Episode 10: RETURN OF THE YUPPIES
[YUPPIES]
As with most words, ‘Yuppie’ has contentious origins.
For some it is short for "young urban professional". For others it means "young upwardly-mobile professional".
That’s sort of irrelevant though. The thing to know is that it was a term applied, particularly to young people in the 1980s that were working in The City.
These were the kids of new money. They were the sons and daughters of the working class barrow boys. Made good, educated and now earning decent money.
The term started as a neutral descriptor of a demographic, but quickly turned into one of derision.
It was associated with new money showiness, materiality and poor taste.
It was also associated with aggressive gentrification and exacerbation of the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
A fact that the Yuppies seemingly celebrated.
[PIONEER SPECIES]
The landscape is barren.
The ambient temperature is scorching.
There’s little moisture and less shade.
This place in inhospitable.
Mostly.
If you look close enough, and examine this environment that no one wants to live in, you’ll find some organisms that make this their home.
We call them pioneer species.
Lichens are a good example of a pioneer species. They live on practically nothing. They don’t need soil, choosing instead to live on the rocks. Often pioneer species are photosynthetic, relying on the sun for energy in the absence of anything else.
It seems as if they live on thin air alone.
What they get, in return for their low requirements, is undisturbed lodgings and all the time they need to get on with things.
Over time, these species will convert the landscape. They will terraform and sculpt.
They will erode the rocks, and the remains of their bodies will create soil.
It is this soil that allows other far fussier organisms to move in and take over.
Eventually these pioneer species are edged out somewhat.
[THE SLUMBLEBRAG]
We were walking along a particularly nice stretch of the Southside of Glasgow the other day.
It’s an area of spectacular gentrification.
Once, it was home to some of the poorest people in the UK, living in conditions that the BBC described as ‘slums’, however, it is now considered a happening place.
We were walking along behind a group of 20-somethings. Southern English accents.
If I had to put money on it, I’d suggest post-grad students, but I’m old and I’m finding it difficult to tell. These could be young professionals.
Something about passing one of several boutique plant shops caused the group to talk loud enough to hear.
‘Oh, yah, I live near what used to be the Gorbals,’ says one, possibly referring to the new build flats that took the place of the infamous housing project that was demolished in the late 1990s.
Those flats sell for around £400,000. They rent for around £1,000 a month.
‘Oh, it is rough,’ says another, passing the anarchist Jewish bakery, ‘people don’t even believe I live here’.
The way they were talking about the area they could have been describing Beirut in the late 1980s.
It wasn’t out of fear, or concern.
It was a badge of pride.
As we pass the four boutique interior design shops in a row, and head towards the vinyl only record shop/coffee house/informal workspace I couldn’t help but reflect on whether they genuinely thought this was a rough and dangerous place, where behind every independent Tarot Card and Crystal shop lurked danger, or whether they were trying to convince each other of it.
It’s cool to live somewhere dangerous, but it is far easier to live somewhere safe and pretend you live somewhere dangerous.
In the end we coined a new term for the process of suggesting you live somewhere far more downmarket than you do.
The Slumblebrag.
[COMEBACKS]
The comeback is like a dance move. It is formalised.
Two steps forward, one step back.
But not in that order.
One step forward, one step back, one step forward.
That’s The Comeback.
You have to be a thing first, then you have to go away, and only then can you make a return.
Trump did it last week. That was a comeback.
The mullet has managed to do it too.
Business at the front, party at the back.
I’m not really fond of either.
Sometimes I think of Trump sporting a mullet. Business politics and the back, party politics at the front.
The mullet, an ancient hairstyle sported by the ancient Romans and indigenous Americans, really grew in popularity during the late 1970s and persisted well into the 1980s.
It had a brief brush with celebrity. It was on Top of The Pops on top of Tom Jones. It even cameoed as Kieffer Sutherland’s hair in the film, The Lost Boys.
How it came to be known as the mullet is particularly interesting. It had adopted other pseudonyms as it rampaged throughout the UK, US and Australia, names such as “Hockey Hair” and “Ape Drape”, but in 1994 The Beastie Boys referred to it by the name ‘Mullet” in their 1994 song, “Mullet Head”.
They also described the form standards:
number one on the side and don't touch the back, number six on the top and don't cut it wack, Jack.
And then it sort of died out.
Sure some nature reserves persisted to keep the stock alive. Australian Rules Football being the largest, but on the whole the haircut was the punchline to many jokes. It was effortlessly uncool.
It went away.
Then, a pandemic happened. People couldn’t go to the hairdresser. In September 2020, i-D called 2020 "the year of the mullet".
Perhaps it started as irony, or a joke, like when all men shave a beard off they leave the Charlie Chaplin moustache… just to see. Except few ever leave the house sporting it.
And now, it is strolling down the street, blatant and irony free. It is back, baby. The mullet is back.
All back.
No sides.
[THE BOWERY]
Why are slums cool?
They’re not. Not initially. They are awful places to live. Often lacking basic amenities, usually owned by slum lords who don’t do the bare minimum to look after their tenants safely.
The people here are not here because they want to be. They are here because they can’t be anywhere else.
Slums are not cool.
At least until they are.
The relative low cost of housing and general dereliction creates the ideal condition for artists. Generally, having room and few financial responsibilities enables this pioneer species to move in.
They aren’t displacing anyone. They are filling in the gaps.
And when they move in they start to make soil.
Sometimes the soil happens on purpose. Artists seeking to better their own living conditions tidy the place up, run electricity into buildings, decorate and re-furnish. Some embed with the community that was already there.
Then, some soil is made by accident. Their very presence stimulates the economy. Usually, it starts with night life and alcohol, but seeps into corner shops and cafes.
The deep soil starts to come when they socialise. Parties in derelict warehouses, decorated with makeshift art, seem really cool. The slight edge of otherness and lawlessness can be attractive.
People from nicer parts start travelling there for the party and, at first, they are always glad to go back home to their comfortable places.
Then one day, they’ll say something like, “this is great, I’m thinking I should move here.”
It’s that moment, where someone chooses to live there. The moment where people want to be there, not because they have nowhere else. That’s the moment where gentrification starts.
A great example of this is in New York. The Bowery had a long history of decline starting just after the Civil War. By the 1970s it was a centre for drug use, alcoholism, homelessness and prostitution.
It was also cheap enough for artists to move in.
Parties ensued, studios were fabricated, galleries appeared.
By the 1990s gentrification had set in.
In the 2000s, The New Museum of Contemporary Art opened there. and , AvalonBay Communities opened Avalon Bowery Place, its first luxury apartment complex.
And all whilst this was happening the original tenants of the place were being pushed out.
In the late 2000s, 60 tenants of 128 Hester Street were thrown out of their building when construction on the nearby Wyndham Garden Hotel destabilised it. They were evicted with the help of the Department of Buildings.
There’s a great documentary called Sunshine Hotel, by Michael Dominic, about one of the flophouses and its occupants. It paints a portrait of a necessary service trying to coexist in an era of gentrification.
[SLUM]
“Government funding to tackle Glasgow Govanhill slums” — BBC News, 2010:
The Scottish government is to put £1.8m into tackling slum housing in the south side of Glasgow.
The move follows complaints that a sudden increase in the area's population has caused overcrowding and allowed rogue landlords to flourish.
Many of the flats in the Govanhill area are below tolerable standards and have been described as modern slums.
The government funding will be spent on renovating properties and will support a hit squad to take on bad landlords.
Govanhill, whose local population is ethnically mixed and has the biggest concentration of Roma families in Scotland, has some of the most severe housing problems in the UK.
Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon, who is the MSP for Govan, said: "This funding will help to breathe new life into Govanhill.
"The area has been plagued by unscrupulous private landlords who flout the law by renting out flats, which are overcrowded and fall below the tolerable standard.
"I am aware that local residents have demanded more action to deal with landlords that have, for too long, been trading in misery."
In 2024 we can see the longer term progress of this plan. Most notably the Roma families have been pushed to the edges of the Southside, particularly West of Victoria Road. Similarly rents have sky rocketed in recent years, particularly post-Covid, fuelled by the influx of wealthy young professionals moving into the area to take opportunity of newly refurbished tenements that had once been decried as slums.
This is gentrification. When the poor do not benefit from the improvements that the well meaning middle class insist up on them.
I would also like to note that there is a very useful distinction to be made between what the BBC considers is a slum and what is, in fact, a ghetto.
[GENTRIFICATION]
Broadly, gentrification is defined as the process that occurs between the first wealthy people moving in and the last poor people having to leave.
It is a process whereby communities make unattractive places more attractive as they seek to better their environment only to be pushed out once it is deemed acceptable for other people to move in.
[THE TERRACE]
There’s a really cool wine shop up the way. It has recently started to operate as a wine bar too.
If you walk past you will see a crowd of young people sat around communal tables, lit by candle light and surrounded by racks of decent but expensive wine.
It reminds me of the wine bars of the 1980s.
The ones that didn’t exist in the working class bit of the North I was from, but the ones on TV. The one in Only Fools and Horses where Del Boy and Trigger go to see if they can impress Yuppie women.
The one where Del Boy says, “Play it cool” before leaning on a bar that isn’t there.
I thought these places were fictional constructs that existed to set up comedy punchlines. This is a scene that really would not have worked in a Northern Labour Club.
Partly, the joke works because we are on Del Boy’s side. The Yuppies are ridiculous, they are posers. They are there, sure, to enjoy expensive wine, but they are also their to be seen enjoying expensive wine.
It is a demonstration of their capital wealth. It is therefore a demonstration of their worth.
And whilst we are supposed to side with the working class barrow boy, who makes his living from scrabbling around scheme to scheme in a desperate attempt to follow the allure of Thatcherite self-made prosperity, it is also Del Boy who is the butt of the joke.
He can’t play it cool. He doesn’t belong here. The idiot didn’t even realise the bar had been opened.
The joke is on him.
[CAPITAL]
The original Yuppies came out of the working class.
Parents that had worked hard to make sure their kids had a good education worked in cooperation with a new form of neo-libral capitalism that was starting to take hold.
In the UK it was Thatcherism. In the US, Reganomics.
Same thing everywhere. Free market capitalism with little regard for regulation.
Sell off public assets, the same council houses the Yuppie’s parents had brought them up in, and re-frame it as empowerment.
Strip the miners.
Strip mine the NHS.
It wasn’t empowerment. It was pulling up the ladder.
Still, these children grew into adults that believed in money, and why not? Look at what it could do. They could buy houses and cars and drink wine.
But then what? They still had money, and they had most of the things they had grown up wanting.
That’s when it became a performative culture. Signs and signifiers, isn’t it?
Gaudy watches, bright coloured braces, being seen to play squash. Earrings like chandeliers. More, heavier, brighter.
The clothes started to look like growths, frillier, puffier, stripier.
The hair grew thicker and featherier.
Much like the chair of French courtiers leading up to the revolution.
And there’s only so high a pile of cocaine can get before it collapses under its own granularity.
But time passed and the young upwardly mobile humans settled down, excess giving way to family practicality. The cars getting bigger and more Land Rover like, the penthouse flats in the city transforming into rural piles. The money started to go into trust funds for the kids.
Property too, safe investment that. Buy up all of those houses that had once been council houses and rent them back to the poor at even higher prices.
Buy up flats in areas that poor people live in.
And their children grew up with this.
Those kids grew up with private education. They grew up with financial security. They grew up with a future with a safety net.
[THE TERRACE]
I was distracted by Only Fools and Horses, wasn’t I?
I was talking about the wine shop that has become a wine bar.
Last summer they expanded out from the shop and onto the pavement outside.
They cordoned the majority of it off.
What had once been a public space, a place for anyone to walk, was now space for people who bought expensive wine.
They left a meagre strip of pocked tarmac for pedestrians to squeeze through, creating a strange bottleneck of shame.
Wealthy kids sat on chairs, drinking expensive wine and watching poor locals have to take turns to pass each other on a pavement they all used to own.
There’s a sign in the window too.
“Please wait to be seated, there is only room for 16 people on The Terrace”.
A terrace?
Their terrace was our pavement.
This feels an awful lot like the practice of every coloniser that ever set foot on land and declared it discovered.
This is a real-time illustration of gentrification.
A terrace? Our pavement is *your* terrace?
It’s hard not to feel judged as you walk past.
The young people, sporting mullets and drinking expensive wine.
I’m reminded of Only Fools and Horses.
I’m reminded of the Yuppies.
[MY OWN INVASION OF THE SOUTHSIDE AND MY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF MY COMPLICITY IN THESE PROBLEMS]
My Mum sounded worried.
I asked if she was OK.
“You hear those stories about Glasgow, don’t you? You don’t live in the Gorbals do you? I saw a thing on the BBC…”
We decided it was probably best to invite my parents up to see where I lived, to put their minds at rest.
Sure, we live in an area the BBC called a slum, even though it is better described as a ghetto, and it has a reputation, but by and large this is a fine place to live. Our neighbours are friendly, the shops are well stocked, and the rent is reasonable.
The flats are, largely, wonderful too. People now like to talk as if living in a tenement is akin to workers inhabiting tiny rooms during the industrial revolution, but the truth is that the flats are large and spacious. Ceilings are high, windows are large. They all have indoor toilets despite the impression some people might want to convey.
Sure, there are problems. Bed bugs are rampant. The government is offering free pest control to everyone whilst also trying to keep the epidemic quiet.
You might think bed bugs are not a serious problem, if you do, go on youtube and search for them. I promise you won’t sleep well for the rest of your life.
There’s also the Roma too.
They are not the problem, rather the council’s inability to work for them. Many of the Roma do not speak English and there is little help for new families moving into the area. This is creating friction with some of the other residents who can’t understand why the Roma don’t put their bins out on the right day.
This is all the pretext for what I did next.
My first act of gentrification.
I committed it so my Mum would worry less.
I swept the inside of the close. That’s the communal area between the flats.
I washed the walls down, removing some of the black mold and dirt that had built up since their last painting.
I’m unrepentant…
…but I know where it led.
A few weeks later, after my parents had visited and seen that I wasn’t living in squalor, I walked past one of my neighbours. He was sweeping the close. He told me that seeing me do it had inspired him to try and keep it that way.
That neighbour doesn’t live here any more. They were priced out of the area just before the pandemic.
[GENTRIFICATION]
The Glad Cafe is just up the road too. You can get a breakfast there for £14 or a pizza with sugo, roast tomatoes, red onions, olives, capers, confit garlic and evoo for just £10.50.
I had to search for what evoo was. I’m still not sure, but I think it stands for “extra virgin olive oil”.
I’m also assuming the currency because, like most modern restaurants there is no ‘£’ symbol, just a number.,
10.5
Back in 2020 the Glad Cafe was host to a symposium titled: “Stopping Gentrification on Glasgow’s Southside”.
In attendance was a variety of social activists and arts workers. Many have combined their role as artist/activist, particularly on their social media handles.
Four years later and we can assess this symposium as a well meaning failure. The gentrification was not stopped.
It is unclear why this panel talk did not prevent the middle class from coming to the South side of Glasgow and determining its future.
Perhaps a better definition of gentrification is the period bookmarked by the first external middle class activist meeting about gentrification and those same activists being all that remains in an area.
[SOCIAL JUSTICE]
“Cosplaying social justice is the new elitist way of elbowing out the working class” — The Observer, 2024
Four years later, many of these same students joined Black Lives Matter protests. Al-Gharbi watched as they demonstrated on Broadway in New York’s Upper West Side, oblivious to the “homeless Black men who didn’t even have shoes” sharing the same space. The protesters “were crowding the benches that homeless people were using”, insisting that “Black Lives Matter”, but apparently not “the Black guys right in front of them”.
This constant disparity between the professed beliefs of liberal students agitating for social justice and actions that revealed an indifference to the material injustice surrounding them led Al-Gharbi to write a book to try to make sense of it.
…
Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.
[THE NEW YUPPIES]
So here’s the rub.
The New Yuppies.
They are not here to demonstrate their riches. That’s no longer a currency in modern discourse. Besides, just being here is enough to demonstrate that. Chosing to be here demonstrates it.
No, what they are doing, is what their parents did but this time with Cultural Capital.
Their Mum and Dad were Loadsa Money, they are We Care a Lot.
Furthermore, they don’t want to be seen as business people. They want to be seen as anti-business.
They are all artists.
Artist Slash…
But they are not the pioneer species that moved into places like SOHO or The Bowery or Brick Lane early on. These are what come later. They are predators. They are the ones that displace.
This place was already fertile long before they arrived.
They are wealthy cosplayers, peacocking their credentials.
They are the beneficiaries of neo-liberal economics. They are the beneficiaries of Thatcherism and Reganomics. They benefitted from the selling of council houses and public libraries and the strip mining of the NHS.
And they’ll proudly proclaim that they were the first of their family to go to University as if that absolves them.
They’ll tell you that they live “in a rough part of town”, but it is one that sells cans of beer in a pop up shop for £12 a can. It is a rough part of town that has cafes slash co-working spaces and a Michelin starred restaurant on the corner.
Their very presence drives out local people, it literally forces them from the pavement of their own streets. The rents rocket. The fish and chip shop is replaced by a dog friendly vegan social space slash patisserie.
Our pavement is replaced by their terrace.
We are being replaced by folk that look like us and pretend to be us. They take whatever cultural capital we have and claim it as their own.
The economic underpinnings of a culture are shaken loose.
How are these artists managing to survive here?
Their Yuppie parents have bought them a flat. They don’t pay the ever escalating rent.
Some of them even have an allowance too.
Grown adults with an allowance!
It is true, I promise you.
[CALL IT A COMEBACK]
As mullets went away and then came back
so Yuppies went away and came back
and Trump, apparently
And so you must go away from here
I doubt you’ll be back
Come back.
