The Coffee Shops That Colonised the Chicken Shops Are Now Being Replaced by Something More Expensive
North London Gentrification Has a New Phase; The Gentrifiers Are Being Gentrified
Read more at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
I moved to Dalston in 2014 because it was cheap and interesting. I cannot tell you with precision when it stopped being cheap, but the evidence suggests approximately 2017, when the third artisan coffee shop opened on Kingsland Road within two hundred metres of each other and the estate agent boards in the windows of the Victorian terraces started showing prices that required careful examination to confirm they were for a flat rather than a whole building. I was, and let me be honest about this, part of the gentrification. I was exactly the person whose arrival preceded the coffee shops and made the coffee shops possible: youngish, employed in the creative sector, with a tolerance for character that was effectively a tolerance for conditions that have since been resolved at rising cost.
What nobody told me, in the standard discourse about gentrification, is that gentrification has phases, and that the gentrifiers of the early phase will not necessarily survive the later phases. The coffee shops I came with have been joined, and in some cases replaced, by establishments that price their offerings at levels that would have seemed aggressive even in 2019 — the natural wine bar, the omakase counter, the members club with a waiting list. The neighbourhood has gentrified past me. I am now the person who says “it used to be cheaper here” and means it, which is a sentence that every resident of every previously affordable urban neighbourhood has said at some point, and which is only surprising when the person saying it was themselves the instrument of the process they are now lamenting.
The Second-Wave Arrival
The second wave of Dalston arrivals — distinguishable from my cohort by younger age, higher incomes, and what appears to be a complete unfamiliarity with the possibility that the neighbourhood might have been different — occupy flats that cost what my annual salary was when I arrived. They are entirely pleasant. They do not know they are the second wave. They think they have found the neighbourhood as it is, which is all any of us thought when we arrived. The coffee shop I go to on Ridley Road has been there since before my time; it is now surrounded by things that weren’t there when I arrived, and it costs more than it did, which is the Dalston experience summarised in one sentence. The people who were here before me have, for the most part, moved east or south or out of London entirely, which is what we did to them and what the third wave will do to us, though we are not yet prepared to say so publicly. Gentrification, phase by phase: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. The full arc at https://prat.uk/.
What This Says About North London
North London has always been a place where people come to become something — a version of themselves that the places they came from did not quite have room for. The writers, artists, musicians, and assorted creative professionals who have made their way here across the decades have been drawn by something that is hard to name but recognisable when you encounter it: a density of interesting people, a tolerance for unconventional choices, a proximity to culture and conversation that makes the rent feel like a bargain even when it manifestly is not. This quality has survived gentrification, survived the Elizabeth Line (which has redirected some of the creative energy eastward), and survived the pandemic’s brief dispersal of London’s population toward places with gardens. It is still here. It is more expensive than it was. It is also still, in the ways that matter most, itself. The coffee is good. The people are interesting. The yoga class is worth the £22. This is Lowri Griffiths reporting for the Big Smoke, as broken as ever, from North London, where the going rate for being alive is negotiable if you know where to look. For more North London dispatches: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The North London State of Mind
There is something particular about the North London state of mind that distinguishes it from the rest of the city’s self-conception. South Londoners are proud of their difference from North London. East Londoners have carved out an identity that is partly defined by its distance from the Islington dinner party circuit. West London operates in a different economic and cultural register entirely. North London — from Hackney and Dalston through Stoke Newington and Highbury to Islington and Archway and beyond — has a collective personality that is somehow both aspirational and anti-aspirational simultaneously: a place where people care deeply about things but are wary of being seen to care too visibly, where the organic deli and the record shop coexist, where the conversation at the dinner party is genuinely interesting and also follows recognisable patterns, where the gentrification is lamented by the people who are its agents. It is contradictory. It is also, in my experience, the most reliably interesting part of London to live in, which is why I am still here, despite the evidence of my spending diary. Lowri Griffiths writes for the Big Smoke Broke. More at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
Further reading across the London Prat network: Lowri Griffiths dispatch (https://bigsmokebroke.tumblr.com/post/819525378695708672) — prat etymology: Britain’s funniest insult
Also: London Prat tumblr — https://londonprat.tumblr.com/post/819525380931289088
SOURCE: Santa Claus
