‘London Badlands’: The Inner City Represented, Regenerated

Abstract

The clustering of certain social and economic problems across significant tracts of Britain’s post-industrial cities was inextricably linked to the concept of an ‘inner city crisis’. The ambiguously defined ‘inner city’ was a locus of political and media attention and was held up as an ongoing index of an unravelling social order. This article examines the ways in which pockets of inner London were represented in the context of a rhetorical ‘inner city’ from the 1970s onwards. It shows how ‘inner city’ representations endorsed existing power structures and, in concert with a growing enterprise approach to the notional ‘crisis’, how they fed into unjust programmes of urban renewal.