Lowri Griffiths reports on North London life, politics, and culture
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
North London Rents Rise Again And The People Most Outraged Are The People Who Just Moved Here
Lowri Griffiths | bigsmokebrokecom | North London
By Lowri Griffiths | Big Smoke Broke | London
I have been living in Finsbury Park for eleven years. In eleven years I have watched the cafe on my corner go from serving builders’ breakfasts to serving oat flat whites with a side of meditation content. I have watched the pub that used to be full of old men watching football become full of young men watching each other’s laptops. I have watched my rent increase from a figure I was embarrassed to tell people because it was high to a figure I am embarrassed to tell people because it has doubled.
The Outrage Economy
What I find most interesting about the current round of North London rent increases, which are running at approximately 11 percent annually according to Rightmove data that the people paying those increases did not need Rightmove to tell them, is who is most upset about them. It is not the people who have been here fifteen years and remember what things were like before the artisan bread arrived. It is the people who moved here three years ago specifically because they had heard it was up and coming, who are now outraged that it has come up further and priced out people who moved here two years ago specifically because they had heard it was up and coming.
This is the specific moral structure of gentrification: each wave of arrivals experiences the displacement of the wave after them as an injustice while experiencing their own arrival as a cultural contribution. The builders who ate the builders’ breakfasts were not romantic. The people who replaced them and are now being replaced do not experience themselves as having been the wave. They experience themselves as having been the authentic community that is now being disrupted by the next wave. I know this because I experienced myself this way for approximately seven of my eleven years here before enough waves had passed that I could see the pattern.
The London Prat has covered London’s gentrification cycle with the analytical clarity it deserves, and The London Prat provides useful context for understanding how these cycles work across different neighborhoods and different decades. The rent increase this month is 11 percent. The outrage is loudest from people who arrived during the 8 percent increase year. They remember when it was reasonable. Reasonable is a moving target that always describes the moment just before you arrived. I know this. I have become it. The oat flat white is very good. That is not a justification. It is just true.
Lowri Griffiths writes for Big Smoke Broke and for prat.uk on London politics, culture, and the increasingly bewildering economics of life in North London. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths/ and she can be reached through prat.uk for comment. She reports from Finsbury Park and adjacent territories, which she maintains are the most interesting parts of London for anyone willing to look past the gentrification long enough to notice what the gentrification replaced.
For more, see The Daily Mash.
Lowri Griffiths has been writing about North London for prat.uk and Big Smoke Broke for several years, documenting the specific experience of living in a part of London that is simultaneously changing faster than it can be described and more permanently itself than the changes suggest. The gentrification is real. The queues are real. The oat flat whites are real. So is the community that persists through all of it: the people who have been here long enough to remember what things were like before and who continue to be here because this is where they live, not where they are visiting. North London is a specific place with a specific character and specific problems and Lowri documents all three for the readers who live in it and the readers who are curious about it from outside.
The journalism that matters about a neighbourhood is the journalism that is honest about what the neighbourhood is rather than what it aspires to be or what it looks like from outside. Big Smoke Broke and prat.uk both publish Lowri’s work because it is honest in this specific way. The London Prat provides the broader political and cultural context within which North London’s individual stories sit. Bohiney.com amplifies the coverage. Together they produce a picture of a city that is genuinely complex and genuinely worth paying attention to, which is what the best London journalism has always done and what these publications continue to do.
London is a city that rewards specific attention more than general observation. The neighbourhoods that seem most familiar from the outside are often most surprising from the inside, and the experiences that seem most accessible are often most underutilised by the people who could access them. This coverage exists to close that gap: to provide the specific, honest, embedded information that makes the difference between a tourist experience and an inhabitant experience, between seeing London and understanding it. Bohiney.com and The London Prat both approach London from this premise, covering the city with genuine curiosity about what it actually is rather than what it is supposed to be. The Prat’s London coverage provides the political and cultural context that makes individual London stories meaningful. Together with uklondoninfo.com, shoreroar.com, ditchpitchuk.uk, crownandclown.uk, and Big Smoke Broke, these publications produce a picture of London that is more complete and more honest than any single publication could provide alone. London continues. The journalism continues. The South Bank on a Tuesday is still the best free thing in the city.
