Olly Zanetti: Gentrification
While middle class invasion of poor urban neighbourhoods may bring some benefits, let's not wipe out what was there before.
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A new show has arrived on UK TV called Seven Days. This reality TV show follows the lives of a collection of people from the London neighbourhood of Notting Hill. But imagine you're standing, clipboard in hand on your local high street, stopping people and asking “what would you most associate with Notting Hill?” Your answers, I reckon, would be split almost 50:50 between the Notting Hill Carnival and the Hugh Grant movie Notting Hill. The former an event started primarily by black people and born of the poor race relations of the 1950s and 1960s, the latter a romcom which gently mocks the buffoonery of 1990s white English bourgeois. One place: two completely different associations.
Before Notting Hill became the kind of area that filmmakers with an eye for the American market wanted to know about and where shoebox-sized studios were exchanged for six figure sums, it was pretty run down. It was populated primarily by relatively impoverished Caribbean migrants until the 1980s when hordes of well-to-do and generally white folk moved in, attracted by period houses that were relatively cheap at the time.
The process is called gentrification and it’s a story that's been played out in cities the world over. Sure, gentrification brings money and areas get tarted up, but that might not be such great news for the people living there. Rising housing costs can sometimes push people away and dissolve whole communities. However, it's complicated process and a heroic narrative of the plucky poor standing up to (or being screwed over by) the undeserving rich tends to over-simplify things. So too does a crude black versus white narrative. After all, cities are dynamic places and things do change, cultures and people get mixed up, and there's little to be celebrated in boarded up shop fronts and dilapidated buildings.
Head east across town and gentrification's happening again, this time in Dalston, an area also known historically for its Afro-Caribbean community. This time it's not families seeking opulent Victoriana who are leading the process, rather its trendy middle class kids (parodied painfully accurately by the video Being a Dickhead's Cool) closely followed by thirty-something apartment dwellers looking for something a bit, ahem, 'edgy'.
While a moustache and a Gameboy necklace might not be my thing, there's nothing inherently wrong with new people moving to the area (and besides I'd be a hypocrite to criticise: I might not live in Dalston but I'm not that far up the road). Like I said, cities are dynamic. But city spaces aren't just places where vibrant culture happens, that culture finds its way into the physical urban landscape. And as the population in this part of Hackney has changed, so parts of that landscape important to many people have been shoved aside, making way for things the area's newer and more wealthy residents want. It's something filmmaker Emily James has documented in her brilliant film, The Battle for Broadway Market.
Dalston Junction is now home to hundreds of swanky new flats and a station on the new London Overground line. As part of the redevelopment, the area's run down local library is to be replaced. What could be wrong with that? The answer, the new name it's getting. What was once the CLR James Library, a name which memorialised the Afro-Trinidadian essayist, novelist and left-wing, anti-colonial thinker, will – if the council and developers get their way – be called simply the Dalston Library and Archives.
And so another part of Hackney, something which represented a vibrant part of its history, will be lost. A name which offered a daily reminder of the struggles of race and class which were fought by many (and arguably, are still going on) will be replaced by something depressingly functional. I'm not arguing that every city street should become a museum piece, that every grotty fried chicken takeaway should be preserved as a piece of 'authentic working class food culture'. Let's keep our cities dynamic, places where exciting things are happening. But let's also be sensitive, and think about the traces of history we want to leave on our landscape. Because it's those traces of the past which are what makes our cities today really interesting.
Join the campaign to retain the library's original name by signing this petition.
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Gentrification (text) by Olly Zanetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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