her bath or applying French dressing before sunbathing.

Upwards had a terrible time in the politically correct 80s because they couldn’t remove any body hair and had to wear long sleeves and skirts. But even before the 80s, Upwards were quite Presbyterian about any form of body modification and improving the face God gave you. They superstitiously claimed that if you removed one hair, two would grow in its place. Grooming knowledge was something they kept from their children, like the facts of life.

When Upwards wore makeup in the 60s and 70s they were heavy handed and slathered on aqua eyeshadow, brown eyebrow pencil and orange foundation that stopped at the jawline and clashed with their pink lipstick. They really did look much better without it.

Upwards will have an aromatherapy massage because it makes you a better person, but won’t have their legs waxed because it just makes you look good. They're uninterested in the superficial – and unable to address problems directly. If they have a problem they don’t solve it, they solve a different problem instead. Probably one they haven’t got.

Many men secretly wax between their eyebrows, but they overdo it and end up with a surprised expression. Mr Definitely dyes his hair a glowing chestnut with purple glints. Howard Weybridge and Mr Definitely clung to Brylcreem long after it had gone out. Howard still attempts a comb-over.

Everyone is much cleaner now, thanks to all those “toiletries”. In the 40s, women were urged to make “Friday night Amami night”, ie they only washed their hair once a week. Though the Guardian asked on Nov 2 2010: “Could you give up washing? A growing number of people are cutting down on daily showering and hair-washing. So could you join the extreme soap-dodgers?” Apparently some Upwards are washing less in an attempt to a) save the planet and b) solve the financial crisis. There was always an Upward trend against washing too much, or using deodorant (unnatural). During lockdown, the broadsheets ran articles on how people weren't bothering to wash since they didn't have to go out and meet people.

The Nouveau Richards soak in foam in their purpose built wet room. Jen keeps her toothbrush in a plastic “beaker”, Sam in a “toothmug”. Teales “take” a lot of showers, Upwards “have” (fewer) baths. Stow Crats use Pears and Imperial Leather soap because they haven’t changed for decades. They have an individual scent made up for them at Floris.

Upward toiletries never foam very much because they’re made of olive oil and seaweed, though Sam and her ilk have become much less hard-line – like many revolutionaries when they realise that the crowds aren’t following them.

Harry Stow-Crat’s grandparents had washbasins plumbed into the bedrooms at Stow-Crat Hall because bedrooms were where you did your washing, in a basin filled with water by a servant with a can. Caro is gradually putting in more bathrooms (what Jen and Eileen call an "en-suite"), and phasing out the washbasins. Sam calls it a basin, Jen a wash-hand basin, Eileen a washbasin and Sharon a sink.

Upwards are obsessed with straightening and pulling in their children’s teeth so they can never have a sexy overbite and end up with small, pinched, repressed mouths. (Elinor Glyn, the 20s sex appeal pundit, advised having your front teeth reset to stick out more.) But Upwards despise people who have their teeth whitened, or veneered. Grand people can get away with having terrible teeth. Upwards also quietly get their children's ears pinned back, and their noses straightened. They are vicious about people getting Botox and Sam claims not to know what a Brazilian wax is. Sharon gets a French manicure at her friend’s nail bar, and a set of stick-on French manicured toenails.

Where the Upwards Live

When I bought a flat in Hackney (London) in the 80s a friend said: "Well, people are moving into the East End now" (as if the teeming millions, Eliza Doolittle and the Brothers Kray didn’t live there already). Samantha is appalled when her area begins to degentrify and bookshops are replaced by pound shops – or never gentrifies as promised.

Before Samantha's daughter Thalia moves out of London, she and her husband and children live in a large house in a distant and unfashionable suburb (though she’d never call it that) which is just next to a slightly more fashionable suburb. But it’s worth living in the less-desirable area because you get more space for your money.

Upwards have a sense of entitlement about space: they think they deserve a really, really big house with a lot of land (paddocks, orchards). If they live in a small house they act as if it was much bigger, filling it with nick nacks and clutter and huge furniture and never throwing anything away. That’s the real reason they move to the country, or France.

Upwards can't live in suburbs, or in provincial towns. Giles Whittell wrote in The Times
January 10, 2008: Some close friends of mine are in the following two-phase pickle. Phase one: respectable family with loveable kids pays mindbending school fees for want of a decent state primary, drawing psychological and sometimes actual support from soaring house prices. Phase two: credit crunch hits house prices and coincides with (yet) another baby...
“So move!” I tell them. “Do what everyone else does and get out!” But they're too delusional, or vain. (I've heard them talk about Tunbridge Wells and season tickets as a sort of death.) ...It's a tribal thing.

Stoke Newington is a suburb of North London attractive to Upwards who buy small Victorian houses and have two children called Chloe and Hugo. It’s very child-friendly, with children’s clothes shops with twee names like Two Potato Three. Stokey mums take their tiny children to the Belle Epoque café on Newington Green (where you can buy a peach tart for £11.50). The children go to the good primary schools in the area but before they reach secondary school age the parents move to Crouch End where the schools are better and less “mixed”.

Stokey attracts a particular brand of Upward. They used to be very politically active and there are still a lot of gay couples. The straight couples consist of a powerful woman and a pale, scrawny man whose shoulders are bowed under the weight of the small child strapped to his chest. His wife buys all his clothes including the baggy shorts he wears in summer. They don’t have rows, they “discuss issues”. Stokey dad is often found in sole charge of the kids. He talks to them in public plaintively and reasonably and much too much (and in slightly too loud a voice). He gives them scientific explanations why they can’t eat anything containing E numbers. The children tell you that they can’t have fizzy drinks or they’ll become hyperactive. They become drug addicts later in life.

Stokeys hang out in Fresh and Wild eating health foods and reading the notices about drumming circles, Pilates classes and baby yoga. There are two natural health centres. Shops run by Stokey couples sell 50s glassware, organic linen, recycled clothes. Many go bust quite fast, or else shut down when the couple move to Crouch End, where they open a boutique (linen shifts), or a club/café for their friends. Crouch End has so many psychotherapists it is known as Couch End.

Older Upwards move from London to the Cotswolds and become so scared of the big city that on their rare visits everybody they see at Waterloo is a Romanian asylum-seeker on the game. Also as they don’t go out very much any more they never see ordinary people. In fact they avoid places where ordinary people might be (Oxford Street, the seaside). They ask “How can you live in London? Oxford street is so crowded!” They avoid the wrong parts of France.

To many Upwards, the world consists of their own patch (Rock, the Cotswolds, North Norfolk, Fulham, Chelsea, Scotland, Crouch End) and they don't see anything outside it. In London they travel by tube, not bus, so as not to see the places in between.

Photo by Me.