In recent times, the language utilized by property brokers to explain numerous London neighbourhoods has change into more and more meaningless and, in some instances, absurd. Right here, I’m considering partly of my mum, who grew up in east London’s Leyton, and her incredulous response to the property pages labelling a piece of her outdated, unglamorous stomping floor ‘Leyton Village’ – and ‘villages’ and ‘quarters’ do certainly abound on this new Manhattanised terminology.
However there are extra delicate examples of this blurry and imprecise language. Hackney turns into ‘the east finish’, Stoke Newington turns into Dalston (or vice versa), Walthamstow is ‘Hackney borders’, and so forth. One impact of this vacuous advertising and marketing schtick, past its relationship to rising rents and home costs, is that it flattens out the geographical, historic and cultural specificity of those areas.
John Medhurst is at pains to set this proper in his wealthy and detailed account of the north London working class from the 1950s as much as the current day. He begins by defining his phrases. The geographical boundaries he units for the examine are by his personal admission contestable. North London for him is:
‘a big semi-circle of territory with the River Thames as its undulating base, the approximate border of which flows north-west-south from Shoreditch via Tottenham, Golders Inexperienced, Willesden and Hammersmith, i.e., your entire London Boroughs of Islington, Camden, Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham, and the Metropolis of Westminster; most of Hackney and Haringey; enclaves of the Metropolis and some western slivers of Tower Hamlets; and people elements of Enfield, Ealing, Barnet and Brent that intently connect to this interior core.’
Some would possibly quibble with this, particularly when he claims – maybe barely mischievously – that ‘some areas south of the river, reminiscent of Borough, Vauxhall and Battersea, have by proximity and higher transport hyperlinks at all times had a north London air about them’. However there’ll at all times be a component of subjectivity in such an account of a spot and Medhurst owns as much as its idiosyncrasy from the start.
There’s a lot right here to again him up. He has a delightful granular exactness when justifying why sure areas are, for him, geographically and spiritually ‘north London’. For many who would possibly label Hackney as east London, for instance, he tells us that it has at all times been extra accessible to north London than to locations within the East Finish. That is partly geography but additionally because of the Stratford-Willesden Junction North London line (now included into the London Overground).
Myths and mobilisation
‘North London’ has lengthy been lazily and ignorantly thrown about as a signifier of privilege, often to discredit left-wing arguments. This tendency attained absurd ranges throughout Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn’s management of the Labour Occasion, and reached a horrid apotheosis in 2019 when Priti Patel, justifying the ending of ‘free motion of individuals as soon as and for all’, stated she would take no lectures from ‘the north London metropolitan elite’. The slur has anti-semitic connotations, a truth which has now change into extra extensively acknowledged, and this concept of out-of-touch privilege may also be countered with financial actuality – in regards to the high rate of child poverty in various north London boroughs, for instance. As Medhurst places it, his need to inform the story comes from the ‘absurd but widespread assumption that North London has no working class.’
He does a wonderful job of conveying the very specific high quality of those communities. He factors out that, within the interval he’s writing about, working-class Londoners haven’t, largely, labored in manufacturing from scratch, and as a substitute have primarily discovered employment in sectors reminiscent of restore work, textiles, market buying and selling, the service trade, transport and quite a lot of expert crafts. (There are exceptions to this, which he acknowledges, such because the manufacturing centres of Park Royal and Tottenham Hale). Medhurst makes use of an enormous vary of sources, together with educational research, social histories, memoir, novels, movie, TV exhibits and pop music, in addition to his personal intensive interviews with folks from the realm, which make up massive sections of the e-book.
Medhurst’s need to inform this story comes from the ‘absurd but widespread assumption that north London has no working class’
The e-book exhibits the fabric struggles of this life – poor housing situations, racism, insecure and badly paid work, discrimination, violence – via the wealthy particular person views of Medhurst’s interviewees. However we additionally hear about working-class mobilisation within the face of those challenges: rent strikes, direct action, anti-fascist demonstrations, squatting, sex worker strikes. Social housing is essential to all these tales, in fact, and he tells us the tales, fates and fortunes of many key estates.
We study that the Golden Lane property subsequent to the Barbican was initially constructed for single folks and {couples}, relatively than households with youngsters. Medhurst describes the low-rise and spacious design of the 1960s Maiden Lane property in Camden, its struggles within the 1970s, and its turnaround within the 1980s and 90s. He additionally rails towards ‘the PFI con’ that Islington Council fell for with its social housing within the early 2000s, which resulted in mismanagement, poor high quality management and misspending.
Medhurst offers accounts of many working-class council tenants – together with his dad – who purchased their flats underneath the Thatcher authorities’s right-to-buy scheme. Whereas alive to the attractiveness of the scheme, he doesn’t shrink back from the devastating impact it had on north London’s council inventory, with an enormous proportion of it now for personal hire or promoting at open market costs, and lots of of those estates massively engaging to rich middle-class professionals.
Cultural capital
Medhurst is especially alive to the myriad social and cultural riches current in a childhood lived within the central elements of north London. There are fascinating accounts from individuals who grew up in Soho, Bloomsbury and Covent Backyard, who have been capable of pop into the British Museum with their mates as youngsters or run round in Covent Backyard market. He describes the ‘much less regularised and predictable’ rhythms of a life lived so near the centre: ‘If solely by advantage of proximity, aspiration, imitation and fortunate happenstance, they possessed or acquired extra innate cultural capital than others not so luckily located.’
Medhurst’s interviewees embody market merchants, jewellers, those that labored in golf equipment and bars, or whose household owned pubs. This might typically lead to a sort of ‘wheeler supplier’ mentality, which Medhurst offers us within the image he attracts of his father Ted, who trod ‘the effective line between legality and illegality’ together with his numerous entrepreneurial schemes within the 1980s. Medhurst’s emphasis on the cultural lifetime of north London can be key right here. I significantly loved the sections on pop music. There are tales of acts already moderately well-known for his or her north London connections reminiscent of Rod Stewart, Madness and The Clash, however I used to be thrilled to see Wham! folded right into a historical past of the metropolis as nicely.
A lot fascinating materials has been gathered collectively for this e-book and the chronological chapters, with out themed sections or headings, can have the marginally dizzying impact of piling element upon element earlier than you’ve had the prospect to take all of it in. I used to be eager about Medhurst’s private experiences rising up in north London and his personal working life within the space – for instance, promoting books in Villiers Avenue market and his stint of employment within the Hackney unemployment profit workplace – and I might have favored him to develop on this in additional element. A quick account of his household background, together with his father Ted, is given within the endnotes, however a extra thorough engagement together with his personal private story may maybe have been used as a thread all through the e-book and would have been one technique to give it a tighter construction.
I additionally wished to know extra in regards to the enormous amount of interviews he undertook. How did he know these folks? The place did the interviews happen? I suppose in educational phrases you would possibly name this ‘positionality’, however it needn’t be achieved within the style of a dry methodological account, and a few descriptive framing would definitely have helped orientate the reader on this sometimes overwhelming sea of knowledge.
That stated, the e-book was typically an actual pleasure to learn, with the depth and element of Medhurst’s data and the originality of his perspective. Although the narrative doesn’t shrink back from the intense injustices and cruelty visited upon north London working-class communities – together with the gentrification, racism and violence of the current day – he appears decided to not succumb to pessimism. Maybe probably the most worthwhile facet of the e-book is its effortlessly inclusive method, particularly the anti-racism operating all through. He rejects any concept that migrants usually are not a part of the working class and repeatedly attracts consideration to the occasions the place folks from all sections of the neighborhood have mobilised collectively to battle injustice. From this, many individuals, together with on the left, may study so much.
Eli Davies is a researcher and author from London
This text first appeared in subject #240, Summer season 2023, Debt. Subscribe right this moment to get your journal delivered sizzling off the press!
Hackney Carnival in 2016 (Credit score: Walej by way of 
