RECENTLY, the Guardian has been running an interesting series of videos on its website, looking at gentrification in the poorer parts of London. One, presented by the novelist Alex Wheatle, looks at Brixton, a part of south London which was once best known for being the site of a spectacular riot in 1981, but where yuppies now have a slightly bewildering choice of pop-up restaurants to visit, serving sourdough pizza and £8 burritos. The clip is worth watching: it is nostalgic for what Brixton used to be like (pumping reggae and curious food stalls) without blaming everything bad on the incomers.

I take an interest in Brixton, for the simple reason that I have lived there for a little over two years now and I have witnessed (and been part of) its change. Last weekend, I spent a few hours wandering around the Brixton Splash—which is sort of like a mini-Notting Hill carnival—and the divisions between the Brixton of old and the new yuppie influx were stark. Public school girls sipped Red Stripe beers next to old Jamaican rastas. I overheard one kid saying to a friend that he “had never seen so many white people at Brixton Splash before.” Yet gentrification has not completely brought about an end to Brixton’s previously bad reputation: a young man was stabbed later that evening.

The curious thing about Brixton is that it is demographically a big exception. Throughout most of London, the “white British” population, as the census curiously defines people who are both white and of British nationality, is falling precipitously, as people move in vast numbers to the deep suburbs of the home counties. Between 2001 and 2011, the “white British” population of London fell by 620,000, even as the population of London overall swelled. Every single London borough registered a decrease in its white-British population—in some, it was stark: Newham, in east London, lost 38% of its white-British people.

Yet look at ward level data, and it is clear that a few places buck the trend. Brixton Hill increased its white-British population between 2001 and 2011. So too did large parts of Hackney, Islington, Wandsworth and Camden. In Stoke Newington and Dalston—both parts of Hackney which have gentrified faster than anywhere—the white British population leapt up by 15% and 26% respectively.

I’ve not got data detailed enough to show it, but I suspect that actually, there are two quite different but complementary migratory trends going on in London. On the one hand, homeowners—in particular those who were lucky enough to buy their council properties under “right-to-buy” when values were so much lower—are taking advantage of booming property prices to sell up and move out to bigger more luxurious properties in the suburbs. That includes a lot of the white working class, but also aspirational British Indians and Africans. On the other hand, yuppies like me are moving in in ever greater numbers, buying up (or more commonly, renting) properties for ever higher prices.

The interesting question is explaining the latter part—why are yuppies now so determined to move back into the inner city neighbourhoods they once shunned? Well, there are some push factors. Since the 1990s, the number of people going to university has increased spectacularly, creating lots of educated and mobile young people who value urban living. The economy is creating lots of skilled jobs in central London, so they tend to end up there. Driving is less popular these days, which boosts inner cities, since good public transport relies on high population densities. And yuppies are waiting ever longer to marry and have children, which means that they can cope with living in a one-bedroom flat with no garden for longer.

Just as important, some of the things that made urban living less than attractive in the past are disappearing. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Thames was lined with smoggy docks and power stations. Until the mid-1990s, crime rates were soaring together with drug addiction. Perhaps most importantly, the schools were atrocious, which meant that even the most committed gentrifiers would disappear to Surrey as soon as they had their first child.

Now crime is falling precipitously, especially in the inner city. And London’s inner-city schools are miles ahead of the rest of the country. Take this statistic: in 2011, 51% of the children on free school meals in inner-city Westminster went onto higher education. In leafy Hertfordshire, just 22% did. And that progress is self-reinforcing. Twenty years ago, even if the city was more fun, aspirational new teachers didn’t want to work in inner-London schools because it was so hopeless. Now, they all want to: London’s schools have no trouble recruiting new teachers, despite a long pay-freeze.

And so gentrification is no longer just the doing of young, single professionals. It increasingly takes in families too. It is here to stay—indeed, it will keep spreading to ever more unlikely locations. Even since the 2011 census, the wave has probably moved on from Brixton and Dalston, where young families are now settling. New graduates now are moving to what were once even grottier places such as Peckham and New Cross. In time, they may even make it to Newham. If so, if there is another census in 2021, it is likely to show that the “white flight” that so worries some commentators will have gone into reverse. By 2031, we may even have to start worrying about the poverty and isolation of the home counties.