Gentrification 7

Trying to rename New York neighbourhoods in order to gentrify them has a long history. (@davidjmadden)

Wake up Nimbys, the option is either Tory housebuilding or Marxist social engineering (Daily Telegraph 7 June 2017) Can they possibly mean “Look out, they’re going to plonk poor people next door to YOU?” Of course they can. “Planning would soon be completely centralised, with bureaucrats in Whitehall dictating everything to the smallest detail… Mass council-house building, including in leafy areas, run by Marxist ideologues, a giant social engineering programme directly aimed at growing the Labour base and killing off the home-ownership dream?” The Tory alternative is new garden cities and suburbs, where poor people can be segregated and “home-ownership culture” preserved. Because of course, apart from the annoyance of having poor people living next door, it would bring down the price of your house. Oh I see – the whole point of Tory “garden cities”, ie new towns, is to keep house prices up, and keep people who need to be housed away from Tory voters. (And note the weasel “leafy areas” for “rich areas”.)

I grew up in the Yorkshire equivalent of what posh people who live in Essex claim is Hertfordshire. (John Avocado ‏@SuperCroup)

Increasingly clear my mum has been slyly upgrading my London location to Greenwich for the benefit of the neighbours. (via Twitter)

The British obsession with class has left writers inventing their own, fictional settings, in order to escape judgments about their characters' background and social standing... Sophie Hannah, the bestselling crime author, said she had created a new county for her novels after finding homegrown readers could not avoid thinking about the stereotypes of the British regions. Saying people are now "obsessed with attaching ideas about what kind of people live in a certain place", she claimed she had struggled to escape judgments about storylines. (Guardian. “Now”? They always did it!)

“Islington dinner-party” is now code for “dangerously left-wing, not nearly racist enough”. (Islington may have a few million-pound houses, but it also has a lot of social housing and deprivation.)

Complaining about the "easy condemnation" of gentrification is the most tiresome form of fake contrarianism there is. (@davidjmadden)

A vandal in Fresno explained his actions: “If you truly love downtown try embracing the folks who’ve been here for decades instead of just running them out and replacing them with snobby little hipsters looking down their noses at everyone else.” He complained that rich white people from North Fresno didn't want to mix with the more diverse people of South Fresno.

Let's rip down anonymous big blocks & spend millions replacing them with anonymous big blocks. (@createstreets on 21st century architecture and planning)

Upwards like to say of a place “It’s very atmospheric”, meaning that it's close to the stereotype they have of a (Polish restaurant, Greek island, Russian housing estate). East London is so atmospheric - like something out of Dickens!

Gentrification used to be called “tarting up”. Workers’ cottages got brightly painted front doors flanked by little trees in pots. Now, when your area is rechristened “something quarter” you can consider yourself gentrified. But it usually includes knocking down something decent and building tin-can flats.

In the 80s, Upwards used to say hopefully that their area was “coming up”, meaning that middle-class people were moving in, so the pavements would surely become cleaner, the street lights brighter and the shops less grimy. And you might even be able to buy lemons, rocket and tarragon vinegar. They waited years while everything stayed the same apart from one Marxist bookshop. What they really wanted to “come up” was of course the value of their house.

It happened in Hackney – the street lights are brighter, enabling “night life” for young people, but we’re too old for that now. We were thinking more of reclaiming beautiful old Georgian houses which were too good for the garment factories and working-class families that inhabited them.

The South Bank... entirely full of pop-up fish restaurants and jugglers on unicycles. (‏@IanMartin Juggling unicyclists haven't been seen since the 80s, but there are too many street food stalls, and over-amplified singer-songwriters given busking licences by a tin-eared committee.)

Central London used to be quite seedy and downmarket and there were few tourists. It was full of chorus girls and motor salesmen, according to a friend – also market traders, tarts and film companies. The area around Centre Point was all guitar, sheet music and drumstick shops. Now it's getting more and more crowded with restaurants, especially noodle bars and burrito bars for the Japanese and American visitors. And everywhere is rather expensive. When I was young and a student we couldn’t afford to eat out all the time! I suppose now young people get decent salaries, and affluent middle-class people send their children to university in greater numbers.

Someone makes the point that hipsters can’t afford a flat or get a regular job – but they can have locally sourced sausages and 50 different types of coffee. (Perhaps because they only job they can get is to open a café.) Surely the market can’t sustain ALL those coffee shops? Except they don’t just sell coffee, they are shared offices as more and more people “work from home”. And middle-class people live in public more than they used to, and they have laptops, and it’s easier to work surrounded by other people, and they don’t have tables at home because there isn’t room.

http://classsystem.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/gentrification-6.html

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.

Classy Areas

More of a hamlet, really.

Where you live in London says so much about you - acceptability vanishes within a few streets. And it changes so fast.

I can’t believe my daughter is now priced out of – Walthamstow! (Middle-class Dad, Inside London, Jan 2014)

The chattering classes are furious at being priced out of Islington. They discovered the area in the 60s when it was grotty and working class, and beautiful Georgian houses were considered “slums” as they were divided up and whole families lived in single rooms and shared a bathroom.

Surely the way to tell whether your part of Croydon is going upmarket is to ask the question 'Is it in Croydon?' If yes, no. (Lee Jackson ‏@VictorianLondon)

Well-off homeowners in San Francisco object to affordable homes being built near them. “A strong organized opposition has emerged, called Grow Potrero Responsibly…. A resident states that she doesn’t like ‘the concrete jungles changing our quality neighborhoods.’ Another says ‘Too big for our sweet, quiet neighborhood’. Another homeowner said that the development would ‘surely tip the scale in favor of relocating to other counties.’ ‘You are seeing a real class protectionism where homeowners are trying to stop other people from coming into the neighbourhood.’” (bizjournals.com)

The premises — after a hiatus as a Filipino restaurant that didn’t sit easily in what estate agents in their wisdom once christened Brackenbury Village — are now in the ownership of Ossie Gray. (Fay Maschler, Evening Standard)

Is the latest middle-class thing complaining about people moving into your street and installing air-conditioning?

Do you live in a “real village”? Or is it “only a hamlet”, as my parents used to say about Linchmere. (Houses, church, farm, green, but no shops.)

Jilly Cooper describes upper middle-class couples who buy a country cottage as well as their city house, and spend hours every weekend in a traffic jam commuting between the two. (And the thing you want is always in the other house.)

Upmarket Caro Stow Crat thinks that because the Middletons are nouveau riche, Berkshire isn't really the country.

More here.