They’ve Got Their Wine Bars, We’ve Got Our Pubs’: Housing, Diversity and Community in Two South London Neighbourhoods

Abstract

This chapter explores the constituents and dynamics of diversity, community and boundary-making in two South London neighbourhoods, Bermondsey and Camberwell. The analysis will in particular focus on how settlement patterns and residential geographies have been impacted by the nature of the housing stock and policies regulating access to social housing (Fig. 1). 1 Despite their relative proximity in the London Borough of Southwark, the two inner-city neighbourhoods of Bermondsey and Camberwell are characterized by signifi cant differences in terms of the built-up urban landscape and their place in the historical development of London. In Camberwell, class was built into the landscape from the late eighteenth century when city merchants built Georgian houses in the southern part of Camberwell, located on a slope above the slums and smells of northern Camberwell. Bermondsey, on the other hand, was a much more homogeneous, white working-class area, with livelihoods sustained by local employment

Welfare micropublics and inequality: urban super-diversity in a time of austerity

“…However, stark inequalities in socio-economic status and access to housing did undermine the potential for meaningful interaction between expectant mothers, illustrated by the group's dynamics: three mothers who had grown up in the area on social housing estates stuck together, while mothers who had moved to the area more recently, and who knew each other from the local NCT group, 4 also stuck together, with no interaction between them. This lack of interaction was accompanied by familiarity and quiet indifference, rather than hostility and exclusion, creating a texture of 'together apart' (Jensen and Gidley 2016) rather than segregation. For expectant mothers, socio-economic inequalities and differentiation of legal status, as articulated in different trajectories into the area (e.g., born and bred; gentrifying property owners; recently arrived migrants/refugees), structured interactions in notionally shared spaces along lines of tacit avoidance of difference rather than either conviviality or hostility.…”

Failing better at convivially researching spaces of diversity

“…Meaningful contact is not always immediately amical. Mundane forms of reciprocity and trust, and the dexterity in navigating linguistic and cultural differences -hallmarks of conviviality and commonplace diversity -can thrive without challenging negative representations of others (Jensen and Gidley 2016). Convivial parochial spaces and public familiarity can be accompanied by private segregation (Blokland 2001;Wessendorf 2013), or even be predicated on the exclusion of others marked as not buying into an ethos of conviviality (as in Wessendorf's account of Hackney, where Orthodox Jews and hipsters appear to be the constitutive outside against which convivial locals define themselves).…”

Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture

“…Meaningful contact is not always immediately amical. Mundane forms of reciprocity and trust, and the dexterity in navigating linguistic and cultural differences -hallmarks of conviviality and commonplace diversity -can thrive without challenging negative representations of others (Jensen and Gidley 2016). Convivial parochial spaces and public familiarity can be accompanied by private segregation (Blokland 2001;Wessendorf 2013), or even be predicated on the exclusion of others marked as not buying into an ethos of conviviality (as in Wessendorf's account of Hackney, where Orthodox Jews and hipsters appear to be the constitutive outside against which convivial locals define themselves).…”