In this talk I will revisit the literature on (super-) gentrification in order to interrogate recent socio-spatial changes in some of London’s most affluent neighbourhoods. If gentrification is understood as any process involving a change in the population of land-users in which the new users are of a higher socio-economic status than the previous users then, we ask, should processes currently occurring in such areas be considered as gentrification?

Only nuanced measures of socio-economic status can capture socio-spatial struggles between what we might think of as ‘microclasses’ rather then the ‘big classes’ of traditional sociology. We re-examine Barnsbury, Islington, review recent work on Highgate, north London, and present new data on the experiences of established residents of Kensington’s W8 – one of London’s most affluent postcode districts.

We conclude that recent changes in land use and population in W8 involve intensive concentrations of wealth and housing reconstruction as plutocrats from all over the world move there. We note important shifts in the social relationships of the neighbourhood as the ‘merely wealthy’ and habitually entitled are displaced. We conclude that these plutocratic forms are specific, and unlike previous configurations of gentrification in their scale and intensity, and insist that this accentuates the benefits of place-based empirical research over more abstract formulations of the concept of gentrification.

Roger Burrows is Professor of Cities in GURU at Newcastle University, UK. Prior to this he was Professor of Sociology and Pro-Warden for Interdisciplinary Development at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, articles, chapters and reports. In recent years, his work has been concerned with the impact of the super-rich on London, the metricization of academic life, the history of geodemographics and the social life of methods