Introduction: the transformation of East London

We have argued in this book that East London has undergone a series of dramatic and far-reaching economic and social transformations over the last 40 years. First, its traditional economic base rooted in the docks and associated manufacturing has largely disappeared to be replaced by a new, service-based, economy. Second, and as a direct consequence of these changes, its occupational class structure has also been transformed. As the previous jobs in manufacturing and the docks have disappeared, so has much of its traditional working class – through retirement, economic inactivity, outmigration and death. They have been replaced in part by a large new white-collar lower middle class, working in non-manual employment often in the burgeoning financial services sector. This is not to say, of course, that the traditional working class has disappeared, but it has shrunk and been transformed. Third, London's ethnic mix has changed over the last 20–30 years, and this change has been particularly dramatic over the last 15 years. London has gone from being an overwhelmingly white, mono-ethnic city in the 1960s and 1970s to one in which minority ethnic groups comprised a third of the population in 2001, and this could grow to over 40% by the 2011 Census. As they have expanded in number, they have also expanded geographically, moving out into what were previously largely white suburban areas. At the same time, the white population is also declining and the traditional East End collectivist white working-class culture has been in rapid decline. The new East London that is in the process of emergence is a firmly multi-ethnic one.

Unlike some of the negative urban social changes which have been so tellingly analysed elsewhere by writers such as W.