Walking Backwards to the Future—Waking Up to Class and Gentrification in London

Abstract

In this article, we consider briefly some of the arguments advanced by Tom Slater and others about the direction taken by gentrification research and, in particular, the arguments that the working class has been evicted from such research in favour of a perspective that is overly sympathetic to a middle-class view of the city. Whilst accepting some of the critique advanced by Slater and others, we refute his arguments about the nature of class and class change in contemporary cities. In particular, we argue that gentrification research needs to come to terms with a new urban class map in which the largest occupational grouping, by some distance, is the middle class and that the next largest group is often the economically inactive.

Keywords:

• Gentrification
• social class
• London
• class change
• ethnic minority
• middle class

Notes

1. Somewhat oddly, the invited participants (with the important exception of Freeman) consist of those who might have been expected to demonstrate support for Slater.

2. Wacquant makes a telling point along similar lines when he identifies only one paper in IJURR with the words working class in the title—by Watt as it turns out.

3. Some of this section draws on our final report to the ESRC, Butler, T. (2007) Gentrification, Ethnicity and Education in East London: Full Research Report, ESRC End of Award Report RES-000-23-0793 (Swindon: ESRC).