Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Urban regeneration? It's all about cupcakes
Never mind crime maps and house prices, research from the States suggests it's the state of your bakeries that may be a bellwether of your area's fortunes.
Read more at Edible Geography
Read more at Edible Geography
Tags for Forum Posts: regeneration
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Any hope of a last ditch resistance to the 'cupcake-ification' of the language on this side of the pond? I think we used call them 'buns' or something.
The recession seems to have already subjected us to that other barbarism, 'staycation', in both British and Irish media
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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
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Don't ask anyone in the U.S.A if you can squeeze her buns...
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Fascinating though this culinary excursion is (and I'm no expert, but I believe Tom is correct and the cupcake and the bun are different), surely the point is not what you call your cake of choice but the quality of the product as an indicator of how well an area is doing.
Think about it. How excited we are when we discover a new shop on the street is a nice deli or bakery. How cross we feel when a pound shop/chickenshop/hairdresser moves in. I think she may be onto something...
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Urban regeneration = urban gentrification ???
though NICOLA does briefly allow: "an influx of middle-class gentrifiers into a low-income neighbourhood does not come without its own problems".
Can it really be down to a choice between bun bakeries and wall-to-wall CCTV ?
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If we are to listen to our media and politicians, which I know OAE you don't, it would appear so.
I must admit that the title of the blog was a trifle off putting but aside from Nicola's thoughts, and bearing in mind this is the States, the academic she was taking the idea from had created a "Tour de Cupcake” – a fieldwork (and tasting) exercise designed to test her theory that cupcake shops can provide a more accurate and timely guide to the frontiers of urban gentrification than traditional demographic and real estate data sets.
This was the idea I found of interest i.e. that it is the type of shops that indicate an area's fortunes rather than crime stats or house prices or even demographics.
Too much of any type of shop establishment is bad for an area be they betting shops or bun shops.
Incidentally, Alan S told me of a study done on Tottenham High Road by an independent assesor that marvelled at the number of nail bars on one stretch of road.
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Nail bars .. ours all tend to be in Indo-chinese ownership.
Greengrocers .. Turkish
Flower Shops/Street Flower Sellers .. Vietnamese
This is surely a sign that these groups are not able to integrate properly into the Western European job market and are forced to become self-employed to earn at least something that they can live from.
I also wonder sometimes if there are mafia-type groupings that start up/support these businesses?
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Malcolm Gladwell touches on this in his book outliers. He wondered why all the rich lawyers in New York were Jewish. It turns out that there were barriers to entry into existing law firms for them because of their "antecedents" so they had to go into the rather nasty business of mergers and acquisitions that the established firms would not touch. Mergers and acquisitions became big business in the 70s. Ha ha ha.
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Well there are at least four jewellery joints, three of them cheek by jowl. Useful? Essential? Or just fronts for something else?
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It is a well known fact that many jewellry shops on GL are a front.
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Permalink Reply by Birdy_Too on
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That's a bold "fact" James, have any proof? The amount of tacky jewelery around I would say they do a brisk business.
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Obviously i can't talk here. would you like to message me i'd be happy to discuss in private.
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