East London Mobilities: The ‘Cockney Diaspora’ and the Remaking of the Essex Ethnoscape

Watt, Paul; Millington, Gareth; Huq, Rupa

doi:10.1057/9781137003638_7

Cited by 8 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…Traditionally, a Cockney is considered to be an individual who was born within the sound of the Bow Bells in Cheapside, the City of London, and lived in London's traditional East End. However, over the last century, the 'Cockney Diaspora' has seen traditional East London communities relocate to the London peripheries, the home counties and in particular, to Essex (see Watt, et al 2014). No single reason led to the mass relocation of traditional, white, working-class East Londoners into Essex.…”

Section: Community Of Interest: the Cockney Diaspora And The Debden Ementioning

confidence: 99%

“…No single reason led to the mass relocation of traditional, white, working-class East Londoners into Essex. Instead, the 'Cockney Diaspora' emerged as a result of a wide range of inter-related factors such as the deindustrialisation of the East End and the slum clearance programmes which ran between the 1920s and the 1960s (Watt et al 2014).…”

Section: Community Of Interest: the Cockney Diaspora And The Debden Ementioning

confidence: 99%

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Phonetic variation and change in the Cockney Diaspora: The role of place, gender, and identity

Cole

Evans

2020

Lang. Soc.

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Recent research has suggested that two linguistic processes are displacing Cockney: the emergence of Multicultural London English (MLE) in inner London and dialect levelling (e.g. Kerswill & Williams 2005). This study investigates firstly whether Cockney phonetic features have ‘moved East’ to Essex (Fox 2015), and secondly the features’ indexicality in relation to place and identity. Fifty-four participants from Debden, an outpost of the Cockney Diaspora, completed a sociolinguistic interview. Vowel measurements were made from a wordlist and passage, and quantitative attitudinal and qualitative data were extracted from a questionnaire and interviews. Overall, changes in identity as a result of social change exceeded linguistic changes, and linguistic labels were not interpreted uniformly across the community. Whilst Cockney variants were largely maintained in young speakers, they were transposed onto an ‘Essex’ accent. Furthermore, some young women but no young men considered themselves Cockney, likely due to the matrifocal nature of Cockney. (Cockney, phonetic variation and change, dialect levelling, identity, indexicality, gender)

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Section: Community Of Interest: the Cockney Diaspora And The Debden Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Community Of Interest: the Cockney Diaspora And The Debden Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Phonetic variation and change in the Cockney Diaspora: The role of place, gender, and identity

Cole

Evans

2020

Lang. Soc.

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“…While moving to suburban outer London and the ROSE is typically regarded as the geographical expression of an upwardly mobile, aspirational lifestyle (Watt et al, 2014), such a spatial trajectory has very different connotations for those who -like the workingclass lone parents in this study -lack the requisite income and private transport resources to facilitate a suburban, middle-class lifestyle. Instead, the lone parents experienced suburbia as entrapment in an unfamiliar, inhospitable place, and one which is moreover potentially unsafe, especially for those from BME backgrounds.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…'Race relations' have notably improved in East London since the 1970s when it was a centre of far right political activity, such that 21 st century "Newham's super-diversity creates a distinctive environment for community cohesion" (Harriss, 2006: 28;LSE Housing and Communities, 2014). What therefore are the racialised impacts of the women being displaced from the relatively safe space of multi-ethnic East London into the whiter, suburban outer London boroughs and the ROSE (Millington, 2011;Watt et al, 2014)? This issue only emerged during two interviews, but is nevertheless not insignificant for the women so concerned.…”

Section: 'Race' and Safety In Suburbiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendering the right to housing in the city: Homeless female lone parents in post-Olympics, austerity East London

Watt

2018

Cities

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This paper assesses how gender, housing, austerity and the right to the city interrelate with reference to female lone parents from East London, the site of the 2012 Olympic Games. In so doing, the paper draws upon qualitative research undertaken with lone parent mothers living in temporary accommodation. The women's housing experiences are embedded within a deepening of neo-liberal welfare cutbacks and restructuring under what Peck (2012) has called 'austerity urbanism'. Although the mother's lives are based in East London where they have extended family and where many of them grew up, they have either been moved, or face the prospect of being moved, out of the area and even beyond the city limits into suburban South East England. Rather than basking in the much trumpeted 2012 Games regeneration 'legacy', these women's right to live in East London, close to their support networks, is being eroded.

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“…Essex noir, in contrast, has a consistently modern spatial register in that its mise‐en‐scène typically consists of arterial roads, new town streetscapes, neon‐lit seaside resorts and disused docks. This also reflects the heterogeneous nature of Essex suburbia, a landscape that by no means conforms to the visions of seamless affluent monotony (see also Watt, Millington and Huq ).…”

Section: Sunshine or Noir?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sub/Urban Histories Against The Grain: Myth And Embourgeoisement In Essex Noir

Millington¹

2015

J Historical Sociology

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This paper considers how literary and cinematic constructions of Essex noir expose the darker, chaotic sides to working-class embourgeoisement: initially via post-War suburbanisation and later, via Margaret Thatcher's attempt to encourage competitive individualism and entrepreneurship. Noir angles a "dark mirror" to suburban Essex and develops a distinctive aesthetics of social and cultural change, while also puncturing myths of social mobility and suburban security. The paper points to both affinities and breaks between noir's bleak pessimism and Walter Benjamin's understanding of history as overcoming the concept of progress. ***** Overcoming the concept of "progress" and overcoming the concept of "period of decline" are two sides of one and the same thing (Benjamin 2002: 460).Whereas it was once the inner city or "awful East" that constituted the "internal Other" of post-imperial London, the city has recently found a new "dark place" in the foreboding, estuarial milieu of south Essex, a large region extending eastwards along the Thames and encompassing towns such as Tilbury, Grays, Basildon and Southend-on-Sea. This shift is due on one hand to the perceived loss of London's grittiness, or authenticity, an effect perhaps of widespread gentrification (Kerr 2012: 18); and on the other, to the symbolic pull of a place that has become "a key political signifier in contemporary British culture" (Dave 2006: 152). The purpose of this article is to interrogate the literary and cinematic noir spaces of south Essex in order to understand first, the "aesthetics of change" (Pusca 2010) deployed in imagining the collapse of the post-War settlement and the socio-spatial re-orderings this instigated in the south east of England; and second, the politics of social class at stake in this aesthetic portrayal of sub/urban history (the making visible of what Sennett and Cobb (1972) referred to as the "hidden injuries of class"). Sources used in this historical sociological analysis range from literary sources to "true crime" memoirs and neo-noir/ pulp films.

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East London Mobilities: The ‘Cockney Diaspora’ and the Remaking of the Essex Ethnoscape

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Phonetic variation and change in the Cockney Diaspora: The role of place, gender, and identity

Phonetic variation and change in the Cockney Diaspora: The role of place, gender, and identity

Gendering the right to housing in the city: Homeless female lone parents in post-Olympics, austerity East London

Sub/Urban Histories Against The Grain: Myth And Embourgeoisement In Essex Noir

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