Introduction

London is now one of the world's leading global cities. One of the characteristics of this is the role of the City of London and its position in global financial flows; another is the role of London in global migration, both at the top and bottom ends of the labour market. On the one hand, there are the highly paid workers in the City who come from the US, France, Germany and other Western countries (including Japan and increasingly China) and on the other hand, there are the less skilled, the ‘huddled masses’ from Africa and Asia. The former are mainly white, the latter predominantly non-white (Wills et al, 2010). At the same time, 40 years of de-industrialisation have dramatically reshaped London's economy, its occupational class structure and its housing market. As a result of these changes, London today is a very different place, both socially and economically, from what it was in the 1970s.

This book examines the dramatic social changes that have taken place in East London over this period of time. Although the empirical focus of the book is on East London, the argument it develops is a wider one regarding the importance of the role of aspiration and education in understanding social change in contemporary Britain. The book examines the effects that class, ethnicity and aspiration have had on spatial and social mobility in a part of London that was, until relatively recently, a bastion of the white working class. We show how largescale de-industrialisation and a subsequent growth of both upper and lower middle classes and an increase in international immigration have transformed its social structure.