Are we quite sure we’re against gentrification, the urban phenomenon routinely blamed for everything held to be destroying London’s soul, from high housing costs, to corporatised shopping streets, to the pricing out of artists and other creative folk, to the alleged “social cleansing” of the poor? Do we absolutely know that gentrification is to blame for such bad things? Do we really know what we mean by the word?

Its most popular deployment is familiar: it disparages the effects of an influx into neighbourhoods “with potential” of newcomers who are wealthier than those already there. At its most pejorative it characterises economic and demographic change in London – especially Inner London - as the colonisation by wealthy people of working class areas with high percentages of ethnic minority residents who are “pushed out” as a result.

This story has become firmly entrenched among the metropolitan left and beyond. Resistance has been declared. Hostility is aimed at estate agents, property developers and local councils deemed too friendly with them. Campaigners vow to defend “the community” and what they say are its wishes against the ravenous encroachments of “the rich”.

The value of all this is that it highlights genuine anxieties about change and the current rapid pace of it, many of them easy to sympathise with. But that value is limited. The analysis that drives it may not be quite as solid or as righteous as it thinks.

Gentrification in London is not new. It has been going on for decades, beginning in the 1960s when bits of the dirty old post-war city began to swing and adventurous young architects started doing up dirt cheap Georgian squares. By the early-1980s, Alexei Sayle had a joke about entire streets in Stoke Newington falling down because all the middle-class people who’d bought terraced houses there chose the same weekend to knock their front and back rooms into one.

Thirty years on, that same joke might be made about Leyton, Peckham, Deptford or Plaistow. There is comedy too in the dislike gentrification inspires. Some of its fiercest opponents are its instigators: the media types and liberal young professionals of every kind who settle the wild and “edgy” urban frontiers, not necessarily to the delight of people already there, and in so doing quite literally prepare the ground for the value “uplift” to come. The funny part is that this truth escapes them.

There is, though, a broader and a deeper irony. It is that these forces of change accused of ruining London are products of its revitalisation. People forget that for four decades the city was bombed out, smogged up and in decline. The population of Inner London still hasn’t recovered to its levels of 1939. Today, people bewail a “hollowing out” attributed to rich foreigners who allegedly “buy to leave” in large numbers. It’s worth remembering that ordinary people have migrated from the centre of London to the suburbs and beyond for many, many years, often eagerly. Skilled manual workers who headed for the New Towns in the 1950s were searching for the promised land.

By the start of the present century, the whole dynamic had changed. London had become a wellspring of economic growth, gushing money from its turbo-charged Square Mile. Where there is profit, there are opportunities. Where there are opportunities, there are people eager to take them – in London’s case, more and more people, from near and far, many of them needing somewhere to set up shop, all of them needing somewhere to live.



Demand for space is the seed of gentrification. Its growth stems from a failure to meet that demand. Squeezed by rising prices, those too affluent to qualify for social housing but not affluent enough to buy in newly-expensive areas – sometimes the very areas where they were born – look further afield. Opposition to gentrification sometimes sounds like the way a particular section of the London middle-class complains about not being able to get a mortgage.

When we look at London’s unacceptable poverty, especially its child poverty, should gentrification be held responsible or is doing so a distraction from the job of addressing the issue properly? Assertions that it is “pushing out” the poor in London look less persuasive in light of the very high levels of social housing that still exist in the classic gentrified boroughs of north London. In Camden, 35% of all housing is for social rent, in Islington it’s 42% and in Hackney, 44%. Although poverty rates have fallen in those boroughs, the absolute numbers of poor people living in them remain high.

There are good arguments that gentrified areas meet poor people’s needs less well, as shops become posher and more niche. But there are also good ones for saying that they benefit from middle-class pressure for better schools and public spaces. Some studies in the United States, focussing on the changing ethnic compositions of urban areas, have found that black people actually moved out of those that had gentrified less than they departed those that hadn’t.

It’s time to get our gentrification story straight. Edward Clarke of the UK thinktank Centre for Cities writes that the debate should not be reduced to “a simple battle between plucky communities and greedy gentrifiers”, stressing that this “fails to recognise that the roles and functions of urban neighbourhoods have always changed over time and within a city” or to acknowledge that gentrifying “new work” businesses can create new jobs and improve wages across the board.

He adds that “the myth that creative incomers are to blame” for rising housing costs and commercial rents works against addressing the true root of the problem, which he sums up as “poor city management”. To improve this, Clarke argues for better skills training for local people, more planning and tax-raising powers to be devolved to local politicians and more land, including a small portion of green belt, being made available for building.

The thing we call gentrification raises large issues for London - and all the UK’s growing cities - and opposing it like trying to hold back the sea. Dealing with it requires a constructive, practical, flexible political response that helps to shape this force of urban change to best and most equitable effect. The politics of protest aren’t up to it.