Humanities & Social Sciences taster course at Goldsmiths University

Despite public and political interest in the wealthy we know surprisingly little about where and how they live, nor how they fit into the social, cultural and economic life of the metropolitan centres within which they tend to reside. Work on deprived and middle-class neighbourhoods has long been a significant element of social scientific research. In particular it has been through work on poverty, the compounded disadvantage of life in deprived neighbourhoods and work on gentrification that much of what we know about how localities operate and how class relations and social identities are 'plugged-in' to localities, has arisen. The aim of the research discussed in this lecture is to supplement and build on the reach of this work by more firmly grappling with what might be described as elite neighbourhoods - locales inhabited by the very affluent; what geodemographers have recently come to term the 'alpha territory'.