Literature and Gentrification on Brick Lane

L t r t r nd ntr f t n n Br L n

Sarah Brouillette

Criticism, Volume 51, Number 3, Summer 2009, pp. 425-449 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University PressDOI: 10.1353/crt.0.0114

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Carleton University Library (6 Jun 2014 10:59 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crt/summary/v051/51.3.brouillette.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/crt/summary/v051/51.3.brouillette.html

425Criticism, Summer 2009, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 425–449. ISSN: 0011-1589.© 2010 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309.

LITERATURE AND GENTRIFICATION ON BRICK LANE

Sarah Brouillette

In 1964 sociologist Ruth Glass used “gentrifi cation” to describe what occurred when middle-class home buyers, landlords, and professional developers moved into parts of London that had dilapidated housing stock and blighted streets. Attracted to historic building features undervalued by existing residents, these newcomers’ mere presence and marked refur-bishment efforts were often coextensive with the transformation of rented homes into owner-occupied ones, as well as with dramatic increases in housing costs and displacement of working-class tenants.1

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Neil Smith and others considerably expanded, and at times abstracted, Glass’s defi nition. By Smith’s account, before it had widespread currency outside academe his sense of gentrifi ca-tion was not unlike hers; in the mid-1970s he would tell people that “[g]entrifi cation is the process . . . by which poor and working-class neighbor-hoods in the inner city are refurbished via an infl ux of private capital and middle-class homebuyers and renters.”2 But since then his language has become progressively more pointed. In 1996 he states gentrifi cation “is no longer about a narrow and quixotic oddity in the housing market but has become the leading residential edge of a much larger endeavor: the class remake of the central urban landscape,”3 and by 2000 his Dictionary of Human Geography defi nition deems it “reinvestment of capital at the urban centre, which is designed to produce space for a more affl uent class of people than currently occupies that space.”4

With these terms, Smith positions gentrifi cation as, in essence, a spatial expression of labor’s relation to capital. Working in tandem with sub-urbanization—as “renewed or more vigorous centralization of capital into urban areas”—it is about bringing working-class space into the ambit of controlled urbanization, and about doing so within global cities “shorn of much of the traditional protection of national state institutions and regulations.”5 Deregulation, privatization of housing and other urban

426 SARAH BROUILLETTE

services, and marketization of public functions are each key to his analysis; “revanchist” city planning that uses a moralizing language of public order to control subjected populations is, as well.

Gentrifi cation is thus at once about making places safer and more liv-able, and about property developers and real estate companies exploiting opportunities to sell expensive new condos, which leads to existing resi-dents, often renters, moving out of neighborhoods they’ve come to see as integral to their communities and identities. The diffi culty of knowing what is fundamental and what is incidental to the process exacerbates its ambivalence. Is it refurbishment of the existing built environment or new development or both? Is it driven by home buyers, by property developers, by landlords, or by any or all of these combined? Is it only the initial phase that counts, when a blighted area is fi rst isolated as desirable and then in-habited and fi xed up, or is any kind of upmarket movement implicated? What role do artists play, given that they are often willing to live in areas others think uninhabitable, and given that, with “the surfeit of meaning in places frequented by artists,” these areas soon appeal to people too prosperous to keep rents low?6 Is the process a linear one, as poor and working-class streets are inhabited by ever wealthier occupants, or does it entail cycles of valuation and devaluation unfolding in cities whose metro-politan areas are constantly expanding? Is it always the product of outside capital moving in, or can communities undertake their own gentrifi cation as part of the work of civic betterment?

These questions have been defi nitive for urban geography. In what fol-lows I suggest that literary scholars have good reason to engage with them, too. Consider the brief example of Spread the Word, one of a handful of recent organizations that have cropped up to help aspiring writers “achieve their full potential.” Funded by Arts Council England, and directed in par-ticular at minority groups, it has just expanded into the notoriously down-trodden, but now gentrifying, East End of London. It describes its work in the area as follows: to “help create a strong cultural infrastructure . . . and support regeneration of the area”; to “promote cultural exchange and community cohesion and confi dence”; to “provide opportunities for ex-pression of disenfranchised voices, particularly those whose fi rst, second or third language is not English”; and to “work in partnership with arts leaders . . . to make literature an essential part of the cultural landscape in East London.”7 In such terms, an initiative like this supports the fl ourish-ing of a diverse young creative class, connects the revitalizing presence of art and artists to offi cial urban planning strategy, and makes literary ex-pression a barometer for the creative capital that is now often positioned at the heart of civic renewal.

LITERATURE AND GENTRIFICATION 427

The East End has been a targeted area since the early 1990s, and nota-bly so since 2000, when a group of literary titles with the words “Brick Lane” in them surfaced—among them Tarquin Hall’s Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End (2005) and Rachel Lichtenstein’s On Brick Lane (2007). Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) was clearly the most visible.8 She received a sizable advance for the novel, it was on the best-seller lists for nearly a year, the hardcover sold 150,000 copies, and it was nominated for all the major literary prizes.9 Meanwhile, provoked in part by these suc-cesses, a group of angry men who presented themselves as residents of the neighborhoods around the real Brick Lane, the high street of the Bangla-deshi area of the East End, staged protests and wrote letters condemning the novel, declaring anger at Ali’s depiction of the area, at her tenuous connection to it, and later at the prospect that their ward might be used to shoot the 2007 book-to-fi lm project.

In the fi rst part of this essay I suggest how these texts partake of and contribute to the area’s gentrifi cation. Recent urban development policy, driven by the language and imperatives of marketing, has set its sights on creative professionals. City branders should know their lifestyle prefer-ences and market redevelopment in a way that will attract and retain them, because it is their presence that will ensure that a place is vital and interesting, qualities that will in turn secure the fi nancial value that can be extracted from its built environment. My interest here is how cultural objects that are marketed as representations of an area like Brick Lane can perform a related function, as they circulate images of this unique location as a cutting-edge “place-based creative economy,” making it a magnet for the people one commentator calls “distressed-looking twenty-somethings with asymmetrical haircuts.”10 As high street and symbol for the “new East End,” translation of Brick Lane into an array of cultural products—books and fi lms, and their accompanying marketing and me-dia commentary—seems to solidify its desirability as an urban frontier for exciting aesthetic experiences. Long after vanguard gentrifi ers have moved out into more affordable neighborhoods, its representation in these widely circulated cultural products continues to concentrate cultural capital in the area.

The second part of my argument is that the process of urban redevelop-ment informed the hostility to Ali’s novel, structuring how critics, seeking to position her interests in opposition to their own, connected her and her coproducers’ capture of intellectual property to the East End’s remaking. Ali’s most vociferous opponents, presenting themselves as spokespeople for Bangladeshis in general, aligned the author with the gentrifying devel-opers who had been at work in their neighborhoods in the decade before


the novel’s release. They associated Ali’s text with outsiders’ desire to con-vert the area’s cultural cachet into lucrative property, whether physical or intellectual. Still, it is this hostile interpretative community’s own involve-ment in East End gentrifi cation, and their desire to police its nature and control its agents, which explains their stake in the novel’s circulation. These men had an interest in placing Ali and her work outside of the area, as they proved time and again. We should read that interest in relation to, and not necessarily as superior to, the desires of those they positioned as outsiders crossing boundaries they reconstituted and reinforced in their reaction to Ali’s work.

It matters that Brick Lane is itself a gentrifi cation tale. Ali depicts the inner life of a young woman who migrates to England, moves into Bangladeshi-dominated Tower Hamlets council housing, sets up a one-woman work-from-home garment factory, and has an affair with a man who is younger and more exciting than the husband she acquired through arranged marriage. At the novel’s end, faced with the prospect of returning to Bangladesh, Nazneen decides to carry on alone in London, where she’ll co-run a sari shop called Fusion Fashions, abandoning piecework clothing manufacture (low-end precarious work) to take up fashion design (high-end creative labor). In John Marx’s persuasive account, throughout the novel Nazneen longs but is unable “to make the kinds of choices that eco-nomic calculability both engenders and requires”;11 by the novel’s end, somewhat miraculously, she achieves her desire and thereby “transforms into the protagonist in a story about self-actualization through work.”12 She becomes a person who can declare, fi nally, “I will say what happens to me. I will be the one.”13 Through Nazneen’s eyes, Ali portrays a dynamic and changing community, one in which heterogeneous but connected groups—for instance, radical Islamists and moderate Muslims—compete for domi-nance, and in which nontraditional ways of positioning oneself as a woman and mother are, if not welcome, at least possible. Though the novel’s critics were loath to suggest that it was these elements of Ali’s depiction that trou-bled them, Ali’s defenders averred that the true source of offense was the challenge her sympathetic portrayal of liberation from traditional gender roles presented to their own retrogressive politics.

My analysis expands upon and contextualizes this last point. The visi-bility of Ali’s novel presented an opportunity to those who had already done much to construct themselves as community spokespeople and advo-cates of local business development; as I’ll describe, many of them had worked or were working to brand the area as a tourist-friendly ethnic enclave known as Banglatown. The outlets for their critiques of Ali’s novel were press interviews and a lengthy letter sent to prize-granting bodies


and to staff at the Guardian newspaper, a widely read, left-leaning, cultur-ally oriented publication. They thus took careful advantage of, and in turn perpetuated, the novel’s starred spot within the heavily mediated contem-porary literary fi eld, in which contests over a given work’s authenticity is one of the surest ways to ensure its continued visibility within the market-place.14 They thereby secured an ideal platform for their ongoing attempts to concretize a particular understanding of what the Brick Lane area should be and how it should be branded for outsiders. Granting that hos-tility toward Ali’s novel was motivated by anxieties about the liberation from masculine dominance of the single professional working woman, in light of the recent upscaling of the area we might also recognize that liber-ated fi gure as someone Brick Lane’s critics feared as one manifestation of a more general invasion of gentrifying forces arriving from “outside.”15

Urban Redevelopment and the “Aesthetic Disposition”

London has been fundamentally remade since the 1960s, when it still had a manufacturing base, the central working-class population mostly rented Victorian-era terraced houses, the docklands were still vital, the riverside was still rundown, Canary Wharf was the site of docks and warehouses, and Covent Garden remained a market. Today Canary Warf is the fi nan-cial center of London and is dense with luxury housing; manufacturing is limited and the fi nance and business sectors are dominant, inner London is split between regulated council apartments and expensive residential neighborhoods, the City Fringe and East End are rapidly gentrifying, and the working classes are retreating to the suburbs. An average house, worth £5,000 in 1970, now fetches £220,000 and climbing.16

Accompanying these changes is an increasingly polarized populace, split between a service class, which includes an expanding deskilled white-collar workforce, and a more prosperous creative, government, fi nance, and business elite that wants to live in a city that can protect it from prop-erty devaluation and perceived criminality. The housing market is an ex-pression of this separation, pitting the rented council sector against the spread of privately owned property development into more and more areas. Ethnic minorities occupy much of the council housing. They now constitute 29 percent of inner London’s population, an increase of 53 per-cent from 1991.17 They are the hardest hit by unemployment and by deindustrialization, and yet the city’s traditional immigrant-receptor areas—most notably Brick Lane—are being encroached upon and re-formed such that their less prosperous residents or new arrivals are pushed


into other areas. Taking over is upmarket housing suited to those whose creativity and careers are thought to gestate and grow in the inner city. Hence Chris Hamnett, for decades a close monitor of gentrifi cation, un-derstands London’s remake as a product of the postindustrial shift away from manufacturing and toward business services and the creative and lifestyle industries.18 Emerging ways of organizing one’s working life em-body and engender particular relations to the city, particular consumer choices about where to live and in what style of house, so that cultural as-pects of the new economy are achieving their “spatial manifestation” in transformations of London’s urban scene.19

But what features attract owners to specifi c kinds of property and determine how new residences are designed and marketed? How does consumer desire become attached to specifi c kinds of housing and particu-lar architectural elements? Ruth Glass’s pioneering home buyers were in-terested in restoration of Georgian architecture. For some of this vanguard, as for some of its analysts, their work was a protest against the moderniz-ing destruction of history; it was a mode of involvement in the heritage movement more generally, for which the city’s past, even “the parts of it that are dirty and exciting and dangerous,” should be preserved and com-memorated.20 In this interpretation, in the decades after World War II gen-trifi cation drew energy from belief that England’s history and specifi city were being devalued or eradicated, whether by mass culture’s obliterating conformity, by the decline of England’s role in the world, or by the arrival of waves of new immigrants. Restoring a building’s surface history could be experienced, then, as a form of resistance against “the oppressive confor-mity of suburbia, modernist planning, and mass market principles,”21 or as a desire to return to a more secure past that could, at least symbolically, destigmatize neighborhoods overrun by undesirables.22

This is how Jon Caulfi eld understands the activities of fi rst-phase gen-trifi ers in major Canadian cities, for instance: their living patterns exhibit “an immanent critique of modern city building” that should be distin-guished from later “entrepreneurial appropriation of [this] marginal cul-tural practice.”23 A sympathetic avant-garde seeks out spaces of “vivid life” to counteract the blandness and standardization that exist outside the city;24 only after they arrive does the neighborhood become a more fash-ionable, expensive, and secure investment, and property developers and real estate agents—by all means members of the culture industry—use the area’s new cachet to sell housing, to be sure, but a form of housing that is coupled to the appeal of living an aesthetically rich life.

Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the rise of a general “aesthetic disposition,” one that grants itself cultural distinction by valuing things otherwise


deemed ordinary, has proven useful here, helping geographers like Caul-fi eld to tie vanguard gentrifi ers together not by particular occupation—novelist, academic, Labour MP, etcetera—but by the sought-after distinction of inhabiting housing that grants them desirable cultural capi-tal. Indeed, the order of succession in phases of gentrifi cation seems per-fect proof of Bourdieu’s take on the imbrication of cultural and economic fi elds.25 As David Ley points out in his study of Vancouver, Canada, those with an aesthetic disposition are drawn to “poverty areas” while they are stylizing their lives, but these tend to lose their appeal when any new de-velopment occurs. Early gentrifi ers share a habitus rich in cultural rather than economic capital; then, as an area’s redevelopment continues apace, in part because the presence and energies of the vanguard attracts others to the area, “the edge becomes a new center” and the aesthetic disposition is forced to roam.26

Though this disposition has never been the exclusive property of artists and writers, it has recently been extended and generalized in some unique ways, as qualities long associated with artists’ lives have become integral to how elite postindustrial labor imagines itself and instantiates that self-image through housing choices. Sharon Zukin’s history of New York loft conversions offers telling illustration of an early example. In the late 1960s and the 1970s a sizable group began to appreciate the collapsing boundar-ies between work and life that made converted factory space attractive to actual artists. So if decline in the manufacturing sector made loft conver-sion possible in a material sense—“[o]nly people who do not know the steam and sweat of a real factory can fi nd industrial space romantic or interesting”27—loft living also refl ects values adopted by those who had come to believe in the merit of escaping the monotony of the 9 to 5 work-day, seeking refuge in “humane” homes that don’t break life up into closely regulated units. Activities like tours of artists’ studios—studios that be-came lofts for nonartists and then models for new developers—helped to celebrate and idealize artists’ lifestyles, and thereby generalized and main-streamed appreciation for cultural producers’ ways of living. That there was an audience for such tours indicated that at this time the artist was becoming an exhibit and a lifestyle model.

In the meantime artists were also becoming social assets in other un-precedented ways: a greater number and wider range of people were buy-ing original art, there was new work for artists within state-supported educational and cultural institutions, grants multiplied, and there was more art in public.28 What we fi nd in the growing popularity of loft living is then a manifestation of what Zukin calls the Artistic Mode of Produc-tion (AMP): the translation into economic value of the cultural capital that


attached to artists’ ostensible ways of living and working. This AMP was indispensable to the gentrifi cation of New York’s manufacturing districts; it helped to separate “the built legacy of the industrial city from the social matrix of industrial production,” as old downtown factories were trans-lated into artists’ studios and then into the scarce and costly commodity lofts soon became.29 Hence for Zukin, as for Caulfi eld and Ley, shifts in art’s social value can play a direct role in urban transformations.

Over the last ten years this role has become only more expected and more predictable, subject to sustained observation and measurement by networks of social scientists, urban planners, and policy makers. Glass’s fi rst-wave gentrifi ers—artists, history buffs, intellectuals, and cultural workers of various kinds—were seeking interesting but inexpensive hous-ing; their choices were informed by overarching transformations in work and leisure practices, but their actions were only indirectly supported by offi cial policies and mandates. Now, though, we fi nd urban policy know-ingly incorporating a so-called creative class into revitalization strategies,30 and property developers targeting what they believe to be its tastes.

While numerous urban theorists have critiqued this direction in urban planning, fi nding in it further evidence of a neoliberal turn toward gov-ernment facilitation of private sector interests,31 some high-profi le public intellectuals have actively encouraged the trend. Few have done more in this respect than Richard Florida,32 as he has codifi ed the idea of a metro-centric creative class and then celebrated its economic importance. Indeed, it is as a purveyor of the concept of the creative class that he has become a gurulike advisor to governments and urban strategists. In his words, “with the decline of physical constraints on cities and communities in recent de-cades, creativity has become the principal driving force in the growth and development of cities, regions, and nations.”33 In similar terms, Florida’s “creativity thesis” states that the key to future economic growth will be capacity “to enable and unleash” our “limitless potential”; building this capacity requires an “open culture” that “does not discriminate, does not force people into boxes, allows us to be ourselves, and validates various forms of family and human identity.” Culture is the facilitation and mobilization of this “range of human creative possibilities.”34 It needs difference and diversity to thrive.

Using a “bohemian index” that basically quantifi es and measures Zukin’s AMP—quite unlike her, though, his aim is to promote such mea-surement devices to institutions and agents of redevelopment—Florida’s researchers concluded that the concentrated presence of bohemians in an area “creates an environment or milieu that attracts other types of tal-ented or high human-capital individuals.”35 A “diversity index” produced


similar results, as did a “gay index.” “Like the avant-garde traditionally associated with bohemia,” Florida writes, “the advance guard of the new place-based creative economy” are cities attractive to artists, to an array of ethnic groups, and to people who do not identify as heterosexual.36 Scholars are beginning to question Florida’s methodology, his fi ndings, and his limited interest in the social inequities and uprootings that his work papers over.37 Meanwhile, the extensive circulation of his research has helped to generalize, globalize, and institutionalize the exact circum-stances that it presents itself as simply identifying and observing. He has, in other words, helped to create the conditions in which his own concep-tion of the creative class—of its importance to a given urban area’s revi-talization, of its tastes and lifestyles—is being incorporated into offi cial urban planning strategy.38

Culture and Gentrifi cation in London’s East End

We can return now to London’s East End, to two texts that capitalized on the controversy over Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Both are authored by young creative professionals and present us with an urban milieu that is begin-ning to undergo the kind of class transformation that Florida’s work celebrates and exacerbates. What they reveal, however, is their authors’ reluctance about being perceived as members of a distinct group that is a motor of gentrifi cation.

In Salaam Brick Lane, journalist Tarquin Hall tells of moving to the area after being priced out of more desirable markets. His description of his time there reads at times like travelogue dispatches from an enthrall-ing but trying exotic adventure. From a taxi he observes,

This was the heart of what was known offi cially as ‘Bangla-town’, home to some fi fty thousand or more Bangladeshis, and this portion of the street was lined with Indian restau-rants, sari emporiums, Asian video rental stores, travel agents advertising Hajj package deals, confectionery shops selling fried, syrupy jellabies and lamp-posts painted red and green, the national colours of Bangladesh.39

He decides to live at the center of this active hub, and presents his book as a spontaneous response to the situation he found himself in once he got there. It offered rich material. When he fi rst moved into his new apartment he discovered his landlord had a sweatshop on the premises.


Garment work like this, along with cooking and waiting tables, has long provided meek but storied livelihoods for new arrivals, especially so since unionized large-scale clothing manufacturing collapsed in the 1960s. Though he is initially troubled by its proximity, Hall quickly realizes that such illicit trade ensures that he fi ts right in: the odd hours he keeps as a writer are no stranger than theirs, and the fact that Mr. Ali runs an illegal workplace in the basement indicates that Hall is free to use the tiny space of his attic apartment in whatever way he likes. Details of the area’s shad-ier features are also precisely the local color that lends his story commer-cial appeal. Hence, forced to live there due to a lack of lucrative creative industries work, once he is able to collect the kind of material attractive to publishers he can sell his work, inhabit a more elite position within the cultural fi eld, and enter an income bracket that means he can fi nally move elsewhere.

In Salaam Brick Lane we encounter a place that is itself developing along with Hall’s career trajectory. From the seventeenth century on, waves of Irish, Huguenot, Jewish, and then Bangladeshi immigrants treated the East End as a place of arrival, hopefully the fi rst stage in their own success stories: one comes, makes one’s way, gains prosperity, and then leaves for greener pastures. This familiar narrative, common to immigrant-receptor areas in cities around the world, is now being threat-ened, though, as the middle classes arrive and make the East End a place fi t for staying in. A confl uence of interconnected forces instigates these changes. The global outsourcing of clothing manufacture has decimated the area’s clothing-and leather-goods trades. Replacing them are service-sector businesses, especially restaurants featuring ethnic décor, cuisine, and alcohol provision aimed at a young, single, white clientele with disposable income.40 Surrounding areas like the Docklands are now thoroughly redeveloped. Incidents of racial violence, once endemic, are increasingly rare. Tourists and native Londoners visit the area in increas-ing numbers, and more and more non-Bangladeshis and nonimmigrants are attracted to the idea that it might be possible to move there.

The new gentrifi cation that serves them has proven to be less about transforming and revaluing existing housing stock, and more about lend-ing character to new buildings through heritage detailing that sometimes references the histories of past inhabitants and sometimes evokes the eth-nicity of present-day neighbors. If 1960s gentrifi ers were attracted to life in refurbished Georgian-era homes, now sanitized appeals to affi liation with the history of the East End’s immigrant streams—including, quite specifi cally, its Bangladeshi residents and their market stalls, sari shops, and restaurants—attract those looking to move into this trendy but still


affordable area. Intimate interconnections between local transformations and transnational capital inform the process, too, such that street-by-street upheavals may be orchestrated in the interests of foreign property- development fi rms. As good an instance as any is the fi nal stage in the transmogrifi cation of Goodman’s Fields into the City Quarter develop-ment, a scheme of fi ve new buildings and the pièce de résistance remaking of the one-time headquarters of the Co-operative Society. First built in 1887, it will now house the Sugar House apartment complex, owned by Berkeley Homes and sold as residential property to “Chinese and expat investors in Hong Kong and the Asia Pacifi c region.”41 The structure’s Victorian edifi ce will remain, as will some of the distinguishing features of the interior; meanwhile promotional materials highlight proximity to the “historic” Spitalfi elds Market. The smallest units sell for more than £200,000.

In light of such changes, geographer Anne Kershen claims that Brick Lane is “transmuting by the minute as the essence of the current immi-grant group—the Bengalis—is being replaced by another”; the arriving group is middle-class professionals whose own “essence,” defi ned for Ker-shen by “the minimalist and the barista,” threatens to replace “the balti and sari.”42 This formulation sets up an opposition between stakeholders arriving from outside the area and the cultural milieu—“the balti and sari”—of its current majority, positioning newcomers as a threat to an au-thentic Bangladeshi identity. In fact, though, area redevelopment is not wholly attributable to an incursion of capital from outside, and the lan-guage of cultural authenticity has proven useful to those who have sought to develop the area from within. Local community leaders, including members of the Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare Council (GSC) that spoke out against Ali’s novel, initiated programs and crafted legisla-tion at the heart of the area’s transformation. Indeed, several of the busi-ness leaders most vocally opposed to Brick Lane were also involved in the campaign to refashion and rebrand the area as Banglatown, a “mono- cultural enclave” meant to present a commercially visible, viable, and essen-tialized image of Bangladeshi identity.43 Their efforts were by all accounts a great success, helping to draw tourists, young professionals eager to learn what the buzz was about, and ultimately new, affl uent home buyers. The area was offi cially designated Spitalfi elds/Banglatown in 2002.44

By now new art galleries, hotels, bars, and cafés are constantly opening their doors. Spitalfi elds Market has become a hip place to buy everything from art to organic foods to ethnic jewelry. At the northern edge the Whitechapel Art Gallery is a key space for fostering and displaying new British talent. High-priced condo developments continue to go up in new


buildings and behind grand old facades. In Salaam Brick Lane, Hall observes these changes. He notes the Truman Brewery’s conversion into studios and work space for “a wave of yuppies and self-styled bohemians.” His fl at is scouted as a fi lm location, and eventually even Mr. Ali is swept up in the tide, deciding to close the sweatshop and sell his property to real estate developers. When Hall moves out with his newly arrived journalist girlfriend, herself born in Kashmir but raised in the United States, they fi nd themselves only a short distance away, signaling less that the East End remains unsuited to young professionals, and more that the areas just beyond it are slightly more so and are thus, in an extension of what began in the Docklands and Canary Warf, slowly encroaching upon what remains of this blighted immigrant district.

Though she would likely object to this label, Rachel Lichtenstein is one of the “self-styled bohemians” whose presence Hall monitors. In her own fi rsthand account, On Brick Lane, she describes moving into a studio in the Truman Brewery in 1995. More than cheap rent, she and her fellow artists valued waste left over by local laborers—“fabric remnants, wicker baskets covered in pink Arabic text, scraps of leather, cardboard patterns and thou-sands of other abandoned things”—as well as rich family histories that could inform their aesthetic projects.45 Lichtenstein’s own family was part of the area’s Jewish population. While living and working in her studio she learned about this heritage and incorporated fragments of it into her sculptures.

In charting her time there, ending after a decade or so when it became too expensive, Lichtenstein deploys an urban-frontier rhetoric: upon ar-rival she found “unexplored territory,” but over the years the “eccentric characters” at her morning breakfast place “seemed to disappear,” as did the more unusual scrap items.46 Cheshire Street is gradually closed off, and the old cottages there are renovated and turned into shops. As rents are going up, so too are costs for stalls within the shrinking parameters of the famous Brick Lane market. Eventually artists like her are forced out as Web and fashion designers and “production and internet companies” move in.47 She writes,

Brick Lane disappeared behind a wall of scaffolding and once-empty shops re-emerged as coffee bars, estate agents and smart new galleries. Pavements were dug up and replaced with fake cobblestones. Leather manufacturers became vintage-clothing stores, selling at hugely infl ated prices the second-hand stuff you could have bought from the Sunday market for a few pence.48


In passages like these, Lichtenstein places herself at a crucial moment of transition. She is at once fascinated by what she fi nds in Brick Lane and “repelled by the way [its stories] were being used to re-market the area and increase property prices.”49 Making this distinction between the stories and their marketing, she positions herself as a writer whose foremost task isn’t to sell the area but rather to exhume the ghosts of her relations; that they suffered there then legitimizes her authorship. Since “[s]o many memories of this streets have already been erased or forgotten . . . hidden behind newly erected buildings, buried under recently paved streets like unexcavated archeological treasures,” her own task will be “to extract” what the city now buries, like an exorcism.50

Indeed, both Hall and Lichtenstein construct the creative work that their books do as their means of capturing in prose a place that will soon be gone. Neither ventures that their access to the cultural market may ac-tually be a product and engine of the same erasure. Indeed, their omissions themselves evince anxiety about the connection between their works’ mar-ket circulation and the way Brick Lane has fast become, in Lichtenstein’s words, “the hottest new fi lm and photographic location in the country . . . recorded and rewritten by documentary makers, news crews, tourists, and photographers taking pictures to accompany Sunday supplement articles on lost Georgian London.”51

Such anxiety reveals itself in Lichtenstein’s tendency to position herself as clearly distinct from those arriving to “document and consume in Lon-don’s ‘newly discovered’ and heavily marketed ‘ethnic quarter’,”52 and Hall makes a number of related gestures. Most notably, when he encoun-ters a new café slogan, “Come Hungry, Leave Edgy,” this strikes him as an accurate summation of Brick Lane and his experience of it, encompassing the histories of the waves of immigrants moving into and out of the area for centuries, and including himself—forced to live there by economic necessity, exposed to much he might never have encountered otherwise, and then fi nally able to move himself out once his ship comes in. What he doesn’t note is the slightly different meaning the café’s marketers surely had in mind: trivializing hunger, they sell diners on the idea that if they choose to eat there they will leave feeling that they have done much more than that; they will have had an enriching cultural experience, one whose “edge” derives from the index-able, measurable diversity of the area’s im-migrant history. To call something edgy is to anchor it resolutely to com-merce; it has come to mean “at the forefront of a trend,” and the OED identifi es an early instance of this usage in assessments of the work of Andy Warhol’s circle—fi gures who return us to the gentrifi cation of New York’s manufacturing districts.53 The word fi ts Hall in precisely


this way: a man who arrives with little, but leaves with a work whose commercial viability borrows from the history of hungry struggle it refer-ences. Just as the café’s slogan appeals to and reconstitutes the area’s brand- ability, Salaam Brick Lane participates in the important task of circulating this singular location as just the kind of appealing, vibrant, “place-based creative economy” that Florida celebrates.

Thus, while Hall and Lichtenstein readily admit to being attracted to Brick Lane for the reasons that cultural workers have traditionally been vanguard gentrifi ers, what they avoid is how in inhabiting it and writing about it they participate in its remaking, at once overseeing and servicing the culturalization of gentrifi cation—a process encompassing the physical features of built environments (public art and overtly stylized architec-ture); the nature of local business development (toward gallery space, de-sign studios, and lifestyle shops and services); the creative labor of those prompted to move into the area; and, fi nally, the transformation of the experiences of the place’s new and old inhabitants into successfully circu-lating intellectual properties. Hall’s and Lichtenstein’s own books perform the crucial market function of supporting the mainstream circulation of the “Brick Lane” signifi er, which in turn contributes to the area’s ongoing reconstitution as a place that is edgy enough—in Florida’s terms, both bohemian and diverse enough—to be of interest to London’s potential roster of gentrifi ers.

That is, if this group’s habitation in blighted areas is something that urban planners and policy makers now clearly position as a path to regen-eration, also key is the very availability of such areas for representation in new intellectual properties. Artists’ actual habitation in a space is not the only way they contribute to its gentrifi cation. On Brick Lane, the gentrify-ing force of the aesthetic can and has been abstracted from the physical presence of those engaged in producing it, as the circulation of the name of the place in the media, most notably in cultural media like Time Out and the Guardian’s arts pages, has contributed to the concentration of cul-tural capital in the area, encouraging more and more prospective inhabit-ants to think of it as an exciting, diverse, aesthetically rich (but ultimately safe) place to work, shop, and live.54

The Reception of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

The evident role of creative professionals within the East End’s gentrifi ca-tion, and the additive force of the circulation of the place name Brick Lane, determined the tenor of the reception of the wildly celebrated novel


that Monica Ali set there. Journalists and residents quickly pointed out that Ali has never lived in Brick Lane herself. Born in Dhaka to a British mother and a Bangladeshi father, she was raised in London in a middle-class neighborhood, attended Oxford University, worked for Verso, and married a white management consultant. She admits candidly that Ban-gladesh exists for her as distant memories supplemented by books and by her father’s stories. In the novel Ali acknowledges that in creating her heroine she relied heavily on Naila Kabeer’s The Power to Choose, a piece of ethnographic scholarship about garment workers in London and Bangladesh.55 Ali did not speak Bengali at home as a child and has not since learned to do so. Also, as critics point out, while 95 percent of Brit-ain’s Bangladeshi community claims identifi cation with the province of Sylhet, a region whose inhabitants have faced insidious stereotyping in Bangladesh and the United Kingdom alike, Ali’s father does not. And, fi nally, the title Ali had once planned for the novel did not directly refer-ence the area: it was “Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers,” which evokes the distance between the United Kingdom and Bangladesh, and which seemed like a viable option for U.S. audiences unlikely to be familiar with the geography of London.

It was Doubleday, Ali’s UK publisher, who preferred and pushed the title Brick Lane, knowing that a key way to capture audiences for the novel would be through reference to its status as the fi rst important work deal-ing with an increasingly visible community at the revitalized heart of a once-notorious area. Audiences of every taste have long been eager to peer into East End spaces perceived as constituting London’s mean streets, un-derbelly, or frontier. Still, Ali’s novel was at the cusp of a new wave of texts set there, and until it appeared no feted literature dealt with the lives of women in Tower Hamlets. The novel’s suitability—and titling—for mar-ket circulation had to do with its arrival at a time of renewed interest in the area. Indeed, it may be that Ali’s manuscript was so attractive to pub-lishers precisely because it was set in a once-blighted area that was then undergoing a substantial transformation, gaining signifi cant cachet through the media buzz that Ali’s work could tap into and foment. In this sense, without Banglatown there may not have been a Brick Lane.

From her publishers’ perspective what mattered about Brick Lane was its availability for use in the construction of a unique, and uniquely mar-ketable, brand. According to Doubleday’s Marianne Velmans it was after Ali made Granta’s list of best young novelists—this miraculously occurred before she’d published a word—that such marketability became irrevo-cable: “The Granta nomination was the crucial moment. The title became a brand and, once a brand is established, it doesn’t matter if it refers to a


street in London or anything else.”56 From that point on, as the novel cir-culated, it was the ostensible contiguity between its content and the area that was at once constantly highlighted and called into question.

For instance, the book launch party was staged at the Truman Brewery, a place associated with the cultural fi eld in ways we’ve seen: inhabited in the mid-1990s by Lichtenstein and other artists and then targeted for con-version into new bars, galleries and condos. Months later Ali’s U.S. book release was accompanied by a cover of the New York Times book review section that magnifi ed the Brick Lane portion of the London A to Z street atlas.57 Then, reviewers and commentators who praised the novel often did so on the basis of the access it ostensibly allowed them to a set of real experiences with which they would have otherwise remained unfamiliar. The New Statesman’s Francis Gilbert states that even though he lives “right at the top of Brick Lane,” after reading the book he felt “more informed about the people who are [his] next-door neighbours.”58 Similarly, reacting to criticism of the novel, D. J. Taylor, one of the Man Booker Prize judges the year Ali was nominated, stated, “If Monica Ali wants to write about Brick Lane, which as a Bangladeshi she presumably knows a good deal about, then she should be free to do so.”59

Meanwhile, again in response to statements against Ali, then-Granta-editor Ian Jack, one of the judges for Granta’s Best of Young British Nove-lists awards that year, wrote an editorial questioning the GSC’s claim to represent the views of area Bangladeshis. He states that the Granta judges, none of whom were Bengalis from East London, liked the book precisely because they “felt that it showed us a glimpse of what life might be like among one of the largest and least described non-white communities in Britain.”60

Finally, in a piece titled “Full of East End Promise,” the Observer re-viewer wrote that “it opened up a world whose contours I could recognise, but which I needed Monica Ali to make me understand.”61 This kind of logic, which establishes the basis for a writer’s value in her immediate ac-cess to a minorized community, is widely perpetuated within the literary marketplace, as well as within arts policy that isolates and highlights writers who are BME (black and minority ethnic) as a means of attracting a more diverse workforce and incorporating new audiences. In this case it also connects Ali to area residents in a way her book’s title already invited.

This contributed to the anger of protesters. Where Ali’s publishers sold the originality of her representation of a community not previously de-picted in any celebrated literary fi ction, with supporters of the novel often getting behind such claims, detractors, typically questioning her right to make money by representing the area, tended to imply that Brick Lane


partakes of the kind of redevelopment that has been “theming” and then selling the area’s living heritages to gentrifying forces arriving from out-side. Most of their charges are versions of the standard claim that Ali’s depiction is inaccurate and that such inaccuracy has its basis in her dis-tance from the area she makes a book out of. Appealing to the existence of a set of sociological truths in this way—truths that Ali is ostensibly guilty of benefi ting from betraying—serves particular purposes. Most markedly, it attempts to secure distance between the carefully constructed Bangla-town brand and the life story of Ali’s protagonist, which involves, as I’ve noted, marriage to a middle-aged ineffectual Bangladeshi man, passage through sexual infi delity with a younger political radical, and a fi nal liberation into autonomous life and creative labor.

The fi rst major feature of the campaign against Brick Lane was an eighteen-page letter to the author composed by the GSC, a charity organi-zation whose stated interest is “the welfare of Sylheti Bangladeshi People living in the UK.”62 They sent the letter to Ali, to the Guardian, and to the Man Booker Prize committee. Within it they state they “feel the book portrays Bangladeshis in Brick Lane as backward, uneducated and unso-phisticated.” They claim it offers a “shameful” and “completely stereo-typical view of Bangladeshis living in Brick Lane and one we simply do not recognise.” Focusing on specifi c, minor features of the story line they call “untrue and hurtful,” they claim the novel “says we got here by jumping ships and it says we have lice and live like rats in their holes.”63

Objections like these were routinized and extended in the following weeks by commentators who supported the GSC in the press. If they did not agree that Ali should correct the work and then have it issued in a re-vised edition—a demand the GSC made—they did contribute critiques of the novel’s infi delity to reality that shaded over into challenges to the au-thor’s accumulation of cultural cachet. In one letter to the Guardian, local doctor David Curtis states that he has worked in the area for several years and has many Bengali patients. He declares any statement that “as a Ban-gladeshi [Ali] presumably knows a good deal about Brick Lane” to be “wildly racist”; and he states that the novel is “full of factual errors which make it clear she has no familiarity with the area, and there is no reason to suppose her portrayal of its inhabitants is any more authentic than yours or mine would be.”64 Thus, while his concern is patently with Ali’s lack of fi delity to the area’s reality, he also extends his commentary to the con-struction of value within the publishing industry: cultural elites—“the middle-class intelligentsia”—are accused of translating Ali’s “foreign name” into a false expectation of her natural ability to access the area’s meaning. They have, in the process, been “suckered.”65


Finally, in a feature article bemoaning “the curse of diversity,” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown discusses the way that the arts, the media, and the heritage industry have begun to “open their doors” to fi gures like “Ali, Meera Syal, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Anish Kapoor, Gurinder Chada et al.,” fi gures who “don’t question the system much any more.” South Asian ethnicity is chic, and to Alibhai-Brown this is problematic. Specifi cally, as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) “is read by the children of earls and by Welsh church-man,” as a “kurtha is a must this summer,” and as it becomes “cool now to adore books about East End Bangladeshis,” we witness the constitution of yet another cultural elite made up of “a new breed of preferred ‘ethnic’ writers” who are “all mixed race, au fait with Oxbridge, not too dark or troublingly alien.” Meanwhile, those who don’t have the benefi t of “that favoured profi le” continue to “live in the shadows.”66 Such reference to the shadowy fi gures whose lives are inaccessible to the chosen few connects Alibhai-Brown’s logic to the GSC’s: for both parties, Ali’s novel cannot do the work that the mainstream literary media wants to charge it with, because the author is herself too removed from the population whose spokesperson some seemed eager to read her as.

Reactions to the fi lm extended this logic. The Brick Lane controversy increased the novel’s sales, and the level of public interest encouraged fi lm-makers to go ahead with their project despite protests. Ruby Films and Film Four contracted to undertake production of the fi lm early on, but in light of threats of blockades and the advice of police the fi lmmakers had to abandon plans to fi lm on location.67 Opposition to the fi lm, based in claims similar to those that grounded the novel’s hostile reception, was perhaps more exaggerated because the director was herself a prominent member of the creative elite—Sarah Gavron, daughter of London’s deputy mayor and of millionaire publisher Lord Gavron.68

Abdus Salique, business owner and restaurateur, member of the local Labour Party, and chair of the Brick Lane Traders’ Association, was heav-ily involved in the campaign against the fi lm. He told the New York Times that area residents feared that their own efforts to turn the neighborhood into “an icon of east London” were now in jeopardy. “The book, and the fi lm of it,” he said, “sully the identity of those Bengalis from the Sylhet region of Bangladesh who made Brick Lane part of the London tourist circuit and center of Bangladeshi culture.”69 He made similar statements to local reporters, telling the London Times that “Monica Ali says this is fi ction but I believe she has targeted our community. Perhaps she thought that being controversial would help sell her book.” In the same Times piece, accountant Mahmoud Rauf, another local elite, is quoted as saying that “Monica Ali has done an injustice to this community. Our culture


prizes respect for our elders. She has ignored that tradition for her own commercial benefi t.”70 Quite directly, then, using the language of urban revitalization to support their positions, area leaders and their supporters claimed to worry that the renewed circulation of Ali’s narrative would continue a process that the novel instigated, benefi ting the author but jeopardizing their hold over the meaning of the Brick Lane brand.

To be sure, the GSC’s and like readings of the novel should trouble anyone who would claim fi ction writers are not responsible for represent-ing a literally accurate sociological truth and, moreover, couldn’t do so if they tried. There are tens of thousands of Bangladeshis in Brick Lane; on what basis could any writer determine what inevitably composite picture most accurately depicts an average immigrant’s experiences? We go some way toward understanding these hostile reactions, though, if we consider what they owe to concern about the links between gentrifi cation and Ali’s ability to capitalize on the novel’s link to the area. That is, in part, their opposition to Ali’s work is symptomatic of an anxiety that accompanies and troubles the operations of intellectual property; namely, the way Ali attaches her name to a work called Brick Lane and accrues cultural and economic capital on the basis of that title despite the several ways in which she is actually distant from the area that name references. Ali benefi ts from association with the area and from the way its reality as a geographic space can be evoked by the Brick Lane signifi er. In turn, the processes I have outlined here indicate why it might be accurate to perceive her emer-gence into authorship as coeval with an infl ux of new galleries, restau-rants, tours, and built-to-own housing meant to attract outside capital. Part of her work’s cachet derives from reference to the local community—a community whose various members are by no means cohesive, but which is represented in the media by people who have an interest in construing it as such and who are threatened by the incursion into the area of members of the creative elite and the other middling classes that come with them and after them.

In this light, Ali’s reception is in part the product of concern that those newly arriving with more elite forms of cultural and economic capital may displace, undermine, or otherwise weaken the forms of currency held by existing local spokespeople. As I’ve suggested, in this fi eld of competi-tive interaction, the various players, all in their own ways engaged in pro-ducing Brick Lane, attempt to delimit who projects images of the area and accrues capital based on their circulation to disparate readers, tourists, or home buyers—all consumers who may have values and interests that do not align with the image of the local population that critics of Brick Lane were working to perpetuate in their protests.


We can then revisit Ian Jack’s Guardian editorial, provoked by the cir-culation of the GSC’s original eighteen-page letter. Most intriguing is his suggestion that area leaders, mostly men, were only claiming to be both-ered by Ali’s ostensibly negative portrayal of the area, when in fact what irked them was the representation of a woman liberated through infi del-ity to her husband:

it is probably safe to assume that its leaders are mainly men and that the novel’s theme of an immigrant Muslim woman’s struggle to come into her own—facing the twin diffi culties of her own male-dominated community and the prejudices of what’s known as “the host society”—had got up their noses and was at least partly responsible for their anger.71

The reactions I’ve briefl y outlined suggest a crucial addition to this tren-chant point, since these two sources of opposition needn’t exclude each other. Salique’s charge is that Ali has ignored local traditions and has done so “for her own commercial benefi t”; he casts her fi nancial gain as the product of her misrepresentation of a distinct collective, while he has himself been visibly engaged, as business leader and community spokes-person, in selecting the features to market as integral to an essentialized Bangladeshi community. Like those “distressed-looking twentysome-things with asymmetrical haircuts,” the liberated single woman who works in fashion design is one of the categories he and his cohort posi-tion as aligned to or arriving with outside forces of gentrifi cation more generally. That is, like the “ haircuts,” she can and has been perceived and positioned as belonging to a core gentrifying group.

Thus, again, when we keep in mind that several of those leading the charge against Ali had themselves been engaged in the work of neigh-borhood revitalization, their concern about the fi delity of Ali’s depiction reads as an extension of earlier efforts to police the nature of the trans-formation of the East End from blighted ward to newly vital city quar-ter. It partakes of and extends the work they did to essentialize Bangladeshi identity into Banglatown. Media interest in the controversy draws attention to the place, and what those with media access say re-veals their interest in monitoring the image of the Bangladeshi popula-tion that will be sold to those positioned as outsiders, those for whom one aspect of the area’s appeal is what it derives from Indo-chic Asian ethnicity.


I’ve noted that many social scientists, think tanks, and policy makers are currently imagining the place of the creative economy in Britain’s ongoing development. They stress that creative industries like publishing companies, and creative elites like writers, are precisely what is needed to help any area leave its blighted past behind, and note that difference from the mainstream, often understood as authenticity, is part of what attracts young creative entrepreneurs to a given area. Attention to the redevelop-ment of Brick Lane suggests that how and when the literary marketplace helps to circulate the images and narratives that constitute this difference, and how and when public perception of the work of literary production is affected in the process, are questions that deserve further scholarly attention.

In the case I have considered here, the marketability of Ali’s novel had to do with its setting in an area that was undergoing a dramatic transformation, a fact that the book’s publishers exploited by deciding to title it Brick Lane. In this it was one of several literary works whose ap-pearance contributed to the continuous and rapid circulation of refer-ence to the area and its betterment—circulation that focused potential consumers’ and residents’ attention on the place’s availability for au-thentically edgy lifestyle experiences, and thereby contributed to its gen-trifi cation. In this sense, Ali and her publishers tapped into something that the Banglatown branding process instigated. Masterminds behind the area’s rebranding found their own uses for the novel, in turn. As they construed Ali as a newcomer and outsider misrepresenting local experiences, and appealed to some cohesive reality fi rst there for her to betray, their statements evinced, in part, that they saw Ali’s capture of this particular intellectual property as a means for her to solidify her position within the creative elite, an elite they quite reasonably con-nected to those stepping across the borders that formerly protected but also destituted the East End as a low-rent enclave attractive to new im-migrants. Moreover, by taking issue with the nature of the novel’s repre-sentation, and doing so both publicly and loudly, these community spokespeople used the Brick Lane controversy as a means of attracting attention to themselves as area leaders, delimiting community affi liation by designating insiders and outsiders, and attempting to constrain the nature, ownership, content, and meaning of the intellectual property that found its market footing in the uniqueness of its reference to the area.

—Carleton University


NOTES

1. See Ruth Glass, “Introduction: Aspects of Change,” in London: Aspects of Change, ed. Centre for Urban Studies, Centre for Urban Studies Report no. 3, University College London (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964).

2. Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrifi cation and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 32.

3. Ibid., 39.

4. Neil Smith, “Gentrifi cation,” in The Dictionary of Human Geography, ed. R. J. Johnson, Derek Gregory, Geraldine Pratt, and Michael Watt (London: Blackwell, 2000), 294.

5. Smith, New Urban Frontier, 85.

6. David Ley, “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrifi cation,” Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (2003): 2527–44, quotation on 2535.

7. “Spread the Word in East London,” Spread the Word, www.spreadtheword.org.uk/index.php?id=miscellaneous&text=278.

8. Tarquin Hall, Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End (London: John Murray, 2005); Rachel Lichtenstein, On Brick Lane (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007); and Monica Ali, Brick Lane: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2003).

9. Germaine Greer, “Reality Bites,” Culture, Guardian, 24 July 2006, http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1834796,00.html.

10. Sukhdev Sandhu, “Come Hungry, Leave Edgy,” review of Brick Lane, by Monica Ali, London Review of Books, 9 October 2003, www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n19/sand01_.html (par. 18).

11. John Marx, “The Feminization of Globalization,” Cultural Critique 63 (2006): 1–32, quotation on 20.

12. Ibid., 18.

13. Ali, Brick Lane, 301.

14. See James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

15. Studies of gentrifi cation will position professional women as a key demographic when, for example, living in city centers allows them ready access to high-quality essential services like child and health care, and provides career and dating opportunities and the best chances to network with others whose lifestyles are similar to their own (see Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992]).

16. Chris Hamnett, Unequal City: London in the Global Arena (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–2, 12. See also Stephen J. Shaw and Nicola E. MacLeod, “Creativity and Confl ict: Cultural Tourism in London’s City Fringe,” Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, 2000, www.its.leeds.ac.uk/projects/mobilenetwork/downloads/travelcult2.doc.

17. Hamnett, Unequal City, 127.

18. Ibid., 93.

19. Ibid., 167. See also Smith, New Urban Frontier, 95.

20. Smith, New Urban Frontier, 33–34.


21. Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly, Gentrifi cation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 95. See also Jon Caulfi eld, “‘Gentrifi cation’ and Desire,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26, no. 4 (1989): 617–32; and Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 58–59.

22. Smith, New Urban Frontier, 114.

23. Caulfi eld, “‘Gentrifi cation’ and Desire,” 617–18.

24. Ibid., 626.

25. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

26. Ley, “Artists,” 2534, 2541.

27. Zukin, Loft Living, 59.

28. Ibid., 97.

29. Ibid., 180, 190.

30. For example, see the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), Towards an Urban Renaissance (London: DETR, 1999); and Urban Task Force, Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance (London: Urban Task Force, 2005).

31. See, most trenchantly, Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrifi cation as Global Urban Strategy,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 427–50. For broader commentary on the trend, see Lees et al., Gentrifi cation, 198–202.

32. Charles Landry is in close competition. See his The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (London: Earthscan, 2000); The Art of City Making (London: Earthscan, 2006); and, with Phil Wood, The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage (London: Earthscan, 2007).

33. Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1. See also his The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002); The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and Who’s Your City? (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

34. Florida, Cities and the Creative Class, 5–6.

35. Ibid., 114.

36. Ibid., 128.

37. See Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2005): 740–70; Ann Markusen, “Urban Development and the Politics of a Creative Class: Evidence from a Study of Artists,” Environment and Planning A 38 (2006): 1921–40; and Mark Banks, “The Instrumental Leisure of the ‘Creative Class’,” Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) Working Paper no. 47 (Manchester, UK: CRESC, 2008), www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/documents/wp47.pdf. Critics of Florida are not of one type. Some consensus has emerged, though, and I align my own research with it: rather than treating the creative class as a self-evident grouping readily available to positivistic measurement, we should investigate it as a constructed and contested concept, one through which academic research has implicated itself in urban-development practices that we need to historicize and query rather than blindly propagate. I thank an anonymous reader at Criticism for clarifying my thoughts on this point.


38. In this way the fate of the concept of the creative class is inseparable from that of the creative industries, a term that gained currency in the 1990s when Tony Blair’s govern-ment campaigned on the idea that it was creative expertise that could secure Britain’s viability within the new global economy. The circulation and legitimization of both concepts indeed dovetails with specifi c political mandates: it helps government construe the cultural sector as something of proper concern to it and as something it understands and has a handle on, while presenting itself also as friendly to enterprise while wary of public subsidy, and friendly to a fl exibly self-suffi cient, self-managing workforce while hostile to collective politics and workers’ interdependence. Excellent treatments of the merging of private enterprise, government, and “creative industries” discourse can be found in Justin O’Connor, The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Review of the Literature (London: Creative Partnerships, Arts Council England, 2007); and Mark Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work (London: Palgrave, 2007).

39. Hall, Salaam Brick Lane, 20.

40. Anne J. Kershen, Strangers, Aliens and Asians: Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfi elds 1660–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 181. See also Paul Barker, “The Taste of Banglatown,” World News, Guardian, 13 April 2004, 20.

41. King Sturge, “About Us,” King Sturge International, 2009, www.kingsturge.com.hk/why-king-sturge.

42. Kershen, Strangers, Aliens and Asians, 70.

43. Jane Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), 100. Cf. Kershen, Strangers, Aliens and Asians, 181.

44. Sukhdev Sandhu, “Come Hungry, Leave Edgy,” par. 19.

45. Lichtenstein, On Brick Lane, 8.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 9.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 12.

50. Ibid., 15.

51. Ibid., 12.

52. Ibid.

53. OED Online, s.v., “Edgy,” Draft Additions, November 2003, http://dictionary.oed.com.libproxy.mit.edu/entrance.dtl.

54. Cf. Sharon Zukin, “Consuming Authenticity,” Cultural Studies 22 (2008): 724–48.

55. Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso, 2000).

56. Quoted in David Smith, “It’s Brick Lane by Any Other Name,” Observer, 14 September 2003, 15.

57. Ian Jack, “Responses to Monica Ali’s Brick Lane Testify to the Continuing Power of Fiction,” Culture, Guardian, 20 December 2003, 7.

58. Francis Gilbert, review of Brick Lane, by Monica Ali, Novel of the Week, New Statesman, 2 June 2003, www.newstatesman.com/200306020042.


59. Quoted in Matthew Taylor, “Brickbats Fly as Community Brands Novel ‘Despicable’,” UK News, Guardian, 3 December 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/dec/03/books.arts.

60. Jack, “Responses.”

61. Geraldine Bedell, “Full of East End Promise,” Observer, 15 June 2003, 17.

62. Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare Council of the UK (GSCUK), “About Us,” www.gscuk.org/about_us.htm.

63. Quoted in Taylor, “Brickbats Fly.”

64. David Curtis, “Roots of Literary Success,” Letters, Guardian, 6 December 2003, 27.

65. Ibid.

66. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, “The Curse of Diversity,” Arts, Independent, 9 June 2003, 14.

67. Sam Lyon, “Victory for Brick Lane as Producers Abandon Plans to Film on Location,” Evening Standard, 27 July 2006, 7.

68. David Cohen, “The Battle of Brick Lane,” Evening Standard, 25 July 2006, 16.

69. Alan Cowell, “In London, a New East-West Skirmish,” New York Times (late ed.), 5 August 2006, B7.

70. Sean O’Neill, “Asian Leaders Warn of Violence against Brick Lane Film,” London Times, 22 July 2006, 28.

71. Jack, “Responses.”

Literature and Gentrification on Brick Lane

Documents

Transcript of Literature and Gentrification on Brick Lane