Have DfLs saved St Leonards?

Gareth Stevens considers the winners and losers of gentrification 

Even though I have used both the terms DfL (Down from London) and OfB (Over from Brighton) from time to time … I try not to. 

Both labels are lazy, reductive and divisive. Whenever people use either term in a pejorative way, they redirect fire which should be kept for money grabbing landlords, opportunist estate agents and they use energy that should otherwise be reserved for critiquing the laws and systems that uphold the protection of capital … that continue to support ever increasing financial and social inequality. Similarly, to write in such a hagiographic way about how Londoners can sweep in and ‘save’ a neighbourhood from itself is ludicrous. To use the term DfL in either way is to be contextually myopic.

Way back when, Socrates said that “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” The routine use of monikers like DfL does just that and doesn’t encourage us to think deeper. I would argue that scapegoating those people that move south or east from densely populated and expensive metropolitan areas, is not that far removed from those views that demonise immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Gentrification is the result of a multitude of complicated causal chains that are hard to understand and almost impossible to hold in your head at one time. It is too easy to blame one loosely amalgamated group, bound together by no other measure than that they have relocated from London to Hastings, and lay the blame at their feet.

Semiology 101

A semiology lesson 101 tells us that every sign (or word) can only be fully understood when you don’t just consider what it denotes, but also what it connotes. So let’s take the moniker DfL. What it denotes is a group of people that, for whatever reason, have relocated from London to Hastings or St Leonards. However what it can connote, in some people’s heads it seems, is an assumed group who parade around our town in a Dryrobe with a couple of pedigree lapdogs, who have sold their pile in the metropolis, bought a previously HMO townhouse and started a vanity project now that they are mortgage free. On top of that they will have signed up to the DfL and OfB facebook community page and make little effort to explore and integrate with the town’s existing vibrant cultural life. Whilst there may be some who do fit that rather crudely expressed profile, I would argue that they are in a real minority. Of course this is a parody of a profile … but I am sure that for some it is a stereotype that is deeply embedded.

The Spectator’s Provocation

Unfortunately some time ago The Spectator ran an article with the toe curling ‘click-baity’ headline of ‘How DFLs saved St Leonards’. On reading it I sent the link around to several friends and fellow writers – within minutes I could almost hear the angry gnashing of teeth down the phone. The article asserts that “The architects of change have been the Londoners who have been flocking down to St Leonards over the past decade or so.” Another telling quote is “The whole vibe of the place has shifted.” The article is founded on the inherent implication that St Leonards was a shithole until creative and entrepreneurial people graced the town with their superior wisdom and dollar. What complete bollocks!

Unsurprisingly The Spectator and the author have displayed a preference for chasing clicks rather than any authentic analysis. Such a better article would have emerged had they asked not only what a sudden influx of people from the capital does …. but also included some thoughts on what it undoes.

Of course those who have sold up in the city and resettled in our borough are not intentional about the disruption theirs and others’ moves have caused, but the effects are hidden in plain sight. Espousing the view, as The Spectator does, that the recent gentrification is wholly positive, is naive and wantonly biassed. It irresponsibly neglects the downsides with only a passing reference to the negative effects that the rush south has had on rents and house prices.

Whilst I am not strictly a DfL – I moved here from Hong Kong six years ago – I may as well be. Despite this, I have never considered that St Leonards needed saving and nor did I ever consider it was people like me’s job to save it. 

One couple mentioned in The Spectator article moved to St Leonards in 2009. They sold their six-bedroom semi in Tottenham and bought a five-bedroom Edwardian townhouse in St Leonards for £315,000 about half what they had sold their place in London for. Since then the trickle has become a deluge as the pandemic triggered mass reflection on the comparative merits and downsides of life in the capital.

Accumulated Advantage

I have noticed many changes in St Leonards since I moved here just before the pandemic. The baker near me has queues outside it on a Saturday morning. When I first moved here people in those queues wore jean jackets and sportswear, now they look like they’re lining up for hair and make-up on the set of Peaky Blinders. 

It seems to me that gentrification always creates winners and losers – but it is so unclassy for so-called DfLs to view themselves as our town’s ‘saviours’, and I am not sure that many of them do. However some people enjoy a privileged position above a financial threshold which enables them to accumulate their advantage and in doing so inadvertently cause those whose lives are more economically precarious to experience more hardship and adversity. In other words, there are increasing numbers of local residents whose disadvantage is accumulated as a direct result of the influx of metropolitans.

When ‘different’ people arrive in large numbers, neighborhoods change in ways that force many longtime residents and businesses to move out because business rates and rents suddenly skyrocket. A proportion of these newcomers are often more wealthy and powerful than the more ‘indigenous’ population.  They have the capacity and reserves to make improvements that past residents fought hard for but could not achieve, but that doesn’t qualify them as saviours!  Gentrification can lead to a mutation of local social history and culture, it causes a moving tide towards a more London hipster vibe that is just parachuted in and which doesn’t grow either organically or sympathetically.

The Disruption of Cultural Ecology

Such abrupt changes to the demographic of any town puts pressure on community cohesion and we all need to be mindful of this and do whatever we can to support the more positive consequences of such shifts. This means that those that move into the borough need to be more receptive to the existing cultural ecology here in Hastings and not think that they can merely replace it with their own. On the other hand, long term residents should avoid the recourse to the damning use of the DfL epithet and direct their invective elsewhere.

Of course many, perhaps the majority, of recently arrived residents in our borough have moved here because of the very same financial pressures that are forcing, particularly young Hastingers, to move to the town’s hinterland or even Bexhill-on-Sea. Living in London and Brighton is hideously expensive, especially when you’re on a low income wage or work in the creative sector. Unless you benefit from privilege or have a family with deep pockets, it can be downright untenable. Who can blame people for wanting to ease their financial strife by moving to areas like ours where rents and house prices are demonstrably lower. Wouldn’t you do the same?

Art Washing

The deep irony here is that, without intending to, this increasing influx of internal economic migrants, accelerates the very pressures they endeavoured to escape in the town they now live in. Grayson Perry famously said that artists are the ‘shock troops of gentrification’ and before it became de rigeur to move to Margate or Hastings, London creatives have been instrumental in the rejuvenation of areas like Hoxton, Shoreditch and, more recently, Leytonstone in their inexorable journey east.

What I didn’t know until recently is that encouraging artists into non-desirable areas is sometimes used as a ploy by big property developers to lift the ‘brand’ of a neighbourhood and increase the prospect of bigger financial return. Cynical in the extreme, this feeds off artists whose precarious financial situations make such a move tempting and disingenuously makes them somehow complicit in flagrant profiteering, when they are not.  

This is known as ‘art washing’ and an oft-cited example of it is exemplified by the story of Balfron Tower. The 1960s brutalist block in the Poplar area of east London was designed by Ernő Goldfinger for the London County Council in 1963. Today it is owned by Social Landlord Poplar HARCA, who took over ownership after a ballot of local residents in 2006. Whilst Poplar HARCA initially undertook to bring all of the dwellings in the estate up to the last Labour government’s “decent homes” standard, in 2015 it was decided that the properties in the Grade II listed building were to be sold as luxury flats.

The existing residents were moved out during the refurbishments, and artists were co-opted to occupy the tower in their place. This was a cynical move to use artists as a way of increasing the attractiveness of the area and to raise the value of properties.

In many ways this is an intense and microcosmic illustration of how creative people can be involved in rapid gentrification. The complete disregard for the architect’s vision for Balfron to be affordable public housing, is a savage indictment of the profit-hunting developers who paid little or no regard to the original residents who were evicted to who knows where.

Gentrification’s Impact on the Arts in Hastings 

And so let’s consider the young emerging artists and musicians who have always lived in Hastings and St leonards. Some time ago I interviewed a driven young creative who had studied in London and returned to his hometown (is he a DfL?). Well aware of Hastings and St Leonards reputation as a thriving Arts hub, he was optimistic about being able to establish himself here. “As a newly graduated artist, Hastings did not deliver on its promise, I felt that there was no place for me despite the alleged arts buzz that I was expecting” he told me. “If you didn’t have access to affordable studio space or were not in a financial position that gave you sufficient free time, it was very difficult for artists in my position to find an inroad into what was supposed to be a thriving scene.”  

It seems that because the demand for studio places and exhibition slots has dramatically increased in the town since the influx of creatives from London and Brighton, the local arts ecology has become clogged with solvent mid-career artists and, consequently this has put pressure on emerging fresh homegrown talent.

Similarly and despite there being a number of young local bands appearing to do very well of late, I have heard some musicians say that older ‘salt and pepper’ rockers are putting pressure on gig slots and are willing to play for lower pay, and thus are unwittingly closing off opportunities for new talent. Venues and promoters clearly have a role here. On top of this young local artists are often having to work longer hours to meet their increased rent. Serving pints for 20 more hours a week than you used to is going to adversely affect your capacity to be creative, rehearse and perform. Furthermore, young people I have spoken to have said that they are not only having to work longer hours, but have had to move further away from where they work and thus incur longer travel times and added transport costs.

I heard the author, journalist and broadcaster Matthew Syed speak on a panel discussion in London recently. He warned that, without intervention, the existing catastrophic intergenerational wealth gap can only get much worse in coming years. It strikes me that the process of gentrification such as that which has occurred in St Leonards over the last ten years, intensifies and exacerbates this financial inequity between ‘boomers’ and the young.

Analogously, the national housing crisis is very much amplified in areas that are experiencing high-speed gentrification.

Do the Right Thing

So where does this leave us? What can we do? Well, as I wrote at the outset, we need to ask what the unethical systems are that are underpinning the undesirable upshots of gentrification and don’t just focus on who is to blame. True I could wax on about the insidious implications of the endemic celebration of free market economics and neoliberalism (maybe in another article), I could elaborate on ways in which state intervention might help to provide a more level playing field and I could write a set of recommendations for how newly arrived metropolitans might carry themselves on arriving in our, in need of saving, neighbourhood (should I? … comment below) … but I’ve said enough.

Above all if you are a financially comfortable interloper don’t ask for the top band of the market value when renting your second house. Have a heart! I recently heard of a case in the US where a person, who had rented rooms out in a house they had bought so as to be able to make mortgage repayments, had their moral compass very much in place. They had done their research well and predicted that the value of the property they had bought would increase in a relatively short period of time. When it came to be resold, and realising that they couldn’t have made any profit on resale without the rent contributions of tenants, he contacted them all and recompensed them a proportion of their rent in proportion to how much profit he had made on the sale. However heartening this is, I fear that such compassionate fairness is a rarity.

A Confession 

It is time for me to fess up. Having said all I have about the destabilising effects of rapid gentrification and after reflecting on the demise of our sense of community here, I do actually like some of the developments that have happened in St Leonards since I’ve lived here. Attending a private view at a newly opened gallery on Norman Road is a joy. I boast about the quality of certain Sourdoughs to unfortunate friends and relatives that live in less interesting areas. I love the fact that I’ve seen legendary reggae musicians at a venue less than one minute’s walk from my place. But like I said, there are always winners and losers.

And there are losers who just lose out …. and there are the other kinds of losers. Don’t be one of the latter group.

If you’d like to continue the discussion, please do comment below. You might also be interested in these articles on similar themes: What is Community? and New Year Under Threat of Eviction.