Taking Bermondsey as a case study, my thesis examines how two groups of inhabitants - long-term residents and early gentrifiers - respond to and contest changes in urban space brought about by gentrification. Bermondsey is a gentrifying neighbourhood in London that has rapidly changed in social composition over the past thirty years. The research involved two aspects. Firstly, an historical analysis of the area's social, political and spatial trajectories. Viewed through this lens I argue that the character of the area's gentrification stems from the extent of its integration into the cultural and economic functions of the adjacent City of London. Secondly, indepth interviews with members of the two inhabitant groups are also used to understand how they experienced change brought about by gentrification in the context of their everyday lives. The research found that long-term residents did not regard the presence of gentrifiers as a direct threat to their housing security. Rather there was segregation between the two groups and protection provided by a large social rented tenure. A third group - 'low-status incomers' - were, however, seen as a threat both to long-term residents' access to social housing and to their (nostalgic) notions of community. I identify a form of intra-class rivalry, differing from the inter-class rivalry between lower income residents and gentrifiers that the literature typically describes. Instead of housing, I describe how public space was the crucible of tensions over gentrification, demonstrated by long-term residents' negative experiences of the public realm on new-build gentrification schemes. This prompted their withdrawal to familiar neighbourhood spaces, a form of 'internal displacement'. I also found a loss of 'place' displayed by early gentrifiers. Through their political practices, such as lobbying for affordable housing, they aimed to mitigate against the excesses of the gentrification they helped initiate. Despite their own housing security, they felt threatened by the arrival of later gentrifiers with divergent consumption preferences and social ideals. The analysis therefore shows how experiences of gentrification among different inhabitant groups are not fixed but open, ambiguous and layered, with different groups representing real and imagined threats to each other in ways not necessarily typified in the existing literature.

In this thesis, a collective urban sector-consisting, in various different guises, of civic governments, urban merchants, and townspeople-is presented as a vital and distinctive component of later medieval English political society. The dynamics of this urban political sector are reconstructed through the use of a modified version of the 'urban systems' approach found in historical geography and economic history, positing that towns are defined by their evolving relationship with one another. Drawing from the municipal records of twenty-two towns, this thesis charts the composition of the later medieval English 'urban system' and the manner in which urban groups belonging to this 'system' participated in a broader national political sphere over four chronological periods-1413-35, 1435-50, 1450-61, and 1461-71. In 1413-35, the highly authoritative and institutionalised governments of Henry V and the child Henry VI fostered vertical relationships between the Crown and a variety of individual civic governments, leading both national and urban political actors to operate within a shared political culture, but not necessarily encouraging inter-urban political communication. This would change in the periods that followed, as the absence of strong royal authority after 1435 renewed the strength of lateral mercantile networks and facilitated the re-emergence of a semi-autonomous inter-urban political community, which saw little reason to participate in the civil wars of the early 1450s that now seemed divorced from its own interests. In the 1460s, however, the financially extractive policies of Edward IV once again gave civic governments and ordinary townspeople a greater stake in royal government, which was reflected in the high level of urban participation in the dynastic conflicts of 1469-71. The developments occurring in these four phases illustrate both the interdependence of urban and national politics in the later medieval period, and the mutability of their relationship with one another.