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.
John Medhurst was born in London in 1962 and graduated inHistory and Politics from Queen Mary College, University of London. He has workedat all levels of the British civil service, from front-line welfare delivery toministerial office in Whitehall, including local Job Centres, the InternationalBranch of the Health and Safety Executive (in which he helped deliver assistanceprojects to ex-Soviet Bloc Eastern European countries), and the Department forCulture, Media and Sport. In all of these he was an active trade unionist. Heis now a full-time officer for the UK's largest civil service trade union, thePublic and Commercial Services Union (PCS).He was elected to PCS's National Executive Committee 2003-06and for six years was PCS's representative on the European Public ServicesUnion's (EPSU) Public Services Network. He has written for Novara Media, MorningStar, Red Pepper, Green Left and the Journal of Contemporary European Research.He is the author of the highly regarded That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76,a revisionist history of Britain in the 1970s published by Zero Books in 2014. He is married with two daughters. He lives in Brighton,England.
Title: I Could Be So Good for You: A Portrait of the North London Working Class
Author: John Medhurst
ISBN: 9781914420344
Binding:
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
Publication Date: 2023-01-10
Number of Pages: 484
Weight: 0.6392 kg
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.
