We all know that gentrification is bad, right? It’s something that I have written about in a previous column about Gillett Square in east London. The insidious march of wealth, pricing out local communities. House prices rising and rents going up so that people and businesses who have sustained a community for years find themselves no longer able to afford to live there.

When I was a student in the early 1980s gentrification was an issue that dominated many of our debates as we wrote essays on the transformation of places like Fulham and Notting Hill. At the same time we were set projects that sought to regenerate dockland areas and run-down housing estates in the name of regeneration which was, of course, completely different.

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