Publisher's Synopsis
Gentrification and the Middle Classes is a study of 250 middle-class people who bought into Hackney, an otherwise deprived inner London borough, during the 1980s. In so doing, they helped transform parts of the borough from a recent history of decline into trendy areas of owner occupation with all the trimmings: restaurants, galleries, gyms and delicatessens. Tim Butler shows however that the gentrifiers were atypical members of the British middle classes. In comparison to the middle class nationally, they were more likely to come from the professional middle class, to be better educated, better paid and, perhaps most significantly, to be long-standing supporters of the Labour party. He argues that gender is of particular importance in understanding this process: almost without exception his female respondents worked full time and this was a major influence on where they, and their partners, lived.
