London’s Gentrification: Widening the Gap
Time Out recently declared Peckham the best place to live in London, because apparently, it’s ‘artsy, gritty;’ and has a ‘lovely atmosphere’. But what’s so gritty about it? The fact jerk chicken is now ‘cool’ among hipsters? Or is it just that the tag of the notorious Peckham Boys gang considered art now?
Perhaps we should explore where it all started in East London with the rise of the hipster. Noticeable through exploitative prices in restaurants and stores, hipsters are often middle class; the type of people who can afford to have their plates chipped in restaurants on purpose and refuse to buy cheap high street clothing for the more expensive, vintage alternative. It was from the birth of the hipster that gentrification in these poorer London areas started to rise, as it was suddenly ‘gritty’ to sit in a mock-derelict café where nothing on the menu is cheaper than £15. For most locals in the area, the type of lifestyle that hipsters ironically adopted was their reality.
Brick Lane, famously located in Tower Hamlets (once one of the poorest boroughs in London), is home to a migrant Bengali community in London, at least this was for the most part until the last 20 years or so. Within this time, traditional Bangladeshi shops have made way for vintage stores, weird art galleries and designer boutiques. If you were to walk from one end of the street to the other, there would be no prizes for guessing which end has fallen victim to gentrification; one has a bustling environment of art students keen to spend their money on the coolest leather vintage jacket, while the other has a string of struggling Bengali restaurants. It is this clear divide which has set a precedent, and for me, creates a real sense of uneasiness over gentrification.
Whenever I see London’s regeneration emerge from places like Shoreditch (and more recently with Brixton and Peckham), I can’t help but feel unnerved. Not for the middle class white hipster who’s enjoying a £15 burger and fries after hunting for the perfect Adidas tracksuit, but for the ethnic minorities who are being pushed out of the place they called their home just because their town is the new ‘in’ thing.
Cynics and sceptics alike will blame the London housing crisis for this surge in migration to cheaper areas of London, yet the increase in gentrification predominantly encouraged by the middle class encourages the affluent to move to these areas and drive house prices up. Take Dalston in East London, for example. In the past five years, house prices have increased by nearly 60%. Places like Shoreditch, Brixton and Peckham are already on the periphery of central London, which means that ethnic minorities who dominated these areas and were already on the outside looking in, must move further outside of London thus creating even more alienation than we have seen just in Brick Lane alone.
Is this gentrification a way for the middle class to appropriate ethnic culture and make it acceptable to live these areas when they would not do so otherwise? Maybe so. The fact that gentrification in London seems to occur in these specific areas of diverse culture certainly suggests that it is another way for the middle class to fetishize foreign cultures. Even on the official Brick Lane website, the area is marked as ‘edgy’. Again, what’s so edgy about it? The long history of poverty and social injustice? Or do you just think it’s edgy that the Brick Lane sign is written in more than one language?
When I hear the word ‘edgy’ being used to describe these areas, it flags up images of people instantly thinking they’re cool because they have a black friend. These kinds of words make me uncomfortable because my culture is not something you can call edgy and gritty, but it’s something that should be normalised. I don’t want people to be interested in my culture because it’s fashionable to do so, but because they have a genuine interest.
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say gentrification is a form of racism, but when I see Turtle Bay, a corporate chain of mass produced Caribbean food in the heart of Brixton, I can’t help but get angry. Gentrification is making cultural appropriation more acceptable, and we need to stop validating it. Does this mean you should stop eating at and visiting these places? Of course not. If you want to enjoy vintage clothing and quirky stores you should not feel pressured to stop, but all I ask is for some awareness to the other half of the story.
By all means, if you want to eat my country’s food and appreciate my culture please go ahead, but please don’t slap us in the face by driving us out while you’re doing it.
