Ruth Glass

Glass described how the middle class was beginning to buy and refurbish working-class houses in Islington, and how the inevitable result was the departure of the original tenants. She took the word «gentry» — the English rural lesser nobility — and coined the term now used worldwide.

Her text runs to only a few pages and already contained the essentials: the process is one of class, it is spatial, and it is irreversible neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Sixty years on, the literature has added nuance but has not refuted her description.