The strange death of Cockney London

London’s white working class all but vanished, with little reporting or remark by press or politicians

My latest article in The Critic, first part below:

As of 2024, the white (British) working class have largely disappeared from inner London. Over the last few decades they have departed en masse for the outer boroughs like Bromley and Havering, and for Essex and Kent, forming what is known as the cockney diaspora. Initially this migration was an economically driven one, getting started in the early to mid 20th century as the redevelopment of inner city housing prompted its residents to move to the new, more spacious council estates that had been built further away from the city centre, or for those who had done well, to buy their own home. Right to Buy in the 80s advanced the process by giving people an asset which they could trade for a larger house further afield, as did the increased availability of mortgages caused by the deregulation of the financial sector.

It was from the mid 90s though that the movement hit its peak, as the mass-immigration driven transformation of working class neighbourhoods (aided by a needs-based social housing policy) joined the existing factors prompting people to leave. As David Goodhart wrote in 2013, “the share of the white British population in London fell so dramatically from 59.8 per cent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011 not only because of high levels of immigration (both white and non-white) but also thanks to an exodus of white Britons. The number of white British Londoners fell by 600,000, about three times higher in absolute terms than over the previous census period, 1991 to 2001.” This fall wasn’t the young professionals leaving, who kept on coming to London to start their careers as they do to this day, but the working class families, the ‘somewheres’ in Goodhart’s terminology, who were seeking a new somewhere further east.

Read the rest there.