In the city but not of the city? Telegraph Hillers and the making of a middle-class community

This article draws on research undertaken in Inner London on gentrification and focuses on one particular community in South-East London. It argues that there is a complex interaction in this community which values diversity in relation to both other social groups in the neighbourhood and other gentrifiers. This is constructed by the creation of strong social networks, often formed around the local school, which see the area as having many of the facets of a traditional village community in which everybody knows each other and everybody has their place. Diversity and otherness have a crucial place in this narrative although such people, though present, are spectacularly absent in respondents' narratives of their lives that are almost entirely constructed around the descriptions of their peer group. They contrast themselves with middle-class groups elsewhere in gentrified London which are characterised as much more urban and aspirational than the more gentle and diverse middle class of Telegraph Hill. This, it is argued, reflects the unease that confronts respondents as they come to terms with how neo-liberalism is felt to be impacting on their sense of social and economic security.