Globalization and the Politics of Place: Place and Identity in an Inner London Neighbourhood

Recent years have seen a growing theoretical literature concerned with delineating the politics of place. Drawing upon interviews conducted with a range of white residents in an inner London neighbourhood, the paper opens these debates to empirical analysis. Attention is focused on the understandings of some of the area's new cultural class residents who are working to construct an image of the area's essential 'Englishness' whilst, at the same time, articulating a desire for diversity and difference. It is suggested that their accounts demonstrate neither a clearly 'bounded' sense of place nor yet anything more progressive, and their understandings are compared to those of their working class neighbours to consider how the politics of race and class intersect in the construction of place identities.