Postgraduate research students

This project explores the uneven urban experience of everyday social, structural, and cultural change during late twentieth century London. The project will centre this investigation within the case study of Wapping, the former Port of London and residential site encompassing just under half a square mile adjacent to the City of London. Existing on the borderlands of often separate historiographies regarding deindustrialisation, gentrification, protest, race and neoliberalism, Wapping offers the unique opportunity to bridge and explore connections within the story of modern Britain.

Using archival research and oral history, the project will investigate Wapping through the everyday as experienced by its shifting composition of residents, from the closure of the docks in 1968, the heavy impact of the 1986 Wapping Print Dispute upon everyday life - and through iterations of redevelopment and mass gentrification. Research will explore the changing ways Wapping residents belonged, experienced, contributed, resisted, and adapted to the structural and cultural transformation of the area and in doing so, examine how the experience of Wapping contributes or contests contemporary British narratives around community, class, politics and difference.

Research interests 

• 20C British Urban history
• Deindustrialisation and its long term impacts
• The London Ports
• Space and mobilities
• The Everyday
• Protest
• Oral history

• Dr Ewan Gibbs
• Dr Diarmaid Kelliher

Scottish Graduate School of Social Science ESRC-funded Doctoral Studentship