ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relative fall in the stock of the 'creative', a particular type of London employee linked in to a wider economic cycle which seems to have been brought down along with the crash in financial services. At the time of writing, one magazine has even looped the etymological loop by referring to a fictional freelance creative, namely, Nathan Barley, to make sense of the 'ambience' at Shoreditch advertising firm Mother so 'trendy it's almost a Nathan Barley pastiche of a creative industry'. The road from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) into Hoxton, connecting government minister to freelance creative, has remained under continuous construction. John Carey's intervention helped to frame the debate in terms tended to exclude the freelance creative. Various UK think tanks and social forecasters identified how the 1990s freelance creative was being demarcated as a distinctive social type from other types of wage labour.
