Editing Gentrification (section)

===Inner London===
[[File:Gentrification graffiti 2024.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|right|"Fuck Your Gentrification": anti-gentrification graffiti in [[Shoreditch]], London, 2024]]

{{blockquote|London is being "made over" by an urban centred middle class. In the post war era, upwardly mobile social classes tended to leave the city. Now, led by a new middle class, they are reconstructing much of inner London as a place both in which to work and live.|Tim Butler, 1997{{sfn|Butler|1997|page=77}}}}

Gentrification is not a new phenomenon in Britain; in [[ancient Rome]] the shop-free forum was developed during the [[Roman Republic]]an period, and in 2nd- and 3rd-century cities in [[Roman Britain]] there is evidence of small shops being replaced by large [[Roman villa|villas]].<ref name=Roman>{{cite book |title=Trade, traders, and the ancient city |editor-first1=Helen |editor-last1=Parkins |editor-first2=Christopher John |editor-last2=Smith |publisher=Routledge |location=London |date=1998 |page=197 |isbn=9780415165174}}</ref>

[[King's College London]] academic [[Loretta Lees]] reported that much of [[Inner London]] was undergoing "super-gentrification", where "a new group of super-wealthy professionals, working in the [[City of London]] [i.e. the financial industry], is slowly imposing its mark on this Inner London housing market, in a way that differentiates it, and them, from traditional gentrifiers, and from the traditional urban upper classes&nbsp;... Super-gentrification is quite different from the classical version of gentrification. It's of a higher economic order; you need a much higher salary and bonuses to live in [[Barnsbury]]" (some two miles north of [[central London]]).<ref name=TimesSuperGentrification/> Rising housing prices due to gentrification within London have led to a doubling of evictions done by private landlords and to a long-term decline in home ownership from the years 2003–2020.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Chou |first1=Winston |last2=Dancygier |first2=Rafaela |title=Why Parties Displace Their Voters: Gentrification, Coalitional Change, and the Demise of Public Housing |journal=American Political Science Review |date=May 2021 |volume=115 |issue=2 |page=432 |doi=10.1017/S0003055421000058|s2cid=232422471 |doi-access=free }}</ref>

Barnsbury was built around 1820, as a middle-class neighbourhood, but after the [[World War II|Second World War]] (1939–1945), many people moved to the suburbs. The upper and middle classes were fleeing from the working class residents of London, made possible by the modern railway. At the war's end, the great housing demand rendered Barnsbury a place of cheap housing, where most people shared accommodation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, people moving into the area had to finance house renovations with their money, because banks rarely financed loans for Barnsbury. Moreover, the rehabilitating spark was ''The 1959 Housing Purchase and Housing Act'', investing £100&nbsp;million to rehabilitating old properties and [[infrastructure]]. As a result, the principal population influx occurred between 1961 and 1975; the UK Census reports that "between the years of 1961 and 1981, owner-occupation increased from 7 to 19 per cent, furnished rentals declined from 14 to 7 per cent, and unfurnished rentals declined from 61 to 6 per cent";{{sfn|Lees|Slater|Wyly|2010|page=13}} another example of urban gentrification is the super-gentrification, in the 1990s, of the neighboring working-class [[London Borough of Islington]], where Prime Minister [[Tony Blair]] lived until his election in 1997.<ref name=TimesSuperGentrification>{{cite news |first=Lewis |last=Smith |url=https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/england/london-travel/theres-plain-gentrification-and-then-you-have-islington-0jm9cwd9cmn |title=There's plain gentrification ... and then you have Islington |website=Timesonline.co.uk |date=1 September 2006 |access-date=2 April 2017}}</ref> The conversion of older houses into flats emerged in the 1980s as developers saw the profits to be made. By the end of the 1980s, conversions were the single largest source of new dwellings in London.<ref>Hamnett, 1989{{Full citation needed|date=April 2019}}</ref>