I studied Sociology at the University of Essex in the late 1960s, graduating in 1971. Then—as now—Essex was a leading place to study social science, and I became interested in social class. I went back a few years later on a part-time basis to do an MA in Social History whilst teaching sociology at the North East London Polytechnic (subsequently the University of East London) where I worked from 1974 to 2003.

“I am increasingly interested in the intersection between class mobility, education, ethnicity, and international migration and how it is playing out in the current remaking of much of London.”

Like many teaching in the ex-Polytechnics, it took me some years to become interested in undertaking research as these were essentially teaching institutions based around passing on scholarship to students from backgrounds where there was not a tradition of higher education. Much more time was devoted to teaching than in traditional universities—and students benefited from this greater contact time.

I became interested in gentrification living in Hackney in the 1970s. This was an area in which it was difficult to buy houses because the building societies generally "red lined" it, i.e., they didn’t lend on the housing in what were seen as unsuitable areas. If they were prepared to lend, it was with many restrictions such as withholding part of the loan until essential repairs were undertaken.

I observed, however, that increasing numbers of young middle-class graduates were choosing to live in the area rather than more established areas. I began to research this in the early 1980s by undertaking a Ph.D. at the Geography Department at the Open University. I was fortunate enough to be supervised by Professors Chris Hamnett and Doreen Massey, who were both interested in the processes of industrial and residential restructuring that were occurring at the time.

This paper was co-authored (like many others at the time) with Garry Robson and came out of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project I had as part of the Cities Cohesion and Competition program. As part of this research we investigated six areas of inner London that had been undergoing gentrification. This paper was written as we were completing fieldwork and was based on our research in three south London districts (Telegraph Hill, Brixton, and Wandsworth) which were all quite different. We were interested in the way in which social capital was often used in relation to working-class communities and asked the question about how it entered into processes of middle-class community building.

We were also interested in the different ways in which the concept was used and we contrasted the Coleman/Puttnam approach with that of Bourdieu, who argued for economic, cultural, and social conceptions of capital. He saw the latter as a relationship rather than a stock. We applied these concepts to our three chosen areas and argued that different kinds of capital were being deployed in the ways in which they were being gentrified. For example, much of the gentrification of Telegraph Hill depended on the deployment of social capital, and to some extent this compensated for a relative deficit in economic capital amongst respondents. In Wandsworth, by contrast, there was a superfluity, or so it seemed, of financial capital and the most likely form of deploying social capital was in eating out!

I am currently working on a project on gentrification and education in East London with Chris Hamnett, and we are looking at the overarching importance of education to many middle-class families. Interesting points to emerge from this research included the increasing importance of the buy-to-let market in housing and how gentrification is no longer restricted to the owner-occupied sector. In addition, much of the competition for housing and school places is now between sections of the middle class, and in this area ethnicity is an important consideration. Much work on gentrification has ignored the question of ethnicity but in East London the black and minority ethnic groups are rapidly establishing a middle-class presence. I am increasingly interested in the intersection between class mobility, education, ethnicity, and international migration and how it is playing out in the current remaking of much of London.