The transformation of English market towns: gentrification

Abstract

Gentrification has been seen to be a predominantly urban process, characterised by\nwholesale replacement of working class communities by a mobile middle-class\npopulation (Glass, 1964). More recently, contributions have acknowledged that\ngentrification is taking place further down the hierarchy of urban settlements with Neil\nSmith (2002) noting that gentrification is expanding both vertically, upwards and\ndownwards through the settlement hierarchy (from cities to provincial cities, Dutton\n2003; 2005 to smaller towns) and horizontally across the globe.\nEnglish market towns, this thesis argues, have become part of what Hackworth and\nSmith (2001) term the third wave of gentrification with the state ‘entangled’ in the\nprocess of gentrification. This can be seen through the encouragement of regeneration\nin market towns, initiated through the 2001 Market Towns Initiative (MTI) that sought\nto regenerate ailing market towns within England. The service role of these rural towns\nhas been seen as crucial to anchoring key services that service the wider rural\nhinterlands in which market towns serve (Powe and Shaw, 2004)\nThe central argument of this thesis is that market towns are now at the leading edge of\nrural restructuring. Many types of market town gentrifier have been identified,\nspecifically mature, ‘geriatrifiers’ who reside in the remote market towns and had past\nservice class working lives via professional and managerial employment and secondly,\nprofessional/managerial gentrifiers, identified previously in rural villages (Phillips,\n1993) who were using market towns as bases to commute and raise a family. Unlike\nprevious narrative concerning gentrification, this middle class incursion was physically\nreflected through new build developments that have been targeted at market towns.

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