20 CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 COLIN THOM Gentrification in London Changing socio-economic conditions have contributed to a range of different forms of gentrification, some of which threaten the creativity and diversity that make London special. Though there are historic antecedents, gentrification as we think of it today is a post-war phenomenon, closely linked to improvements in health, standards of living and levels of income in British society. Hugely significant was the post-war decline of industry, and consequently the disintegration and almost total disappearance of the capital’s industrial working class and its culture. Into the vacuum left behind came a changed inner-city employment structure with an emergent service sector and growth in office development, mostly populated by a bettereducated and better-off middle class. Other than the effects of the second world war, it is the recolonisation of former working-class areas by these middle-class professionals that has been the single biggest influence on the residential composition of inner London in the 20th and 21st centuries. Early ‘organic’ gentrification The well-known, ‘classic’ early phase of gentrification first became evident on a large scale in the 1960s and 70s, when young, affluent professionals, priced out of established uppermiddle-class areas like Hampstead, Highgate or Chelsea, began moving to other convenient but often poorer areas, buying up and restoring the generally rundown period houses there. This process is often referred to as ‘organic’ gentrification, as it differs conceptually from more recent examples in areas like Docklands, and was reliant on the rehabilitation of existing housing stock by individual homeowners, rather than large-scale redevelopment. The areas that these pioneer gentrifiers populated are also well-known: Islington, Camden, Hackney in north London, Battersea and Clapham south of the river. Their attractions were several. Usually, they were on the fringe of an already socially acceptable area – what you might term ‘spillover’ gentrification. These districts often had a sense of independence or detachment from less salubrious areas. For instance, the most exclusive parts of south Battersea around Lavender Hill and ‘Between the Commons’, where gentrification took hold in the Thatcherite 1980s and never let go, are completely cut off from the council estates and tower blocks of north Battersea by the broad swathe of east-west train tracks running in Anti-gentrification graffiti in Tiverton Street, near Newington Causeway, in 2015 (Photo: themostinept via Flickr) A terrace of rehabilitated mid19th-century suburban houses in Hartland Road, Camden (Photo: Alison Day via Flickr)
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