Month: December 2005

I ain’t going out. Yeah, the streets aren’t that bad but I got the annual leave and I hate waiting for the bus in the cold, so I ain’t going out.

Anyways, looking at somethings on gentrification and London I found a sentence that stayed on my mind for a while. In a review of Tim Butler’s book London Calling: The Middle Classes and the Re-making of Inner London the reviewer writes “newcomers arriving with limited resources usually have little chance to settle in established, traditional middle-class neighbourhoods.” The middle classes who gentrify a hood move in because they are locked out of middle class neighborhoods. I gather there are two options for them, one move into working class neighborhoods or move to a newly carved out suburban community. Gentrification vs sprawl.

It is hard to be upbeat about the neighborhood when crap happens. It is even harder when crap happens right after some other crap. Stoner dog’s dad got mugged. A bunch of kids, not the usual crew that usually hangs around, knocked him down and when they discovered he only had $1 in his wallet, threw it back at him. Afterwards, this stoic man of a man, just comes on over to the BACA party after we have done a round robin of introductions and saying what we liked about our block/street/ neighborhood. His wife, who’d gotten there before him, mentioned something that really needs to be said. She said after they were robbed they got a lot of support from their neighbors, some brought over food, flowers, and one loaned them his car. She said if they lived in a big faceless condo they wouldn’t have gotten that.
There is no way to smoothly segway back to the corner….
But other news related to our crime ridden corner is that the usual crowd of dealers have apparently taken seasonal jobs indoors. If you haven’t noticed it is too cold to hang out waiting for crack heads and other druggies to pass by for a buy. According to the grapevine one of the dealers has taken a temporary job at a large store and is reselling some items on the street obtained with the 5-finger employee discount.

British Airways had a sale and I took the bait. So before winter ends and spring starts, I’m going to London town. I figure I’d throw in a gentrification tour in there since I don’t do touristy things. The problem is, it is going to be Winter. In London. A city not well known for bright sun shine and balmy weather, so when I get there it might be a toss up between wandering around cold & lost in a gentrifying neighborhood or soaking in a nice claw foot tub with a Lush bath bomb.
I’m curious to see how a city ten kazillion times older and bigger than DC deals with gentrification. Brixton is a definite stop. I’ve made the comparison between Brixton and Shaw before. I visited Brixton often back in the early 90s and I’d like to take a look at it now in the mid aughts.
I also may visit Earl’s Court, where I lived for one summer. I don’t know if the area gentrified or ever was something else to be gentrified. But I do remember there were women of “questionable” occupation and a guy with a burnt off face always hanging out near the tube (subway) station. Earl’s Court had a lot of tourist and cheap hotels. There were Aussies & Kiwis all over the place. I remember being told it was a transitional neighborhood, but I always thought it meant that no one stuck around very long because many of us were foreigners.
I remember looking out the window of my Earl’s Court flat. A no-frills flat I shared with 6 other foreign girls. From my window I could see the back of one of the many cheap hotels and see immigrant women taking care of their families in what looked to be crowded conditions. From another window in the flat I could see into distinctly middle class and upper middle class homes. In front there was a beautiful gated garden square that only residents (real residents not us foreigners) had a key to enter. I could see the contrasts, but all I cared about then was cheap rent and being close enough to take the midnight bus home from my part-time job near Piccadilly.
So fair warning some of my gentrification posts might have a British accent between now and my trip.