£7.99 – £18.99
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.
“What a fantastic book this is – both 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.”
