I Could Be So Good for You

Name: I Could Be So Good for You
Price: 55 AUD
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ISBN: 9781914420344

A Portrait of the North London Working Class

John Medhurst

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Paperback

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English

Repeater Books
28 February 2023

Social & cultural history; Cultural studies; Political science & theory

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 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.

By: John Medhurst
Imprint: Repeater Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9781914420344
ISBN 10: 1914420349
Pages: 484
Publication Date: 28 February 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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).

Reviews for I Could Be So Good for You: A Portrait of the North London Working Class

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.