Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free (broadly) weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.
There’s a pub in Dalston we’ve been going to a lot over the past few years. It’s the kind of pub I might once have walked past and thought better of entering and, to be fair, the first few times I went in, there were definitely some frosty glances from the regulars. We went at first because it was the only pub in the area with a decent beer garden, and we were looking for somewhere to watch the World Cup during the pandemic. That was the thin end of the wedge though, because suddenly the pub’s other virtues became clear.
The beer was cheap. The landlord was friendly. You could get chips from over the road and bring them in with you. Built in the 1930s, it had a historic charm that was distinct from the stuffier Victorian pubs you could find in the area, a bit more permissive, a bit more homely. The carpets were patterned and the furniture was wooden; the beer garden was astro-turfed. But above all, it just felt alive. You could go in there any day of the week and find a kind of embracing life. Pop in on a Wednesday afternoon and it might be the soft and drowsy kind of life that occurs when a bunch of guys sit on separate tables doing crosswords. Head in there on a Friday or Saturday, though, and you’d find it packed, a pub singer on stage, the whole place teeming and boisterous and happy. Every other week, they’d put on a karaoke night that I still maintain is the best night out I’ve ever had in London.
But I had doubts from the beginning. The pub is incredible, has a indefinable quality and energy that make it irresistible, but was it ever ours? From the start, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the clientele was changing, that the influx of young Dalston hipsters were not the pub’s traditional patrons. Even so, it was possible to convince ourselves that we were witnessing something magic, the perfect inter-generational, inter-class meeting place, where the true promise of the public house was being fulfilled.
Yes, perhaps we were intruding, but, we told ourselves, we were intruding respectfully. We were there because we loved it - we weren’t extracting anything but trying to share in something special. We weren’t causing trouble, we were there to spend our money. The landlord, a figure beloved by old regulars and newcomers alike, seemed to be walking a careful tightrope - welcoming in new customers while keeping the old ones happy.
Never was this illusion more exciting or intoxicating than on karaoke nights. Where young and old punters would take to the stage. New York New York, Freed From Desire, Teenage Dirtbag, No Scrubs, Suspicious Minds. On my birthday one year I was lifted up, dumped on the stage, and forced to sing Sex Bomb. It was the best and worst moment of my life. Those nights were something truly special and so, of course, we invited our friends, and they invited their friends. And, naturally, we weren’t the only ones who had discovered this hidden gem. Lots of other young, often middle class, people were bringing all their mates too.
And inevitably, over time, the character of the place started to change. The price of the beer crept up a little, and then one day there were leaflets on the tables advertising Yard Sale Pizza, a mainstay of other hipster North London haunts. And suddenly the shine started coming off the karaoke too. There were fewer of the old crooning regulars and more groups of coked-up blokes standing on tables. The resignation was sometimes visible on the bartenders faces, but did they ever have any power to stop this tide?
I was prompted to write this newsletter when we heard some terrible news - the karaoke nights have been cancelled for the foreseeable future. The landlord said it had become too much, and they weren’t doing it anymore. Ever since hearing that, I’ve been fixating on the same question - are we responsible for killing the pub?
In other words, is gentrification something an individual is responsible for, or is it a process that’s bigger than all of us, the cumulative effect of a long series of relatively innocuous decisions? With the exception of landlords and property developers, most people* don’t move to an area with the explicit intention of changing its character. They go because they like the character that already exists there and, more often than not, because it’s the best place they can afford to live.
(*I know landlords aren’t “people” in the strictest sense, but you see what I mean).
Gentrification is something I feel guilty about, but find it difficult to know how to challenge. Yes I’m selfishly seeking out my idea of a good time, but I also like to support local businesses, and invest in some way in my local community. The problem is that I’m middle class, meaning my spending power is greater than a lot of the other people who have lived in this area for years. When people like me “invest” in a community, it serves only to push up house prices and incentivise the establishment of more and more natural wine bars.
This is a dynamic with a long history. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite recently wrote an essay for the London Review of Books about gentrification’s predecessor, ‘Chelseafication’, a term coined by estate agents in the late 60s and 70s to describe the post-industrial phenomenon whereby the middle and upper classes began to sweep back into the centre of London, causing an incidental wave of “improvement” to once deprived working class neighbourhoods. “Many commentators,” Sutcliffe-Braithwaite writes, “were taken with the idea that Britain, that bastion of class-consciousness, was undergoing a process of social levelling.” In reality, like now, there was no social levelling, just a slow and pernicious process of displacement.
The pub is the tip of the iceberg, the very public expression of what’s going on more privately all around us. In the centre of Dalston, that pub is surrounded by council-built tower blocks and handsome four-bed houses alike. The changing faces at the bar don’t just reflect a shift in the clientele, but in the demographics of the borough itself. Rents are skyrocketing, businesses are folding, and the institutions that drew people in the first place - the independently owned places, the characterful places - are struggling to survive.
There will be differences of opinion as to what caused all this. For someone of my political leanings, it seems there’s an obvious line to be drawn back to Thatcher’s Right to Buy policies - which saw huge swathes of the country’s public housing sold off - and to the subsequent decades of corrosive neoliberalism. Others, as Sutcliffe-Braithwaite explores, might argue that this is simply a natural consequence of deindustrialisation, where gentrification has been “driven by technological change, affluence, and shifts in the global distribution of industry”.
Regardless of the cause, I’m still left wondering what to do about it. I do feel complicit for destroying what was once so special about that pub. I also feel guilty for being being part of a wave that will displace people less privileged than me. But as important as I think it is to consider and own your personal culpability, it’s clear that the answer to these issues will lie in much broader and more sweeping social reform - more house building, rent caps, universal basic income.
Gentrification is a logical consequence of capitalism, a system whose logic revolves entirely around processes of growth, displacement, and the increasing concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer pockets. Of course I’m a part of gentrification, but to fight it means critiquing capitalism itself and, at the absolute least, supporting political forces that seek to regulate and reform capitalism's worst excesses. It would be nice to go for a pint with getting blood on my hands.
Cultural indigestion
Watching - I took myself to the cinema the other week to watch Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and, sure, it’s a cartoon about superheroes and there’s a good chance that’s not your thing. It’s not really my thing either to be honest but it was incredible. It manages to engage with the kind of multi-verse guff that seems to be everywhere these days, but in a way that’s not shit, using different animation styles to play with the idea of alternate universes. It’s working with similar material to Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) but, with presumably a fraction of the budget, it profoundly exceeds that film in terms of creativity, playfulness, humour, and excitement.
Listening - Afro Cuban Funky Grooves.
Visiting - Whenever I go to read the Guardian online, I’ve formed a habit of just typing a ‘g’ in the search bar and pressing enter. For reasons I’ve never understood, this action navigates me not to the Guardian home page, but to a guide to the 2010 Winter Olympics. When I get there, I just navigate to the home page without thinking, but I like to imagine the people who work in the Guardian analytics team wondering at the enduring appeal of this 13-year-old explainer. If anyone wants to know who was up and coming in the British Skeleton field a decade and a half ago, hit me up.