ABSTRACT

A sign on a disused commercial building in a triangle of back streets marks the beginning of a transformation: ANOTHER PRESTIGIOUS LUXURY INNER CITY LIFESTYLE DEVELOPMENT. After thirty years the front line of gentrification has reached this pocket of railway arches in inner southeast London. There is no longer anything remarkable about these small economic miracles. Similar transfigurations happen all over the city, in buildings whose industrial proportions conduce to an attractive arrangement of domestic light and space; whose unyielding contours lend themselves to twenty-four-hour porterage and the other maximum-security accoutrements of ‘lifestyle developments’ whose imaginative situations can bring with them forms of unwanted adjacency. If such packaging of wharves, warehouses, offices and factories represents a cut-rate variant on the bespoke conversions of the original gentrifiers, it now has its own imitators – in new-build developments which promise ‘loft-style’ living or affect the look of deconsecrated churches and shut-down hospitals.