Social capital has been used extensively in recent years to examine issues of social exclusion. Following Bourdieu, the concept is reintegrated into social theory alongside cultural and economic capital to examine the variations in the upgrading of gentrified areas of inner London. Three neighbourhoods in south London are compared and it is argued that their differences can, to a limited extent, be understood in terms of the differential deployment of cultural, social and economic capital by their middle-class residents. These neighbourhoods have acquired distinctive characters as a result and it is argued that the gentrification process in inner London is leading to heterogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods which contrasts with the perceived homogeneity of the traditional suburban area.

In this paper we argue that a process of super‐gentrification, similar to that first identified by Lees (2003 Urban Studies 40 2487–509) in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, is occurring in the already gentrified, inner London neighbourhood of Barnsbury. A new group of super wealthy professionals working in the City of London is slowly imposing its mark on this inner London housing market in a way that differentiates it and them both from traditional gentrifiers and from the traditional urban upper classes. We suggest that there is a close interaction between work in the newly globalizing industries of the financial services economy, elite forms of education, particularly Oxbridge, and residence in Barnsbury which is very different from other areas of gentrified inner London.

The article examines aspects of middle-class life by a group of 75 gentrifiers in Islington in north London. The study demonstrates that in their day-to-day lives almost all the respondents lived quite apart from non-middle-class residents in Islington. This was demonstrated by their educational strategies which involved finding schooling for their children out of the borough in both the private and state sectors. Their children had almost no contact with children from other social backgrounds. It is suggested that, despite a strong rhetoric in favour of social integration, the current gentrifiers of Islington, unlike the pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, are unwilling to invest social capital in the area and that their relationships are almost entirely with 'people like us'. It is suggested that this is likely to lead to an increasingly polarised social structure in which the middle classes and their children inhabit entirely separate social spaces from other, and more disadvantaged, groups. The long-term consequences of this are uncertain but are unlikely to lead to greater social cohesion.

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The subtitle of Atkinson and Bridge's (2005) edited collection Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism (emphasis added) reflects the widely held belief that gentrification is responsible for the emergence of an`urban other' across the globe. (1) This assertion should at the very least have had a question mark at the end because the hunt for the urban frontiers of gentrification by academics on their travels has sometimes been less clear cut than it might have seemed at first sight. Clark (2005) and Sykora ( 2005) both confide that the frontiers of gentrification in Malmo « and Budapest, respectively, were not as sharply drawn as Neil Smith might have understood them to have been when he came visiting.In many ways, the gentrification concept does as nicely for the travelling academic as the American Express card did for his (sic) corporate colleague. It comes bundled with a set of assumptions about the neoliberal nature of the world that originated in the socioeconomic urban landscapes of North America plus a few other sites elsewhere in the Anglophone world. These assumptions are now being rolled out across the globe in a way that is seemingly oblivious to local circumstances. However, this rather restrictive analysis (`gentrification as displacement') by no means tells the whole story about the trend towards new forms of sociospatial segmentation of urban centres elsewhere across the globe. Gentrification has joined a selection of mediating concepts which

Converting the 2001 census NS-SEC categories back into SEG categories for the 1981 and 1991 censuses, the authors show that there is a continued process of class upgrading occurring within Greater London compared with the rest of England and Wales. Inner London continues to see an increase in the proportion of residents in the higher social classes (particularly in the boroughs that were already gentrified in the centre and west of the centre). In outer London, there has been a process of upwards class change, but this is being led by the intermediate social class groups and is geographically more uneven. The authors conclude that these trends provide evidence for a continued gentrification of and social upgrading in inner London. The most significant finding is that London's gentrification is now being partly driven by the expansion of the `middle' middle classes of lower professional and intermediate non-manual groups.

In this article we contrast the experience of middle-class life in two areas of South London. We hypothesize that different sections of the middle class will live in different areas. Whilst these differences partly reflect economic capabilities and occupational divisions (such as public versus private employment sector, professionals versus managers), we suggest these divisions are becoming more complex. We develop a threefold model based on the work of Savage "et al". (1992) and hypothesize that each group will tend to live in different and distinct areas of the city. In our comparison of two areas in which we have completed fieldwork (Telegraph Hill and Brixton), we are able to show very different accommodations to metropolitan life which provides initial support for our hypothesis. We characterize middle-class life in Brixton as being essentially unstable, which is largely compensated for by the "frisson" of living in a cosmopolitan and mixed area. Telegraph Hill is a more stable area, with residents building a long-term relationship with the area and forming substantial social networks with other residents; it, however, lacks the cultural infrastructure of Brixton. We argue that 'circuits of education' are of prime importance for middle-class families living in London: in comparison to Brixton, our respondents in Telegraph Hill have developed sophisticated educational strategies which have enabled them to come to terms with living in London. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.

In this article, a new approach is outlined to the gentrification of London which argues that it is a diverse phenomenon. This reflects not merely contested explanations for gentrification but more importantly the different ways in which individuals and social groups have reacted to the effect of living and/or working in global cities on their 'work-life balance'. As the middle classes have increasingly lost a sense of place-based rootedness at work, they have been struggling to build it in their domestic and residential lives. For many, this meant a move into the heart of the globalising metropolises. This has been associated with a proliferation of gentrified neighbourhoods in such cities. The paper reports on research undertaken in five such London neighbourhoods and presents three models of neighbourhood gentrification which have each produced their own patterns and narratives of settlement.