Art and gentrification: pursuing the urban pastoral in Hoxton, London

The role of artists as precursors and agents of gentrification processes has been widely acknowledged and studied. Yet there has been limited consideration of the particular aesthetic practices and attitudes deployed by these artists, and the related urban landscapes they have helped shape and re-imagine. This paper uses the notion drawn from art history of the urban pastoral to highlight largely disregarded socio-cultural and political relations of power accompanying gentrification. It focuses on a district of inner London called Hoxton where a deindustrialised location and a legacy of forms and practices of British working-class popular culture offered artists a rich resource and socio-spatial environment to work and operate during the 1990s. By indulging in fantasies and performances of the urban pastoral, these artists fashioned a new cultural landscape that not only catered to many of the lifestyle tastes and investment priorities within postindustrial London, but manipulated and downplayed the complex and potentially conflictual histories of the area. The paper argues that this capture of urban space through the pastoral is indicative of new forms of gentrification where class-based and race-related neighbourhood change occurs without direct displacement.