ABSTRACT
The suburban move from inner London to outer London and beyond to the ‘ROSE’ (Rest of the South-East excluding London) is an important albeit under-researched part of the social geography and history of London. It is associated with a number of key social, economic and policy developments in South-East England during the post-war period. Prominent among these is the decentralisation of industry, including along the Thames Estuary the area that is currently subsumed within the Essex and Kent sections of the Thames Gateway and designated as in need of regeneration (Church and Frost, 1995). The suburbanisation of London’s population has been brought about via the formation of the New Towns, the development of peripheral council housing estates, and the expansion of private housing estates in the commuter villages and small towns of the ROSE. Despite the massive scale of post-war development in South-East England and its profound demographic implications, notably the spatial dispersal of Londoners (‘white Cockney on the drift’ – Sinclair, 2003, p. 20), it is remarkable how few social scientic studies have been centrally concerned with this phenomenon. One has to go back to the classics from the Institute of Community Studies (Young and Willmott, 1957, 1975; Willmott and Young ,1960) for an extensive sociological analysis of London’s diasporic development. In comparison, we know relatively little about contemporary suburban South-East England from the perspective of the people who live there.
