Settling or Surviving in London? The Experience of Poles and Other ‘A8’ Migrants in a Global City Borough

As the long economic boom, which began in the mid-1990s, comes to an end, the cracks in the shiny edifice of the global city are appearing once more. London’s prosperity has always concealed a sharp division between rich and poor, which has been shaped by the global flows of people, capital and goods (see Sassen 1991; Fainstein et al. 1992; Fainstein 1994; Eade 1997, 2000; Buck et al. 2002; Hamnett 2003; Kaplanis 2007). The most striking feature of the city’s socio-economic hierarchy is the cleavage between the global elite and professionals within the new service class, on the one hand, and those at the lower levels of the economic hierarchy, who were competing for poorly paid and insecure jobs or facing long-term unemployment.