Myths of working-class utopias are as weirdly skewed from reality's axis as fragrant dreams of gentility's unattainable paradise with its horse-shoe shaped drive and two-Audi garage. So, news that the BBC's superlatively proletarian Albert Square is to be redesigned to take account of London's restlessly shifting demographic is an interesting moment for amateurs of the history of taste.
The EastEnders manor – which, in conformity with the protocols of the fantasy world it represents can, in fact, be found on a film lot in distant Elstree – is based on a real square in Hackney. And the set of the rival Coronation Street has become a Disney-like attraction. Nostalgia for the mud is what the French call it. Poverty tourism, if you ask me.
The prototype of Coronation Street, a slum in Salford, has long gone. And Hackney has changed. Just as the shoe-less waifs and coster-mongers were replaced by the cartoonish characters that were the models for EastEnders, so, in a cycle of renewal, they have been replaced by hipster overspill from the fashionable neighbouring Shoreditch.
The migratory patterns of the middle classes and the effect they have on urban housing are summarised by "gentrification". This was given popular currency by German-born sociologist, Ruth Glass, in a 1964 book called London: Aspects of Change. Some years later a young Cambridge-educated architect arrived with his Mini Cooper in the inner-city street where I now live. He was a protoype gentrifier. The four-storey houses had originally been built for salarymen on the Southern Railway. Eventually, they moved to the suburbs.
It was an early version of White Flight. Their homes were divided into bed-sits, doss-houses and probably much worse. Still today there are old black cab drivers who remember when our "desirable" road was an echelon of knocking shops. Meanwhile, the Cambridge architect set to work, knocking through, shoring up, sanding off, rewiring, inserting I-beams and generally creating a scenario where sensitive graduates could feel safe, surrounded by key signifiers of domestic wellbeing. When I moved in, a neighbour was the Hon Nick – now Lord – Monson, who wrote a book called Les Nouveaux Pauvres, a witty account of how an aristocrat went slumming. In Albert Square they pop around to borrow a mythic cup of sugar. In my road I actually saw a neighbour hang out of the window and heard him shout: "Darling, can you ask if we can borrow the asparagus kettle?"
Still, the future Lord Monson was trading down while I was trading up and that's part of the interesting process of gentrification. It treats the city as a work-in-progress. As a process, gentrification has its critics, who use damaging imperialist language and talk of recolonisation and forced emigration of the urban poor. But, more positively, gentrification is a welcome by-product of de-industrialisation. It's a way of re-purposing neglected buildings. Fashionably, you can call it creative re-use. You can also call it capital appreciation.
But, architecturally speaking, what's going on? The very idea of gentrification sounds Pooterish, an embarrassing programme of self-help with building materials, as if an ambitious kitchen extension can be an aid to longed-for social promotion. Thing is, it can. We make our environments and then our environments make us. That new kitchen with its zinc-clad island lit by a trio of Holophane prismatic luminaires will change your status as well as your cooking.
What models does the gentrifier have in mind? In any period they reflect the dominant aesthetic of the architectural establishment. When the Cambridge architect arrived in our road, he aimed for something from the Arne Jacobsen chapter of the Scandinavian Design Encyclopaedia. Now, in Shoreditch, they are in the Late Loft Era with some elements of New York West Village haut-grunge appearing at its fringes. Indeed, Manhattan's Meatpacking District sets a world standard for ambitious gentrification. Thirty years ago you had to avert your eyes from the doorways. Today realtors jostle where felons once pimped.
Then there are all the joke signifiers of gentrification-in-progress. The number of skips in the road. Regular sightings of Ocado. The eventual appearance of lead planters with orbital trimmed box. Boards from Hamptons and Savills. There is one area of Fulham where every single house has wooden shutters. But no matter how much cargo-cult gentrification appears in EastEnders, I doubt if television fiction will ever catch-up with London's strange real-world dynamic. Already hipsters are getting sniffy about Shoreditch and thinking in terms of Peckham. The only certainty in this Theory and Practice of Social Promotion is the inevitability of change. Sixty years ago John Betjeman wrote about a street off Chelsea's King's Road being careworn and grubby. Now it's where Charles Saatchi lives.
