Join us for an enlightening evening as Loretta Lees explores the history and present of gentrification in London.

The talk kicks off a wider conference on gentrification in London celebrating the 60th anniversary of Ruth Glass coining the term. Tickets of the conference are available here: billetto.co.uk/e/959171

Loretta is director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University and a world-reknowned expert in gentrification, public space, and urban social studies. Her books include Planetary Gentrification (2016) and Defensible Space: mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice (2022).

The event will run from 6pm to 8pm, refreshments provided.

Despite the term ‘gentrification’ being coined in London by the British sociologist Ruth Glass, there has not been an attempt to develop a stage model of gentrification for London. Research on urban gentrification tends to see it as an evolving wave, or set of waves, that change in relation to context and the dynamics of urban change. Contra earlier stage models, processes of gentrification predate coinage of the term by Ruth Glass in 1964 and gentrification of a neighbourhood per se is no-longer seen as an end point, as such identifying a starting point and indeed an end point is a contentious issue. In this talk I draw on research and thinking that myself and Sharda Rozena have recently undertaken looking at the different stages of gentrification that have affected London over time. We did this by looking through the lens of a long gentrified part of inner London – Kensington, part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. We focused at the neighbourhood scale and on fine grained geographical differences to read up to the scale of the city - London.