Poplar Stories: Whiteness, Class Loss and the Affective Infrastructure of Urban Regeneration in East London's Former Docklands

Examining the entanglements of heritage and urban regeneration in Poplar, east London, this thesis advances an intersectional and multimodal approach to the study of gentrification and resistance. After heavy bombing in the Second World War, the docklands district of Poplar was rebuilt according to a modernist masterplan. Today it is undergoing another round of intensive redevelopment – one that risks displacing many of its working-class residents. In this context, ‘heritage’ has emerged as a key point of contestation, deployed by a range of actors – from residents and housing activists to architectural enthusiasts and housing developers - to make claims on urban space. The class-focused concept of ‘gentrification’ remains the dominant framework for analysing processes of displacement and resistance amid urban regeneration. Yet attention to urban regeneration’s entanglements with heritage in this setting reveals a need to consider how class-based displacement pressures overlay and reanimate longer intersecting histories of race, class, and nation.

Through chapters exploring a project to re-establish a pub on a social housing estate, contestation around the redevelopment of a dilapidated but architecturally renowned retail market at which most traders are of Bangladeshi ethnicity, and a film project I developed with Jimmy – an unemployed white-British, male, working-class man in his early sixties – I draw attention to the ‘affective infrastructure’ of urban regeneration. This brings into view urban regeneration’s complex and nonlinear entanglement with processes of gentrification: not simply imposed from above through a single logic of neoliberal political economy these projects are importantly shaped by residents’ practices and imaginaries of place, across multiple axes of inequality. I show how the affective infrastructure of urban regeneration in Poplar often works to reproduce place-based histories of racial and class inequality, but also explore – through a multimodal approach - how inventive engagements with affective infrastructure might work towards more egalitarian urban futures.