‘You work at the Guardian, but you’re from Edmonton?” That but, and the genuine wonderment packed into it, made me laugh. This was Kate Osamor speaking! Come next Thursday, she will almost certainly be elected as the Labour MP for my old home of Edmonton, in north London. She’ll move into the Palace of Westminster and take up one of the 650 most elite positions in Britain. But before that process of dessication, she can still be impressed by more humble achievements.

I’ve heard that tone before: you’re from here? The first temptation is to laugh it off – it’s a newspaper, mate, not a space mission. But soon the questions behind the question start to weigh you down. From outside the Guardian’s offices, a bus runs all the way to Edmonton Green shopping centre. The journey takes less than an hour. The idea of anyone actually making it seems to me as plausible as a fairy handing out coins for fallen teeth.

London is one of the richest, most powerful cities in history. It can raise billions for companies entering the stock market, while politicians sitting in its centre charter war after war. Here, just 10 miles north of parliament, they have neither wealth nor power: parts of Edmonton rank among the poorest in England.

You’re not meant to know about this side of the capital. The story put about by politicians and pundits and money men is that London is the one engine that roars in a largely broken economic machine. “A first-rate city with a second-rate country attached,” as the BBC’s previous economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, quoted a financier friend. Strip that statement of its self-preening and it’s really a damning indictment: a national economic system that only delivers the goods for one city.

But Edmonton demonstrates that Thatcher’s trickle-down didn’t even reach the capital’s sides, let alone its hinterland. While London now has more billionaires than any other city, according to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, a local youth worker told me last year of showing a recruitment ad to a teenager, only to be told that £10,000 a year jobs weren’t for Edmonton people. “I know my place,” he said.

That sense of hopelessness hasn’t featured in this election campaign, but I’ve heard much more of it travelling around London and Britain than any happy-clappy rubbish about “securing a brighter future”. It goes back well before the bankers’ crash and the long slump, as more and more people felt left out of an economy touted by the Tories and New Labour as a national success story: industries disappeared, jobs weren’t as good, pay rises never went far enough.

You see all of this in Edmonton, which used to be the light-industrial hub of Britain. Most of that was still intact when I was growing up there in the 80s, which made it feel like a busy, confident neighbourhood. Now it’s all vanished. In three decades, a council executive told me last year, the area has slid from working-class “prosperity” to “working poverty”. Central to that decline is something else you’ll never see in this election – the pauperisation of the working class.

Drug-dealers colonise the doorstep of her constituency office, and prostitution goes on behind it

You see this all over Edmonton. The factories and their relatively high-paying jobs have shut. The industrial estates still buzz with forklifts – only now the employers are distribution warehouses and food plants, paying minimum wage and offering zero-hours contracts and temporary work. A twentysomething I’ll call Adam works in one of those warehouses for one of Britain’s biggest firms, humping goods on to lorries to go to internet shoppers. He told me of how supervisors scream at staff, of how drivers and loaders get called up the evening before or even the morning of a shift and are told not to worry about coming in on a set contract day. Oh, and if they really want to be paid they can take it as holiday. For humping pallets about 34 hours a week, he is paid less than 13 grand a year.

These are examples of systemic abuse, and parties committed to making tweaks will never tackle it. A Labour member, Adam wants to believe the best of Ed Miliband, but admits the reality is bitterly disappointing. What do you make of a ban on “exploitative” zero-hours contracts? “For fuck’s sake,” he says. How about Ed’s plan to dampen rent rises? “Four out of 10.” Then he tells me about seeing a letting agent in Edmonton who offered a mate a flat to rent, “provided you don’t mind rats”.

For the past five years, London has been painted as a success story: a land of duckers and divers popping champagne whenever their houses go up by a grand a month, even while the rest of the country staggers out of recession. This is Boris’s yarn, and it’s what enables him to be “weaponised”. The truth is that property owners in London have made out like bandits during the crash, while those at the bottom have been shafted. LSE academics found last month that the poorest Londoners were worse off after the crash than their counterparts in the rest of the UK. Hardest hit were the poorest 10% renting in the private sector, who were 53% poorer in 2013 than they were in 2007.

As Jill Harrison at the local Citizens Advice bureau (of which I am a trustee) puts it: “London is turning into Paris: all the problems are being dumped on the suburbs.” Osamor sees it too. She tells me about drug-dealers colonising the doorstep of her constituency office, and the prostitution going on behind it. Those are just the lighter offences: Edmonton’s latest nickname is Shanktown, on account of the number of stabbings.

The local Labour-led council has done some heroic work, most notably on building social housing

Out in the suburbs such problems can be much more easily ignored. Organisations have neither the funding nor the attention of the political centre to tackle them. The local Labour-led council has done some heroic work, most notably on building social housing, but it has been told off by the chieftains on the Westminster frontbench for “running ahead of national policy”. And the blame can be more easily transferred from politics to individuals. When a hustings was held here, in the back of an internet cafe; only two candidates turned up – Osamor and the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition’s man; and only one contribution from the floor was applauded, from a black woman who asked: “Why would anyone choose to live in Edmonton?” This is what collective shame looks like, and a sense of being trapped. I don’t remember either when I was there.

Plenty of places like Edmonton are dotted all around the M25 and north of the Watford Gap. They are offered next to nothing by the national economy, while Westminster only checks in every five years. The frontbenchers and their spads are too fixated on swing voters and marginal seats to care the rest of the time. This is a different Britain than the one confected for campaigns: post-growth, post-democracy. I bet you won’t see it on election night.

• This article was amended on 29 April 2015. An earlier version said incorrectly that only one hustings was held in Edmonton.