Lowri Griffiths on the Specific Discomfort of Being a Journalist Who Covers London’s Housing Crisis From Inside a Neighbourhood That She Helped Gentrify

A reader wrote to me last month after my piece on displacement in Hackney to point out, with a precision that I found uncomfortable because it was accurate, that I was writing about gentrification from a neighbourhood that I had moved to in 2011 specifically because it was cheap and that is now not cheap, partly because people like me moved there in 2011 and established the pattern that made it expensive. He was not unkind about this. He was just correct. This is the most difficult kind of correspondence to receive.

I have been thinking about the feedback since. The honest response is that the reader is right and that the honest response is uncomfortable in a way that I have not resolved and am not sure how to resolve. I moved to North London because I could afford North London in a way I could not afford Islington. I wrote about North London in publications that other people read. Some of those people moved to North London. The neighbourhood changed. This is not a conspiracy. It is not even a plan. It is the mechanism of gentrification, operating through ordinary people making individually reasonable decisions whose aggregate effect is the thing they would, if asked, oppose.

The Journalism Dimension

There is a specific responsibility that lifestyle journalism carries in relation to neighbourhood change that the journalism is rarely honest about. The ‘neighbourhood guide’ format — of which I have written several, and which are among my most-read pieces, and which I feel ambivalent about in proportion to how well they performed — is an accelerant of the process it documents. The Time Out neighbourhood guide to the up-and-coming area is a document that makes the area more up-and-coming. This is known and is generally not discussed because discussing it would require acknowledging that the journalism participates in the outcome it observes, and that acknowledgment complicates the clean framing that makes the journalism publishable.

I don’t have a solution. I have a discomfort that I am trying to write through rather than around. That is what this piece is, and why the reader’s email was the most important I received last month. More of my uncomfortable London journalism at The London Prat.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK