The Clapton Hart pub in Lower Clapton Road, Hackney. Photograph: Dave Hill Recent graffiti at Dalston Junction read, "Hipsters, fuck off back to Mummy." It's a bit late for that. Young, middle class incomers parading anti-materialist aesthetics and with a taste for that "edgy" inner city vibe discovered the Islington-Hackney borderland at least a generation ago.
A celebrated peace mural on the side of a building just down the road enshrines those pioneers in history. Painted in 1985 it celebrates a politics that today's "alternative" tribe, with their pipe-cleaner jeans and inventive facial hair, subscribe to in, at most, a diluted form, but perhaps their mummys (and daddys) were keener.
Maybe some of those mummys and daddys are actually long-embedded locals, people who bought a tatty 19th century terraced house three decades ago, prized its "original features," spent weeks stripping its woodwork and painting its walls white, and have reached Freedom Pass age owning property worth not far short of a million pounds.
Gentrification happens and goes on happening for as long as a city beguiles the socially adventurous ready to live cheap and with a little cash to hand. Even its phenomenon's fiercest foes might have to acknowledge that early London gentrifiers, the folk to whom Islingtonian sociologist Ruth Glass first gave a name in 1964, might legitimately lay claim to salvaging much of inner London from decay.
In The Making of Modern London, Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries describe the arrival of this rebellious breed in Canonbury, Islington, rejecting suburbia and buying for next to nothing handsome houses that were falling to bits and making them beautiful again. They quoted Harley Sherlock, architect and author, one of the first of the new kids on the block:
We wanted to be in the centre of things, we wanted to be where everybody was, we wanted to be part of London; we wanted to be where working people of all sorts were, and all this we found in Canonbury.
Sherlock describes himself and his pals knocking two houses together. Come the 1983 general election Canonbury Square front windows were festooned with posters for the newborn SDP, and Alexei Sayle had a joke about a Stoke Newington street falling down because all the middle-class people chose the same weekend to knock their front and back rooms into one.
Oh, how we laughed – even we small town oiks who would ourselves make our way in the city's blossoming media industries and find we could afford to move out of "short life" and do up a place in Homerton. How I laugh thirty years on, in a secret, know-all, way as I eavesdrop on the conversations of the whiskery film students and the bicycle-riding mums clustered round the busy barista at my local corner shop, which, in the early years after I moved from Homerton to Clapton in 1992, was one of three walking distance greasy spoons. But what would my patch of east London, Islington and Camden be like if gentrifiers had stayed away?
Worse, in some ways, for an awful lot of Londoners, including those of the post-war working class who didn't joyfully migrate to Harlow or Stevenage where new jobs and larger gardens awaited, or sell their homes to incomers and move to somewhere modern in Romford, following an eastbound dream trail that has existed for decades.
"Apologists for gentrification always accuse critical analysts of 'romanticising working class communities,'" declaims an urban geographer. So I imagine, but those "apologists" aren't exactly fibbing either. Much polemic against gentrification seems informed by a conviction that no social housing tenant would ever shop at a delicatessen or eat a panini, or has ever wished there were fewer bookmakers or pawn shops on their local shopping street, or been scared of their neighbours or found their concrete flat pack tower block to be not quite a piece of welfare state heaven on Earth.
Two years ago, a Tesco Express arrived in my backyard despite protests from among the local middle-class worried about independent shops being squeezed. The "traditional community," as some anti-gentrifiers would term everyone else, have taken a different approach – they shop there. Nearby, a new-ish Sunday market sells cheese you need a second mortgage to afford, but the comments here suggest the presence of such cheese is thought beneficial by some who'd never actually buy it.
In academia, arcane debates rage about breadths of definitions and the respective merits of production-side and consumption-side theorisations. All concerned appear quite sure that the neoliberal paradigm is the devil's work, yet unable to agree about anything else. Meanwhile, I invite readers to decide if the recent conversion of a large, long-abandoned pub close to my home - standing next to a former nightclub that had bullet holes in its ceiling - into a restaurant-bar that does a solid Sunday roast for around 12 quid has helped or hindered the lives of the secure council tenants in the high rise block next door (see picture).
Gentrification can plainly be fostered and exploited for questionable ends, but it impacts vary in type and degree. If a one-child London couple each earning 25 grand a year – less than the capital's average – in voluntary or public sector sector jobs can just about stretch to buying a two bedroom basement flat in Leyton - or Brixton? - , should they be fought and denounced as "yuppie" incomers driving out "the poor" by helping to push up land values or might "the community" derive some benefit from their energies and skills?
Weightman and Humphries remind us that the villains of a phenomenon that had really taken hold in parts of London by the mid-1970s weren't the broad-minded, modestly middle-class embracers of a big, bad inner city many others had been glad to leave, but the landlords, estate agents and property developers who were "ruthless in winkling out sitting tenants who had a legal right to stay," in order to sell Victorian houses "with potential" to professionals. They were the greatest displacers of low-income households against their will, rather than the liberal lifestyle patrons of the stripped pine industry.
The immediate issue for London's politicians and planners is – or ought to be - how best to use their powers to manage the effects of gentrification within regeneration strategies that help the majority of their residents, especially those who need it most, whilst seeking to cope with London's population growth. I'll be bending my head round that one in my next and final article in this series.
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