Leasing space through the private rented sector: The intersections of class and tenure change in London,2011–2021

Abstract

Housing is central to the social dynamics of cities. However, many recent citywide analyses of social change have largely set aside housing to concentrate on shifts in income and occupational class structure. In this paper, we argue that examining the intersections of class with tenure provides a richer framework for making sense of patterns and processes of urban social change. Using data from the 2011 and 2021 Censuses, we examine (1) how the intersecting occupational class and housing tenure position of households in London has changed over the decade before (2) analysing the shifting locational and tenure positions of middle- and working-class households in the capital. The results show that ‘leasing space’ through the private rented sector is a key dynamic enabling the continued gentrification of Inner London boroughs. The apparent persistence of working-class London meanwhile masks disadvantageous changes in the residential position of working-class households, as declines in working-class homeownership and social housing have been offset by the growth of working-class private renting in the northern and western suburbs. These restructuring trends have major implications for social inequalities of wealth, residential security and access to opportunities.

Introduction

Understanding how the restructuring of labour markets and housing systems interact to reshape the socio-economic geography of cities is a critical issue for urban studies. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ever-expanding literature on gentrification, which is perhaps the process of interlocking social class- and housing-related change par excellence. Over recent years, much research has explored how shifts in occupational structures, income distributions and in the accessibility, affordability and security of housing tenures are reconfiguring social and spatial inequalities within and across Global North cities (Hochstenbach and Arundel, 2021; Smith et al., 2022; van Ham et al., 2020).

London has a unique place in this field with analyses stretching back to Charles Booth’s social mapping of the late Victorian metropolis. Throughout much of the 20th century, social change in London was analysed along two cross-cutting axes: shifts in the size and distribution of occupational classes and changes in housing tenure as private renting receded, owner-occupation expanded, and council housing grew before being denuded after 1980 by Right to Buy sales (Hamnett, 1986; Wilmott and Young, 1973). As Glass (1964) observed, these twin processes of class and tenure restructuring acted as interlocking engines of urban change as the post-war gentrification of Islington she described involved middle-class homebuyers displacing working-class tenants. These insights fit well within wider contemporary debates about how changing patterns of property ownership were modifying traditional social hierarchies (Saunders, 1984).

In recent years, this emphasis on interlocking class and tenure shifts has diminished as the gentrification literature has splintered. One strand of work has focussed on specific, localised housing-led processes of social change, such as newbuild gentrification or the displacement of social housing tenants from redeveloped estates (Davidson and Lees, 2005; Lees and White, 2020; Reades et al., 2023). These studies show how intensive state-led transformations in local housing and property relations–usually involving shifts in tenure mix and affordability–reconfigure an area’s social complexion. Meanwhile, citywide studies have largely set aside housing to concentrate on the shifting geography of London’s occupational class composition (Butler et al., 2008; Davidson and Wyly, 2012; Hamnett, 2024; Manley and Johnston, 2014). The main point of debate here has been whether such restructuring is best understood as polarisation or professionalisation (Hamnett, 2024).

In this paper, we argue that a revived focus on the intersections between class and housing tenure is vital to understand urban social change. Rather than focus purely on the relations between occupational classes or between owners and tenants, we propose that social change in London is best understood through the interaction of these variables, as this allows households to be differentiated according to their relative positioning within hierarchies of both occupational and property relations. This is not in itself a new argument: writing in 1984, Peter Saunders observed that the growth of private property ownership was generating new social divides which ‘may come to outweigh class alignments in respect of production’ (Saunders, 1984: 203). More recently, Adkins and colleagues (2021) have also outlined an asset class schema where households are differentiated by their combination of property holdings and labour market participation (see Ruonavaara, 2024).

Empirically examining contemporary social change in terms of these interactions of occupational social class and housing is important for two reasons. First, new housing disparities within and between occupational classes have undoubtedly emerged in recent decades. In particular, the rapid expansion of private renting in London has accommodated displaced demand from two very different sources: younger higher-income households priced out of owner-occupation and lower-income households facing the same challenges but also excluded from the diminished stock of social housing (Kemp, 2015). The private rental sector thus increasingly allows individuals of all classes to ‘lease space’ in London which would be otherwise inaccessible. This leasing process has a classed geography as high rents coupled with reduced housing benefits mean that poorer private tenants are constrained to suburban locales (Bailey et al., 2025).

Second, crossing class and tenure allows us to distinguish between different types of local social change that are often conflated. For example, gentrification (involving upwards social class trajectories) can occur through owner-occupation or through the growth of middle-class renting (buy-to-let). These are very different processes with different drivers and differential impacts on people and places (Paccoud, 2017). Similarly, it is important to differentiate between changes in the spatial distribution of working-class owner-occupiers and private renters. Little change in the overall size of the working-class population in an area is not indicative of social stasis if working-class homeownership or social renting has been replaced with less secure and less affordable forms of private renting. ¹

This paper thus aims to show that studying the ‘molecular’–the particular intersections of class and tenure change occurring in a given context–is necessary to grasp what is going on at the ‘molar’ citywide level. The next section surveys processes of social change that have been identified by crossing class and tenure change at the local level, followed by a discussion of the insights this approach provides in general and for London specifically. We then describe our census data and methodological approach before examining (1) the changing social class and housing tenure composition of London and (2) how the residential position defined in terms of tenure and place of managerial/professional and working-class households shifted over this decade. Finally, we conclude with some broader reflections.

Background

Class, tenure and local social change

Conceptualising social change as involving the intersection of social class with housing tenure not only has methodological implications. At the theoretical level, crossing multiple dimensions complicates attempts to isolate a single, overarching process of urban social change. This is because local social change can occur through occupation, tenure or through both dimensions simultaneously–thus making it possible that what appears as continuity along one dimension (for example in terms of class) can mask a process of change along another (in tenure relations).

To avoid these pitfalls, we have chosen to start out at the molecular level (what is happening at the level of local intersections of class and tenure change) rather than at the molar level (what process best encapsulates the aggregate result of these dynamics). In this molecular perspective, we first identify several distinct population groups according to their relative position in hierarchies of occupational and property relations. Each of these ‘ideal types’ can be considered the protagonist of specific forms of local social change which can overlap and co-occur. Their relative importance as drivers of change will depend on an area’s history and location (for instance its housing stock and proximity to transit connections), the policy context (for example state-led redevelopment efforts) and the state of the labour and housing markets (configuring inter alia the distribution of job types, incomes and patterns of housing affordability). These ideal types thus provide a means to connect the molecular and molar levels precisely because they are the manifestation on the ground of broader economic, social and policy changes. We now sketch five of these ideal types in turn, discussing their shifting importance for social change across London.

Middle-class owner-occupiers

These are the quintessential protagonists of gentrification first identified by Glass in 1964, at a time when homeownership was rising as private renting receded across Europe. In Britain, this tenure restructuring was driven partly by post-war rent controls motivating landlords to sell up to chase profits elsewhere in ‘perhaps the most effective low-cost homeownership scheme ever devised’ (Lund, 2017: 136). Gentrification was thus, from the outset, characterised by class change occurring through a policy-supported tenure shift from private renting to owner-occupation (Hamnett, 1986).

The conditions required for traditional owner-gentrification no longer exist in many central areas of global cities. Faced with significant price inflation ² as well as waning policy support for homeownership, there has been a bifurcation in the trajectories of middle-class owner-occupiers. While the more elite echelons dominate aesthetically desirable and high-priced inner-city areas that have gone through earlier rounds of gentrification (Cunningham and Savage, 2017) or engage in buy-to-leave in the most exclusive places (Glucksberg, 2016), other middle-class owners have spilled over into more affordable suburbs (Booi, 2024). Thus, while middle-class owner-occupiers remain relevant protagonists of gentrification, their personal and locational characteristics have diversified: no longer the only gentrifiers in town, the opportunities afforded to them are more spatially circumscribed and dependent on other actors, in particular the owners of rental property.

Middle-class private renters

While Smith (1979) theorised the ‘landlord developer’ to be one of three types of gentrifier, empirical accounts of private tenants contributing to gentrification only started to appear from the 1980s. Writing about Melbourne, Logan (1982: 78) presciently remarked that ‘much of the “trendiness” linked in the public eye with a gentry class may, in fact, be as closely related to changes in renters as to changes in owner occupiers’. Engels (1999), meanwhile, later focussed on the role of landlords in Sydney’s gentrification.

Since then, work on buy-to-let gentrification has evidenced the neighbourhood-level trajectories through which a revival of private renting can foster gentrification (Paccoud, 2017). Crucially, this process enables the spread of gentrification to new and often more deprived areas that are less desirable to traditional owner-gentrifiers looking for a long-term, aesthetically attractive and amenity-rich place to live (Paccoud et al., 2021; Paccoud and Mace, 2018). In London and many comparator cities, private rental gentrification may now be eclipsing traditional ownership-led gentrification as intensified financial barriers to home purchase–coupled with policy support for build-to-rent (re)development and strong flows of rental investment from individuals, institutions and overseas buyers–restrict access to homeownership and deepen younger households’ reliance on private renting (Kemp, 2015). Compositional changes within the middle-classes including more international migrants, postponed family formation and greater employment instability have also most likely increased higher income households’ demand for flexible, centrally located rental accommodation.

Working-class owner-occupiers

Working-class owner-occupiers have been considered the protagonists in two processes of local social change. In the US, Rose (1984: 61) introduced the idea of ‘marginal gentrifiers’ to capture the practices of ‘moderate-income first-time homebuyers [who] are likely to be “competing” with lower-income tenants for old inner-city housing’. Meanwhile in the UK, working-class households exercising the Right to Buy their council homes can act as agents of neighbourhood change. This commodification-induced dynamic is usually slow burning as it requires purchasers to subsequently sell their home, either to more advantaged homeowners or to landlords targeting middle-class tenants (Hamnett and Butler, 2010).

It is likely that working-class gentrification and owner-occupation more generally is becoming more marginal in urban areas. While incumbent upgrading might still occur in places of entrenched working-class owner-occupation, the end of ‘mass homeownership’ increasingly limits entry to owner-occupation to those with high incomes, especially in expensive cities (Arundel and Ronald, 2021). Right to Buy commodification has also receded in London since the policy’s heyday. Fewer than 22,000 London council homes were sold under Right to Buy between 2011 and 2021 as reduced stock coupled with weak tenant finances left little to sell to few potential buyers (Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government [MHCLG], 2023).

Working-class private renters

In much of the gentrification literature, the lower income private tenants are those who are displaced–directly or indirectly–by the arrival of middle-class owners. There is, however, mounting evidence that the growth in lower income private renters in peripheral areas is an important dimension of contemporary urban change. Hulse and Reynolds (2018: 1667) coined the term ‘investification’ to account for this process ‘by which disproportionately high levels of household investor purchases in disadvantaged suburbs contribute to higher prices and rents and to the persistence of socio-economic disadvantage as properties are rented on the private market to low socio-economic households’.

This process is linked to the investment strategy of landlords targeting disadvantaged suburbs in the expectation of capital gains (Pawson and Martin, 2021). The investification strategy thus evokes Smith’s (1979: 545) stages of rent gap formation, in which disinvestment is associated with a building ‘being undermaintained or systematically “milked”’. Investification is sustained by several conditions including low taxation of capital gains, low incomes, employment insecurity and heightened demand from the wealth-poor migrants that now comprise a greater share of the urban working class. Investification also relies on the suburbanisation of poverty that occurs when poor households are pushed into the peripheral private rented sector. Across Britain, this suburbanisation of low-income renters has been driven by rent inflation in urban cores as well as by cuts to housing benefits and diminished access to inner-city social housing (Bailey et al., 2025).

Social renters

As a largely decommodified housing form, social renting is usually on the negative side of the gentrification ledger: social renters are the lower income victims of gentrification and can be replaced by middle-class owners or renters (Paccoud, 2017). Given that social housing is always managed to some degree by public bodies, gentrification dynamics linked to local decreases in social renting are thus either directly instigated by state actors (Lees and White, 2020) or emerge from developer influence over the planning process (Flynn, 2016). This can result in direct displacement when tenants are decanted during estate demolition-and-rebuild schemes before being rehoused further afield (Reades et al., 2023). However, it is also at least theoretically possible for social upscaling to occur within the socially rented stock, such as through policy reforms encouraging the diversification of social housing provision into more mid-market rents (Herrault, 2025) in the context of increasingly costly ‘affordable’ housing (Preece et al., 2020). This type of internal upscaling is probably unlikely to occur on a significant scale in London given the way social housing allocations prioritise filling scarce vacancies with vulnerable households.

Revisiting social change as the intersection of class and tenure

Each of the above ‘ideal type’ agents of urban change embodies particular combinations of class and tenure characteristics. This reflects how, across advanced economies, a household’s social position and resources now depend on residential property relations as well as on occupational position (Saunders, 1984). However, although large-scale analyses of social change in London and beyond formerly examined these class and tenure intersections (Hamnett, 1984), such approaches have become less common in recent years as researchers have concentrated primarily on trends in occupational social class (but see Paccoud, 2017; Paccoud and Mace, 2018).

There are nonetheless visible problems with the continuing prioritisation of aggregate molar processes of social change at a time in which complexity has grown at the finer-grained molecular level. This is most visible in the debate that has raged since the 2000s over new manifestations of social change in London. On one side, Hamnett and colleagues (see Butler et al., 2008; Hamnett, 2003, 2015) contested Sassen’s polarisation thesis, arguing that industrial restructuring and cohort replacement were driving the gradual ‘professionalisation’ of London’s workforce. This involved the inversion of post-war class geographies as middle-class populations grew most rapidly in Inner London in the context of booming house prices (Butler et al., 2008). This thesis was subsequently contested on methodological and political grounds (Davidson and Wyly, 2012, 2015; Watt, 2008), as well as by Cunningham and Savage (2017), who contend that it is the growth of an ‘elite’ upper-strata and not the wider middle-class that most characterises Inner London. The professionalisation thesis also struggled to integrate some empirical findings, in particular Manley and Johnston’s (2014) evidence of ‘static’ class change in London (with no absolute loss of working-class population) between 2001 and 2011. Most recently, Hamnett (2024) has revived this debate by nuancing the professionalisation thesis in line with these critiques and emerging evidence. In his latest study, Hamnett (2024) observes that growth in London’s managerial and professional population resumed in the 2011–2021 period. However, he argues that this has driven ‘asymmetric polarisation’ as there has been a simultaneous expansion of self-employment as well as routine and insecure work in the city.

What is missing from this debate is the molecular level: a detailed consideration of the classed changes in property relations that have also occurred in recent years. Our argument is that these are of fundamental importance as ‘leasing space’ through the private rented sector increasingly underpins and generates new fractures within the occupational class geometry of London. The basic idea here is that, through private renting, households can lease a space in which they cannot afford to purchase housing (due to asset price inflation) and where they are also unable to access secure and affordable rental housing (due to social housing marketisation and disinvestment). Given the intense house price inflation in Inner London between 2011 and 2021, leasing space and thus potentially participating in buy-to-let gentrification is likely to be the only way in which many younger middle-class households without familial wealth (and who are working outside of the highest paying professions) are able to maintain a toehold in these spaces. Likewise, the persistence of an increasingly ethnically diverse working-class London identified by Davidson and Wyly (2012), Manley and Johnston (2014) and Hamnett (2024) probably masks a deterioration in working-class property relations as state-led regeneration schemes, austerity cuts to benefits and affordability constraints increasingly force lower-income households to rent housing on the private market. Thus, while leasing space may allow certain populations to enter new spaces and others to remain in place, growing levels of private renting could have adverse consequences on residential security, control, housing quality, costs and possibly–if linked to reduced ownership–asset accumulation. This makes it crucial to analyse social change along the intersecting axes of social class and tenure, that is, to arrive at the molar from the molecular. It is to this task that we now turn.

Data and methods

The 2011 and 2021 censuses of England and Wales provided our raw data. ³ Counts of households subdivided by housing tenure (owner-occupied, socially rented or privately rented) and by the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SeC) of the Household Reference Person (HRP) were acquired for both years. The HRP concept was introduced in the 2001 Census to replace the older assumption that a male breadwinner acts as the ‘head of the household’. In contrast, the HRP is selected from among the adult members of each household on the basis of family seniority, economic activity (with priority given to economically active, employed, full-time workers and non-students) and finally age and questionnaire position in the event of tied rankings. NS-SeC categories are designed to capture differences in employment relations and conditions and are used as our occupational class measure (Office for National Statistics [ONS], 2023). ⁴

HRPs are assigned to NS-SeC categories during census processing using information about their employment status and main occupation or, for those neither currently working nor long-term unemployed, by the characteristics of their most recent main job (ONS, 2023). We followed Paccoud and Mace (2018) by using the three-category version of NS-SeC developed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This distinguishes HRPs with managerial, administrative and professional occupations (NS-SeC 1–2) from those with intermediate (NS-SeC 3–4) and routine and manual occupations (NS-SeC 5–7). A further category covers those who have never worked and the long-term unemployed (NS-SeC 8). Our focus in this study is on contrasting NS-SeC 1–2 (the broad middle-class) and 5–7 (working-class) although in places we also discuss trends in NS-SeC 3–4 and these households are included in all calculations. Following previous research, NS-SeC 8 households ⁵ and full-time students ⁶ were dropped from all counts prior to analysis.

It is important to note that the process of assigning occupations to NS-SeC categories involves first coding jobs to a Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) before then allocating grouped SOC categories to NS-SeC classes (ONS, 2023). Different versions of SOC were used in 2011 and 2021 and thus the ONS points out that the two NS-SeC categorisations are not perfectly comparable. However, this is a minor issue for this study as our emphasis is on aggregated spatial patterns and trends in broadly defined NS-SeC classes.

We follow Hamnett (2024) in tracking patterns of change across London’s 32 boroughs plus the administratively distinct City of London. ⁷ Boroughs have been used as the spatial units for studies of social change in London for over 50 years and our study extends this tradition through to 2021. For some analyses we group boroughs into ONS’s five International Territorial Level 2 regions (formerly NUTS2 areas).

We begin by comparing intercensal trends in the social class and housing tenure composition of Inner and Outer London with trends in other conurbations and across the rest of England and Wales. Next, the analysis tracks borough-level change in the absolute number of households in each NS-SeC*tenure category (for example NS-SeC 1–2 homeowners or NS-SeC 5–7 social tenants), as well as the borough-level percentage point change in these category sizes from 2011 to 2021. We then calculate how the residential position–defined as the share of households living in each borough and tenure–of managerial or professional (NS-SeC 1–2) households changed from 2011 to 2021 and compare these trends with the equivalent figures for routine and manual households (NS-SeC 5–7). This final step allows us to track the shifting geography and housing position of more and less occupationally advantaged households over the last decade.

Analysis

Aggregate patterns

Table 1 shows the occupational and housing tenure composition of Inner and Outer London, other conurbations and the Rest of England and Wales in 2021, as well as the percentage point (PP) and numerical change in each household type between 2011 and 2021. Table 1 shows that leasing space through the private rented sector became more common in London over this period as owner-occupation and social renting fell in both absolute and proportional terms, while private renting rose across Inner (+3.5PP) and Outer (+5.6PP) London. In Outer London, this growth came principally at the expense of owner-occupation (−4.7PP), whereas in Inner London both homeownership (−1.7PP) and social renting (−1.8PP) declined. These trends are not confined to the capital as other conurbations followed the Inner London trend (albeit starting from a much higher homeownership base), while the Rest of England and Wales exhibited similar, but more muted, tenure change patterns to Outer London. This national revival of private renting has been underway since the 1990s but has more recently spread beyond cities into suburban areas, smaller towns and the countryside (Kemp, 2015).

Table 1.

Changes in social class and housing tenure across England and Wales, 2011−21.

Variable	Inner London			Outer London			Other conurbation			Rest of England and Wales
	2021 %	PP Δ	NΔ	2021 %	PP Δ	NΔ	2021 %	PP Δ	NΔ	2021 %	PP Δ	NΔ
Own (OO)	36.4	−1.7	−6.3	58.6	−4.7	−39.4	63.6	−1.8	−75.3	69.2	−1.6	+158.4
Social rent (SR)	28.2	−1.8	−11.0	14.9	−0.9	−4.5	17.6	−2.0	−94.1	12.8	−0.7	−32.6
Private rent (PR)	35.4	+3.5	+56.0	26.5	+5.6	+116.8	18.8	+3.8	+188.4	18.0	+2.3	+427.8
NS–SeC 1–2	54.7	+3.9	+68.1	45.8	+3.6	+95.8	37.3	+4.2	+207.5	40.9	+3.3	+692.0
1–2 OO	25.4	+1.1	+22.8	32.3	+1.7	+54.0	28.2	+2.6	+128.9	32.5	+2.3	+500.7
1–2 SR	7.3	−0.2	+0.7	3.3	+0.1	+3.5	2.6	+0.1	+3.5	2.0	+0.1	+23.6
1–2 PR	22.0	+3.0	+44.6	10.3	+1.8	+38.3	6.5	+1.5	+75.1	6.3	+0.9	+167.7
NS–SeC 3–4	21.6	−0.5	+2.3	27.6	−0.6	+10.1	24.6	+0.9	+46.6	25.4	+0.5	+213.9
3–4 OO	7.1	−1.1	−10.2	15.3	−2.9	−40.1	16.1	−0.6	−24.9	18.1	−0.6	+21.9
3–4 SR	7.7	+0.2	+5.4	4.2	+0.1	+4.0	3.7	+0.2	+8.1	2.8	+0.2	+42.3
3–4 PR	6.8	+0.4	+7.0	8.1	+2.3	+46.2	4.7	+1.3	+63.4	4.6	+0.9	+149.6
NS–SeC 5–7	23.7	−3.4	−31.7	26.6	−3.0	−32.9	38.2	−5.0	−235.1	33.7	−3.8	−352.2
5–7 OO	4.0	−1.7	−18.9	11.0	−3.5	−53.3	19.3	−3.8	−179.3	18.6	−3.3	−364.2
5–7 SR	13.1	−1.8	−17.1	7.5	−1.0	−12.1	11.3	−2.2	−105.6	8.0	−1	−98.5
5–7 PR	6.6	+0.2	+4.4	8.1	+1.5	+32.4	7.6	+1.0	+49.9	7.1	+0.5	+110.5
Total HH (1000)	1239.5		+38.6	1826.8		+73.0	4840.9		+19.0	14661.9		+553.7

Note: Figures rounded to one decimal place.

Source: Authors’ own analysis.

PP Δ: percentage point change 2011–21. NΔ: change in household numbers 2011–21.

Turning to occupational class, Table 1 shows that within London the managerial and professional NS-SeC 1–2 population grew over the 2011–21 period while NS-SeC 5–7 manual and routine occupations declined in both numerical and relative terms. ⁸ Again, this is not just a London trend, but what distinguishes Inner London in particular is the predominance of NS-SeC 1–2 households which in 2021 comprised ∼55% of the population. The working-class share of London (∼25% households) is also much lower than in other conurbations (38.2%) and across the country more widely (33.7%). The general thrust of the professionalisation thesis does thus appear to have purchase in London.

Examining the more disaggregated breakdown of NS-SeC and tenure change patterns provides new evidence about the classed and spatially varied trends in property relations that occurred over the 2011–21 period. In Inner London, NS-SeC 1–2 households are now almost evenly split between homeownership (25.4%) and private renting (22.0%), with two-thirds of the numeric 2011–21 growth in this class occurring through the private rented sector. These patterns are specific to London’s core as in Outer London NS-SeC 1–2 households are far more likely to own (32.3%) than rent privately (10.3%), with 2011–21 growth in this class split more evenly between these two tenures. Beyond London, the 2011–21 expansion of NS-SeC 1–2 has mostly occurred through homeownership.

Finally, Table 1 shows that focussing purely on trends in the size of NS-SeC 5–7 populations glosses over major and disadvantageous underlying shifts in their property relations. Across all areas, the aggregate decline in NS-SeC 5–7 households masked growth in the number and share of NS-SeC 5–7 households renting privately. This trend was particularly strong in Outer London (and to a slightly lesser extent in other conurbations) where a growth of +1.5PP in NS-SeC 5–7 private tenants helped counterbalance strong declines in NS-SeC 5–7 owners (−3.5PP) and to a lesser extent social tenants (−1PP). By contrast in Inner London, the growth of NS-SeC 5–7 private tenants was weaker (+0.2PP). This probably reflects centrifugal displacement pressure from an expensive private rental market.

Class and tenure change within London boroughs

Figures 1 and 2 plot the numerical and relative (PP) change in the occupational and tenure composition of each borough from 2011 to 2021. ⁹ Although the number of households in most boroughs increased over the period, in several Inner West boroughs household counts fell. This could be due to affluent households leaving London during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as purchases of central London property by global elites who are content to leave it vacant. Setting this aside, across Inner West boroughs we see relatively modest change in NS-SeC 5–7 household numbers and shares, most likely due to past waves of gentrification meaning that these boroughs had relatively small working-class populations in 2011. The most striking trend in these areas is the large relative growth in NS-SeC 1–2 private renters. In Camden, Hammersmith and Fulham, the City and Wandsworth this trend has occurred alongside a decline in NS-SeC 5–7, indicating that buy-to-let gentrification has occurred in these areas.

Figure 1.

Change in household numbers by class and tenure across London boroughs, 2011–21.

Figure 2.

Percentage point changes in class and tenure across London boroughs, 2011–21.

Patterns of social change are quite different across the Inner East. Here, with the exception of Haringey, there has been strong absolute and relative growth in NS-SeC 1–2 households and a fall in NS-SeC 5–7. However, the tenure dynamics of this class restructuring vary. In some places, NS-SeC 1–2 growth has come mainly through private renting (Islington, Hackney, Southwark and Tower Hamlets), while elsewhere this buy-to-let gentrification has been accompanied by traditional owner-gentrification (Lambeth, Lewisham and Newham). Meanwhile, in some areas an aggregate loss of working-class households has occurred mostly through a decline in homeownership (Haringey, Lambeth, Lewisham and Newham) whereas in others the loss of social housing is the key working-class dynamic (Islington, Hackney, Southwark and Tower Hamlets). This is unsurprising as these latter boroughs are where some of the most contentious estate redevelopment schemes have occurred (for instance Woodberry Down in Hackney and the Aylesbury estate in Southwark). Finally, in Haringey, Tower Hamlets and to a lesser extent in Newham and Lewisham the overall decline in NS-SeC 5–7 masks modest increases in NS-SeC 5–7 households living in the private rented sector.

Across Outer London, Figures 1 and 2 show that working-class homeownership has declined in all boroughs, but most strongly in the Outer East and NE. While this has been accompanied by declines in NS-SeC 5–7 social tenants in some areas, across all outer boroughs (except Waltham Forest) investification has clearly occurred as the population of NS-SeC 5–7 private tenants grew in both absolute and relative terms, especially in more deprived and ethnically diverse boroughs like Brent and Enfield. Meanwhile, NS-SeC 1–2 trends also vary across Outer London with some areas seeing strong owner-gentrification (Bexley, Bromley, Havering, Waltham Forest) while others posted more mixed growth (Greenwich, Kingston) or only modest change (much of the Outer West and NW). Overall, growth in the share of NS-SeC 1–2 households between 2011 and 2021 was strongest in the outer boroughs where this class was least represented in 2011 (mostly in the Outer East). This trend probably reflects centrifugal housing pressures pushing prospective middle-class homebuyers into historically cheaper eastern suburbs which have become better connected to central London by the new Elizabeth Line rail services.

Class-based changes in residential position, 2011–21

Figures 3 and 4 extend the analysis by changing the denominator. Instead of looking at how borough populations have changed we instead examine how the spatial distribution of classes shifted from 2011 to 21. To produce the figures we first calculated what percentage of NS-SeC 1–2 and 5–7 households lived in each borough in 2011 and 2021. The 2011 value is then subtracted from the 2021 value to derive a PP change score. For example, if 4% of London’s NS-SeC 1–2s lived in Newham in 2011 and 5% in 2021 then Newham’s PP change would be+1PP. From this we would learn that middle-class households became more prone to living in Newham over the decade. ¹⁰

Figure 3.

Percentage point change in the distribution of London’s NS-SeC 1–2 households, 2011–21.

Figure 4.

Percentage point change in the distribution of London’s NS-SeC 5–7 households, 2011–21.

Figures 3 and 4 show that the NS-SeC 1–2 population has shifted eastwards with particularly strong positive redistribution towards Newham and Tower Hamlets. The opposite is true for Inner West boroughs and in parts of Outer Northern and Western London. If we look back to Figures 1 and 2, we can see that this eastwards shift in NS-SeC 1–2 has not been produced by declines in West London so much as by strong growth in the Inner East. By contrast, the distribution of the smaller NS-SeC 5–7 population has shifted towards the Outer Northern and Western boroughs as well as towards other cheaper suburbs like Croydon and Redbridge. Interestingly, NS-SeC 5–7 have also–like NS-SeC 1–2–become increasingly likely to live in Newham and Tower Hamlets. Figure 1 shows that this is not because working-class numbers increased in these areas, but rather because they declined less strongly here than elsewhere. Overall, Figures 3 and 4 confirm that working-class London is increasingly found in the suburbs as the old East End becomes a more gentrified, leased space.

Figure 5 completes the analysis by showing how the tenure and borough shares of each class changed (in PP terms) between 2011 and 2021. Dots to the right of the vertical 0 line indicate that a particular class became increasingly concentrated into a particular borough and tenure over the study period. Dots to the left of the vertical denote the reverse.

Figure 5.

Percentage point change in the tenure and borough location of London’s households.

Looking first at Inner London, Figure 5 shows that apart from a modest increase in the concentration of NS-SeC 1–2s in private renting in Wandsworth, overall middle-class Londoners were less likely to live in all tenures in the Inner West in 2021 than 2011. By contrast, NS-SeC 1–2 concentration into the Inner East private rented sector (and to a lesser extent homeownership) increased. Meanwhile, the tendency for NS-SeC 5–7 to own homes in the Inner East has declined, but in some boroughs (especially Tower Hamlets, Newham, Haringey) this has been offset or outweighed by an increased concentration into private renting. Overall, leasing space in Inner East boroughs through the private rented sector has been a clear trend for both middle- and working-class Londoners.

Finally, Figure 5 shows that Outer London trends are quite variegated. NS-SeC 5–7 concentrations in private renting in Outer London boroughs have increased–especially in the Outer West and NW and also in more deprived Inner boroughs like Haringey–while the tendency for working-class households to own suburban homes has markedly fallen. Middle-class trends are, in contrast, more muted in Outer London, excepting strong increases in the propensity to live in Greenwich and to own a home in Waltham Forest. Indeed, in the Outer North and NW the main overall trend is a modest decline in the propensity to own homes and a general growth in private renting.

Conclusions

In this article, we argued that contemporary urban social change is defined by the intersections of occupational class with housing tenure. This is not a novel claim but is rather a call to revisit classic 20th century perspectives on how shifts in property relations reshape traditional class-based inequalities (e.g. Ruonavaara, 2024; Saunders, 1984) and underpin varied processes of gentrification and city change (e.g. Glass, 1964). Both of these older literatures considered social class and tenure restructuring to be inseparable and interlocking engines of local urban dynamics. However, this more holistic perspective has, somewhat unaccountably, dropped out of the burgeoning gentrification literature in recent years.

Our analyses of intersecting class and tenure restructuring help to explain why univariate studies have recently struggled to decipher dynamics of local social change in London. Essentially, multiple processes of class and housing-related change are occurring at the same time in different places, with apparent stability or relatively modest change in overall class geographies (e.g. Manley and Johnston, 2014) masking major underlying ‘classed’ patterns of housing restructuring. These trends include continued gentrification (driven in different places by ownership and by the private rental sector), investification in the urban periphery, and estate renewal that displaces working-class social tenants from central sites. These processes mainly involve three of our ‘ideal type’ protagonists of local social change–middle-class owner-occupiers, middle-class private renters and working-class private renters–whilst working-class owner-occupiers and social renters have declined in number and proportion across much of London. While previous studies have correctly asserted that London is not becoming a ‘middle-class space’ without any working-class areas (Davidson and Wyly, 2012; Manley and Johnston, 2014), what they have not shown is that working-class households increasingly maintain only a relatively precarious and peripheral toehold in the capital by privately leasing space in the suburbs as opposed to living in owner-occupation or in centrally located social housing.

Indeed, throughout this paper, we have highlighted the extent to which the private rental sector has been involved in local social change in London over the last decade. Among the middle class, owner-occupiers had a larger positive percentage point change than private renters in only a few boroughs. Inner London’s continued gentrification and this trend’s eastward spread (Hamnett, 2024) have thus primarily occurred through leasing space. Among the working-class, private renters have the largest percentage point changes across all areas, with particularly strong growth in the northern and western suburbs where working-class homeownership has declined.

As the private rental sector continues its return through the joint operation of buy-to-let gentrification and investification, it is clear that social class alone loses its determining role in explaining the spatial distribution of urban populations. While leasing space through the private rental sector gives fragile populations an opportunity to (temporarily) access the spaces they can no longer afford to buy into or rent securely within, it is a deregulated process driven by the decisions of those who make rental housing available. Indeed, tenants in the private rental sector are able to lease space in a given area only because housing there has been transferred to that tenure or built specifically to be rented out. The social geography of a city like London is thus increasingly dependent on the actions of private rental housing providers–understood broadly as those responsible for the availability of rental housing–and diminishingly dependent on the actions of public housing providers and households buying and selling housing for their own occupation. The return of the private rental sector thus requires a step change in perspectives on urban social geography towards one that considers the distribution of populations as co-determined by the actions of owners located across different levels of the property wealth distribution, ranging from owner-occupiers through to landlords, large-scale investors and developers.

The paper also shows more broadly the merits of returning to the molecular level when debates on what is happening at the molar level start to spiral in on themselves. Rather than attempt to encapsulate what is happening in London in a single term (professionalisation, polarisation, gentrification, etc.), it can be more helpful to isolate the locally specific, varied forms of social change that are being pushed forward by particular types of populations. Our contention is that this approach–which should be extended to include other dimensions such as migration background and ethnicity–provides a practical way forward for both theoretical and empirical attempts to better understand the geographies of social change in contemporary cities.