Hackney resident Ferdia Carr sees social mobility alongside the class divide.
On the face of it, Hackney is a tale of two cities divided by class. There is inward pressure from young middle class professionals, moving in on Victorian housing stock. Meanwhile older working class residents have been pushed to the margins of the borough and even dispersed to London’s outer crust. This amounts to a reversal of ‘white flight’, when the better-off moved out of inner London. The Economist describes the recent trend as ‘the great inversion’.
But the idea that in Hackney the two classes no longer speak to each other – that they live in separate bubbles within the same borough, should also be turned upside down. Local life just isn’t like that.
Yes, Lauriston Road E9 has been rebranded by eager estate agents as ‘Victoria Park Village’. It is a cosy colony of boutiques, cafés and restaurants. The street seems to be owned by gangs of middle class mums with gaggles of Boden-attired children. They congregate at baby yoga groups and Scandinavian furniture stores where the talk is of off-colour fashions and goats-milk yoghurt.
In nearby Well Street, where Jack Cohen set up a market stall which later turned into Tesco, the ambience is different. Vintage shops give way to second hand stores and greasy spoons. Behind the main thoroughfare, open streets with leafy gardens are replaced by concrete estates.
But there is traffic between the two. One local resident, a BT technician who came to install my wi-fi, explained that there always was a trendy contingent, even when he was growing up in the area. A working class father of two, he made extensive use of the posh end while his daughters were growing up. ‘We used to take the girls for a pub dinner after a day in the park,’ he recalled. Looking around at the new shops and restaurants which were not so plentiful ‘before all this money came in’, he insists ‘it’s nice’. Rather the mix that comes with new money, than let the whole area get left behind.
In Hackney the two classes continue to converse, with the church of St John’s of Jerusalem as the pivotal point between them.
Or is it really Tesco that’s the mediating link nowadays? Either way, the point is they are still connected.