Things You Hate About Gentrification

Gentrification is a highly fashionable term, to the extent that we have to question if it really is a bad thing. However, there always remain victims priced out. These victims were once part of the culture of the place, so this culture also dies. In their place come waves of smart yet soulless commodities and phenomena. These are just a few a lot of us can’t stand. Do you know others or want to defend some of these choices? Join our discussion by clicking here!

Organic vegan quinoa falafel coffee (patent pending)

Who needs this shit? For some reason, find some vaguely different way of marketing a bean we’ve known for half a millenium and you get enough funding to put astroturf in front of your shop, get white-daubed shabby chic furniture and have miniature paper cups made.

 

 

Shit fashion lines

Look at Soho. There are shops that resemble nightclubs with bouncers, velvet rope, carpet and queues. Seriously, what the fuck. The products? T-shirts, tracksuits, fairly standard stuff with a scarcely exciting graphic ironed on. You can get gold-plated trainers from what looks like a car show-room.

 

“Boutique” Charity Shops

These are charity shops for those who can’t be arsed to hunt. In other words, those who don’t want to charity shop (it is a verb). Expect empty rails with one or two middle-range jackets and lots of ‘Not For Sale’ ornaments. The worst part is these suck up the good prizes from your local branches of the same shop.

 

 

Organic Wholefood Supermarkets

Breathe on this stuff and you’ve contaminated it. Sometimes, it’s nice to know chained orphans aren’t harvesting your cucumbers. Ethical sourcing is important. But when you get to the level of some of these products for their apparent purity, you are seeing the commodification of cleanliness. You have anxieties about health and the environment, what better way to cure those than throwing money at them.

Twat Bars

Wire-frame industrial style lights. ‘Loft-style’ brick walls. Craft beer. It’s basically beer at six pounds per bottle. They might lure you in with some sort of Saturday night DJ, much more lively than just a night in the pub. What’s their gimmick? LA rock’n’roll vibe or something more sophisticated. Either way you’re pretty much guaranteed a guitar mounted on the wall next to a bike while you’re served by a top-knotted lumberjack.

 

Hipsters

I didn’t want to be a video games journalist. I wanted to be…   a lumberjack! As the hipster is the only minority it seems universally accepted to deride, perhaps a better summary of this figure is found in the Beards of Britain…

 

 

Venue Closure

Rising rents and noise. The classic case of gentrification causing venue closure is a wealthy respectable tenant moving to a luxury property next door to a nightclub. But that’s, like, loud. Who’da’thunkit! A swift complaint to the council and renewing licenses suddenly becomes very difficult. Hence the Intrepid Fox in Soho is now a Byron Burgers. More and more venues are being priced out.

Nightclubs are also quite big, perfect for developers to stack up some flats in a quaint ‘feature property’. Even bastions like Ministry of Sound and the Coronet are vulnerable. Mayor Sadiq Khan has highlighted this problem and is improving measures to protect London’s vital cultural scene. The charity the Music Venue Trust is now actively working to improve this worrying decline.    http://musicvenuetrust.com/

You can’t live there anymore…

This one is quite obvious. Those glass IKEA showrooms look great- especially if you’re looking from the Tate Modern’s new tower (we didn’t say anything). But even if you had that sort of money, there’s a hell of a lot more you could do with that than renting a great white ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ set. Rent a bin and save a couple of hundred a month! There is a reason many of these are empty, partly because they are such a guaranteed investment that many owners don’t even bother getting tenants. What is the solution?

The gentrified saying how bad gentrification is

In typical pseudo-philanthropic style, those who apparently care most about gentrification are often those who occupy it. Spending in Waitrose is counter-balanced if you show you have a good heart for artists and bohemians. It’s like an E.M. Forster novel with aristocrats discussing the solution to poverty over afternoon tea, a holier-than-thou one-upmanship. But we are all guilty of this unfortunate truth! How many do you know so happy to discuss issues without actually taking direct action? We all hate chains right? It’s what we say in our high street shoes with a takeaway coffee in hand…

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