Gentrification apparently is a topic that has been hot before mediaspree and even before the eighties. Today I found the following quote from a certain Patrick Purpoole (cited in Coleman's Power and the Structure of Society), complaining in an 1792 article in the New Law Journal that
"Around the remains of the old priority of the Knights Hospitaliers beyond Smithfield Market there has grown up across the centuries a veritable collony of small individual craftsmen, clockmakers, wood carvers, jewellers, workers in metals, spinners, musical instrument makers, in clusters of little workshops hidden in the upretentious old streets. [...] These craftsmen are not representative of dying trades. Their work is, if anything, more than even in demand, but, on the one hand, they cannot pay the rents which oil companies, banks and insurance companies can pay, and, on the other, they are an untidy anomaly in the neat, inhuman calculations of the planners." It sounds so familliar, one could think the quote is taken from a page of the lonely planet boy for berlin or paris.