Expanded narratives of gentrification: Mobility, infrastructure and urban change in 1970s London literature

Abstract

This article revisits Ruth Glass’s essay ‘Aspects of change’ (1964), in which the urban sociologist reputedly coins the term gentrification. Whereas other readers are content merely to quote Glass’s description of gentrification, I consider how she situates the phenomenon within a broader complex of urban change. Doing so, I suggest, provides a useful optic for considering later literary engagements with gentrification in London. I examine two fictional texts – Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Innocent and the Guilty (1971) and Maureen Duffy’s Capital (1975) – and argue that they follow Glass by providing ‘expanded narratives’ of gentrification. This narrative mode is distinctive for the way that it frames highly visible and seemingly localized phenomena, such as gentrification, within broader cultural, geographical and historical contexts, in order to ask larger questions about the nature of urbanity. A concern with mobility and infrastructure defines these expanded narratives, which illuminate how these aspects of the city shape perceptions of urban change. I conclude by outlining how expanded narratives might also provide the basis for a useful reading strategy which contrasts with the extractive procedures that characterize readings of Glass and certain scholarly approaches to urban literature.