I Could Be So Good for You

A Portrait of the North London Working Class

I Could Be So Good for You
John Medhurst
RRP:
NZ$ 85.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 68.00
Paperback
h234 x 153mm - 484pg
10 Jan 2023 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781914420344
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
I Could Be So Good For You is a unique portrait of north London' s working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, and how it lived, struggled, survived and sometimes thrived. I Could Be So Good For You tackles head-on the pernicious and implicitly racist fiction that London, most especially north London, has no "real" working class in comparison to a more "authentic" working class in a place called "the North". In doing so it offers a history and a portrait of north London' s working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, based on a wide and original range of sources including personal memoirs, autobiographies, collected oral histories and new interviews conducted by the author. The result is an important social history and a rich panorama of working-class life - its struggles, work, celebrations, events, triumphs, tragedies and the occasional nice little earner. For good or ill, from the start of post-war affluence in the 1950s to the economic crash of 2008, north London' s working class had a life experience like almost no other part of the British working class, one not just of poverty, racism and exploitation, but also of bold new housing schemes in the heart of the city, of great opportunity and diversity and enjoyment. Its about time to tell that story.
"Fantastic - a much-needed history of a class claimed regularly not to exist, and a compendious, endlessly quotable book of facts, anecdotes and tales of the ' working class bohemia' that existed, and crucially still exists, and changes and grows and thrives, in the lands south of Watford, east of Staines, north of the Thames and west of the Lea' " "This is a Dickens for a postwar North London. . . an intimate letter to the North London working class, written out of a tough love, completely shorn of sentimentality. This is an important book. I know of no other quite like it. I wish I had written it. " "It' s great to see that ordinary London working class voices, not normally heard, are well represented in this cracking social history. " "A vivid and compelling account of North London society from the 1950s to the present. . . This is grass-roots local history at its best. "
John Medhurst was born and raised in Camden, London, and studied History and Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. He works for one of the UK' s largest trade unions and is an Executive Director of the Labour Research Department. He is the author of That Option No Longer Exists- Britain 1974-76 (Zero, 2014); No Less Than Mystic- A History of the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left (Repeater, 2017); and Sub Culture- The Many Lives of the Submarine (Reaktion, 2022).
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781914420344
Published: 10 Jan 2023
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Repeater Books
Publisher: Watkins Media
Format: Paperback
Height: 234mm
Width: 153mm
Pages: 484

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