Whitechapel field trip report by Rukhsana Jahangir

In coining the term ‘gentrification’ in reference to the London housing situation in the 1960s, the sociologist Ruth Glass highlighted the precarious situation of working class Londoners, displaced by rising property prices and a lack of housing stock. The working class community of Whitechapel today faces similar challenges, as do other communities across London. Swept up in the waves of contemporary developments, yet dispossessed of the capital means to fully participate, they face an increasingly uncertain future. As the process of gentrification spreads across London, housing prices and rents steadily ascend, forcing many who have lived in areas for generations to relocate or exist in an insecure state of precarity. The astonishing rate of gentrification in Whitechapel, East London, was illustrated to our ‘Class, Politics and Culture’ course cohort on a recent LSE Sociology field trip, led by Dr. Lisa McKenzie and Martin Wright, an individual who has lived in the area since 1994 and is a working class activist.