Beverley’s Story: Survivability on one of London’s newest gentrification frontiers

Abstract

This article considers the different dimensions of an individual’s attempt to survive gentrification. The focus is on Beverley Robinson, a displacee from the Aylesbury Estate in London, who has experienced the slow violence of gentrification and displacement over an extended period of time. We argue that her ‘survivability’ has been, and indeed continues to be, key in her resistance to gentrification. Few academic studies of gentrification have focused in depth on an individual’s everyday fight for survival in the face of gentrification; this article zooms in on the experience of one displacee. The individual displaced by gentrification, Beverley Robinson, interrogates her own experience, and in so doing she shares her autobiography with us; and this is interlocked, dovetailed, with an ethnographic biography undertaken by Loretta Lees, a scholar-activist who has worked with and fought with her.