‘Brewing the Truth’: Craft Beer,Class and Place in Contemporary London

Introduction

The 20th century brought industrialisation, standardisation and multinational conglomeration to beer brewing. Today, this model still dominates, but we are also in the midst of a ‘third wave’ (Cabras and Bamforth, 2016) of independent ‘micro’ or ‘craft’ brewing concentrated in the UK and the USA but also extending into Europe (Daneshkhu, 2014), Australasia (Halpin and Tatham, 2016), South America (Long, 2016) and parts of Asia (EFE, 2016; Green, 2016) and Africa (Reuters, 2017). ¹ Craft beer is estimated to account for around 15% of the global beer market in the coming years (Mordor Intelligence, 2018) ² and by 2018, there were around 2000 breweries in the UK (up from 150 in 1980), the majority of which were categorised as independent craft breweries established within the previous decade (Cabras and Bamforth, 2016: 629).

Scholars have established the broad economic and spatial geography of craft brewing, especially in the UK and the USA (Baginski and Bell, 2011; Cabras, 2017; Cabras and Bamforth, 2016; Danson et al., 2015; McLaughlin et al., 2014; Maye, 2012). In the UK, one notable aspect has been the return of brewing to British cities. At one time these hosted single, large, iconic breweries employing hundreds of workers (e.g. Boddington’s in Manchester or Tetley’s in Leeds). However, by the end of the 20th century most had ceased production or been bought by conglomerates and moved out (e.g. Newcastle Brown Ale is now owned by Heineken and brewed in the Netherlands (Beverage Industry, 2017)). As such, London had a mere 10 breweries left in operation by the 1990s. Today, in contrast, it has around 115, the vast majority of which are small, independent ‘craft’ breweries established since the 2010s. Similarly, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Leeds and Bristol all now host 10 to 20 craft breweries per city pulling a variety of urban spaces and districts into the ambit of beer production and consumption.

As a form of work, the craft brewing boom perhaps supports Carr and Gibson’s (2016: 298) contention that material production ‘remains persistently central to human life’. Indeed, late capitalist economies might be typified by financialisation, flexibilisation and ‘knowledge’ work, but we have also seen crafting, making and physical labour recently revalorised within these economies (see Fox Miller, 2017; Jakob, 2013), narrated by discourses of resilient ‘creativity’ (McRobbie, 2016) and forming a culturally powerful ‘aura of the analogue’ (Luckman, 2013). For Scott (2017), post-industrial cities are a key site of craft production. He describes a ‘hipster capitalism’ whereby a new crop of ‘creatives’ are integrating their ‘cultural and aesthetic competence with the making of livelihoods’. Existing alongside the cultural producer archetypes found in, for example, media and fashion, he argues, are self-employed neo-artisanal entrepreneurs – such as craft brewers – who ‘provision the goods and services of style, taste, and living well to urban dwellers’ (2017: 61).

The ‘hipster’ entrepreneurs that generate and sell this realm of gustatory and aesthetic goods (Lash and Urry, 1994) have invited some suspicion from urban researchers (see Hubbard, 2016). ³ This chimes with critical scholarship which has long decried urban development agendas built around ‘creatives’, fearing displacement of working class and minority communities from the city (e.g. Harvey, 1989; Peck, 2005; Slater, 2006). ⁴ In terms of craft brewing, there are reasons for concern. For example, consumer research suggests demand for craft drinks is classed (IWSR, 2015), supporting recent sociological work demonstrating the relationship between high cultural and economic capital and ‘alimentary dispositions’ which tend towards the exclusive and/or the organic (e.g. Atkinson and Deeming, 2015). Ocejo (2017), meanwhile, gives reason to suspect brewing is valorised by educated, male urbanites in the same vein as the ‘new masters of craft’ working as distillers, bartenders and butchers in New York City. We also know from research in the USA (e.g. Barajas et al., 2017; Feeney, 2017; Reid, 2018; Walker and Fox Miller, 2018; Zukin, 2009) that the presence of craft breweries in neighbourhoods is linked with cycles of investment and changes in residential composition, although the precise causal relationship here remains open to debate.

Taking account of these trends and questions and focusing on London – a global city riven with ‘intensifying’ socio-economic inequalities (Cunningham and Savage, 2017) – this article explores who exactly owns craft breweries and how craft breweries inhabit and interact with social and material space. To this end, it attends to the enmeshing of craft brewery owners’/brewers’ dispositions with wider political-economic trends restructuring urban space in speculative directions. To unpick this dialectic, the article combines Bourdieusian-inspired economic anthropology to provide the first qualitative account of London’s craft brewers’ ‘culturepreneurship’ (Davies and Ford, 1998) with a cultural economy approach (see Amin and Thrift, 2007; Gibson and Kong, 2005) attending to the broad trends in economic and spatial organisation within the city. The article is organised into five sections. Next, the methodological approach is outlined before we move on to present data establishing who owns and runs London’s craft breweries and how breweries are interacting with social and material space. Finally, the article reflects on how breweries and the ‘artisanal’ symbolic they embody have come to ‘craft-wash’ real estate-driven spatial restructuring projects.

Methodology

Eighteen months of empirical work was undertaken in London. After conducting online research of all London’s craft breweries, a database containing the key characteristics of each (brewery location, years of operation, ownership/workforce structure, owner demographics and contact details) was compiled for two reasons. First, each brewery was emailed a maximum of three times inviting the owner for a semi-structured interview lasting 45–60 minutes. All those that responded to email invitations were interviewed. Interview topic guides were informed by academic and industry literature and by online research. Interviews were digitally recorded and were conducted at the relevant brewery either in an office or while sitting on brewing equipment. One was conducted by telephone. Twenty-three of the sample were white males, one was a white female and one a British Asian male. All were between 25 and 50 years old and breweries from all districts of London’s scene were represented. Thematic analysis was adopted to analyse the data: interviews were transcribed by the author and read several times for familiarisation and to note and refine coding themes. Documentary and online research was conducted to keep track of industry developments via magazines (such as Beer, Ferment and Original Gravity) and blogs such as http://www.desdemoor.co.uk.

Second, an ownership typology was developed (see Figure 1) taking account of as many of London’s brewery owners as possible, drawing on interviews and/or online and documentary research for those not interviewed (website biographies, PR statements, industry analysis, magazine interviews). Breweries were excluded if data were seriously limited. Drawing on a Bourdieusian ‘capitals’ framework (see Scott, 2017) each brewery was ‘scored’ in the domains of economic capital (the extent of access to personal savings, bank loans, investors and evidence/extent of investment in brewery estate or equipment), cultural capital (the degree of experimentation in their beer range, the nature/extent of their ‘talk’ regarding taste/subcultural mores/industry trends/innovations) and social capital (the extent of meaningful connections with other brewers and intermediaries (shops, pubs, journalists). ⁵

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Figure 1.

Typology of London craft brewery owners.

Data analysis took account of the interview data and the typological framework to assess the extent to which London’s craft brewers were part of Scott’s (2017) urban ‘hipster’ capitalist ecology. Also, given the diverse brewing geography that became apparent, the analysis focused on how different ‘types’ occupied, represented and imagined place through, for example, their brewery locational decisions, their branding and their role within the local area. To establish how craft brewers are embroiled in the wider speculative real estate agendas which we know suffuse London, a third strand of data collection involved monitoring the online activity of real estate developers and London borough councils to establish how state and capital interests might be leveraging craft breweries in new real estate developments.

Who Owns London’s Craft Breweries?

Most craft brewery owners in London are white men aged 30–45, so slightly older than the archetypal self-starting ‘culturepreneur’ working in more ‘traditional’ urban creative industries – music, media and the arts (cf. Scott, 2012). This profile appears to be in line with UK craft brewery owners as a whole and with the US craft beer scene (Withers, 2017). Of those interviewed, all had lived in London for several years before setting up their brewery and around one-third were born in London. Most breweries are small businesses employing around 5–10 people, although there are a handful of larger breweries with anything up to 70 employees. Others are sole-trader micro-businesses but breweries are typically owned by groups of friends, business partnerships or heterosexual couples.

Where women are involved in brewery ownership, they tend to have an accounting or branding role and while there are certainly women brewers in London’s craft scene, they tend to be waged brewery employees (although the first female-owned brewery was due to open in 2018). This could be read as a legacy of the marginalisation of female ‘brewsters’ and the transformation of beer into a ‘public’, masculine concern (see Bennett, 1996; Rydzik and Ellis-Vowles, 2018). Notably, there are a number of prominent women beer writers and bloggers and reports suggest beer drinking has become slightly less masculinised (Sutton, 2017; although see Darwin, 2018). In class terms, urban craft brewery owners present as akin to Bourdieu’s new petite bourgeoisie (Bourdieu, 1984; Scott, 2017). They tend to be fairly well resourced with access to varying constellations of financial assets, cultural expertise and social connections. There was evidence from my respondents’ accounts (also see Dennett and Page, 2016) of a Great Recession effect with some opting out of white collar jobs into work perceived as more creative (see also Thurnell-Read, 2014). Others are more precarious – working long hours, in debt or even homeless – aligning some craft brewers with wider trends in flexibilised or even self-exploitative creative employment in an era of individualised risk and polarised job markets (see Scott, 2017: 65). Most appear to ‘believe in what they sell’ (see Bourdieu, 1984: 365) and have no qualms about converting ‘cool into commerce’ (Scott, 2017: 62). Most echoed variants of Garrett Oliver’s sentiment (noted Brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery in New York City) that: ‘the task of the craft brewer is to brew the truth as he or she sees it … Period’ (Neilson, 2016: 11). These sentiments tended to invoke a claim to ‘authenticity’ designed to contrast their breweries with what they considered faceless brewing conglomerates.

Artisans and Entrepreneurs

The ‘craftiest’ of the owners (or most ‘truthful’) in London is a group we might call ‘Connected Artisans’ (see Figure 1 for typological overview and estimated prevalence). From my interviews and analysis, these are the brewery owners who most closely align with ‘neo-bohemian’ artists (Lloyd, 2010) as well as Ocejo’s (2017) renaissance ‘masters of craft’ (craft gin distillers, new generation barbers, butchers and cocktail bartenders). They present as having more robust stocks of social and cultural capital than financial capital. For example, they have often exchanged one creative job in the food and drinks industry (cheese monger, coffee barista, brewer in a larger company or chef in a fashionable restaurant) for another in brewing; evidence, perhaps, of the cross-fertilisation typical in urban cultural production (see Storper and Venables, 2004). They spoke explicitly about being inspired by the American craft brewing scene and talked about moments of ‘discovery’ when they travelled in the USA: ‘I thought to myself, if it (craft beer) can work in Brooklyn, it’s not much of a leap of faith to think it can work in Hackney.’ (‘Jack’; ‘connected artisan’, east London.) This is a group who felt that their refined beer tastes, forged by travelling, were not being catered for and who took it upon themselves to experiment on small brewing kits, sometimes with friends, often looking to replicate the beer flavours and styles they had encountered elsewhere. They felt comfortable being recognised as part of a wider artisanal ecology waging war on a moribund urban culture.

It is invidious to suggest absolute lines of division, but less inclined towards the artisanal are the ‘Beer Entrepreneurs’. These are individuals who present with high existing financial and social capital but seemingly less high cultural capital. Several come from jobs in IT, finance or real estate and for some brewing is not their first commercial venture. Some breweries owned by Beer Entrepreneurs have scaled quickly to the point that their beer can be found in high street supermarkets or have been bought out by multinational brewing companies. London is a pragmatic location for most of this group as this is where they have established working lives but it is also where they know consumers can pay premium prices for their product. Occasionally, breweries are owned by a combination of artisans and entrepreneurs.

Underneath the Arches

Generally speaking, London’s 115 or so breweries and 50 independent neighbourhood beer shops can be found largely in a zone ‘two to four’ sweep that extends anti-clockwise from Wandsworth in the south-west of the city round to Camden Town in the north. ⁶ Most districts within this sweep currently host at least one craft brewery and perhaps also a beer shop or ‘free house’ pub sympathetic to craft breweries. ⁷ Reflecting the class and economic geography of London, which we can assume feeds into expensive land and unit costs as well as an ‘elite’ cultural milieu which, it seems, craft brewing is yet to really penetrate, the ‘alpha territories’ of west London (Burrows et al., 2017) or, indeed, in the central London ‘zone one’ commercial and tourist districts contain very few breweries or beer shops. Within the ‘sweep’, there are currently three main clusters of craft brewing and it is here that we tend to find the ‘Connected Artisan’ and ‘Beer Entrepreneur’ breweries: Bermondsey (circa nine breweries), Hackney/Tower Hamlets (circa fifteen breweries) and Tottenham/Enfield (circa eight breweries) (see Dennett and Page (2016) for more on this clustering of London’s breweries). Bermondsey and Hackney/Tower Hamlets are central districts on the fringes of the City of London while Tottenham/Enfield are north-eastern inner-suburbs. All have been gentrifying for several years – propelled to some degree by large-scale regeneration projects in each area (see Dillon and Fanning, 2018; Watt, 2013) – but are still home to large multi-ethnic, working class populations.

In all three cases, there is an abundance of light or post-industrial units typically popular with small-batch, artisanal producers: lock-ups, railway arches and accessible industrial estates. ⁸ Railway arches are particularly popular and their prevalence has been mooted as a key factor in the craft brewing boom in London (see Dennett and Page, 2016: 16). Nonetheless, this kind of ‘off-centre location’ (cf. Hubbard, 2017 on micropubs) associates craft breweries with a ‘temporary urbanism’ frisson in which vacant space is repurposed for ‘creative’ economic activity (Ferreri, 2015), not to mention histories of edgy, dirty or casual work (Dennett and Page, 2016: 16) and everyday working class life. In the case of Bermondsey, however, the interests of Network Rail (the state infrastructure company which owns the arches), real estate developers and craft brewers appear to have temporarily aligned:

Network Rail were keen on not having car mechanics, they want people that are going to develop the area for them … ourselves and other small-scale producers help them achieve that … having taxi firms, or garages or paint shops isn’t really going to help. They want someone who is going to look after the space a bit more … You see the area is becoming more gentrified … the whole of Bermondsey is going through a weird transition with the gated new-builds, luxury flats and the council estates which are maybe on the way down … I think the real estate developers have realised what a good thing Bermondsey is. (‘Mike’, ‘connected artisan’, south London)

A similar pattern was evident in Tottenham where one brewery had to make a business case to Haringey borough council to lease one of their units:

Our case was: if regeneration is what you are trying to do, I think a brewery brings young, more sophisticated people, it brings artists … Next door is a guy making yoghurt so that is what they are trying to do, put us together: food, drinks … more craft producers … butcher, ice cream maker, someone making hummus. (‘Jasper’, ‘connected artisan’, north London)

Of course, it is the ‘edgy’ industrial and working class setting that craft breweries trade on to some degree. In Bermondsey, they have agglomerated on the edge of busier, more sanitised consumption spaces such as the Maltby street gourmet food market and the South Bank area around the Tate Modern art gallery and sprawling Borough food market. Owners in these zones spoke about the reciprocal dimensions of clustering: sharing equipment, ingredients, ideas and experiences, a neo-Polanyian feature of ‘hipster capitalist’ production, posits Scott (2017), supporting (Allen J) Scott’s (1999) theory of face-to-face contact in clustered urban cultural economies.

As a consumer, one can undertake the so-called Bermondsey ‘beer mile’ taking in some of the eight or so brewery ‘tap rooms’ in one visit. ⁹ In so doing, drinkers can traverse and consume some local unglamour: low income housing, logistics and hire plants, unprepossessing alleys and dank bridges supporting trains rumbling through to the hop-growing county of Kent. Upon arriving at a ‘beer mile’ tap room, the familiar motifs of the modern urban ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) are apparent: improvised seating, handwritten menus and cool, easy-going staff. If, as Savage et al. (2018) suggest, cities are increasingly ‘lived and consumed as resources’ for ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital defined by ‘participation’, craft beer spaces like this perhaps offer a clear example. Unlike traditional pub drinking, craft breweries enable (perhaps demand) a more tactile appreciation of beer: visits to the brewery, caresses of equipment, the smelling of malts and hops and conversing with brewers – crucial, argue Fox Miller (2017) and Ocejo (2010) for craft producers who want to cultivate shared cultural values and passions with their customers. That said, in the case of the ‘beer mile’ this ‘participation’ was tightly scripted for some brewers:

I think it is pretty horrible … it [the ‘beer mile’] [attracts] the sort of person who wants to drink in a pub crawling fashion and I don’t know of any positive connotations to that … if a stag do comes in and says ‘I’ll have eight pints of your strongest beer’ … you are giving your time to these people when there are others who are more deserving. (‘Keith’, ‘connected artisan’, south London)

‘Keith’ spoke evangelically about ‘good’ beer and framed his ‘job’ as being about expanding knowledge and changing the palates of an imagined consumer who was engaged and willing to learn. He referred approvingly to the US craft beer scene where ‘they [consumers] had enthusiasm and passion for beers … It wasn’t just a vessel for getting alcohol into your system.’ If one ventures to a craft brewery tap room like Keith’s, one is assumed to understand and be able to navigate these taste markers. In Bermondsey, the craft beer stag party is assumed to have made a set of cursory and instrumental choices which fly in the face of this restrained appreciation of ‘good’ beer, echoing Thurnell-Read’s (2016) account of the ‘sensible’ drinking of ‘real ale’ enthusiasts. More than that, according to another owner, they do not recognise the skill that went in to making the product:

It [the beer mile] became a drinking tour, a pub crawl I suppose, which really wasn’t the point for us, which was about having interaction with customers and letting people see where something is made and be able to talk to them about how and why we made the beer. (‘Mike’, ‘connected artisan’, south London)

Brewers of Suburbia

If we travel out of the London craft beer clusters, we begin to find another type of brewery owned by a different type of owner perhaps marketed at a different beer drinker. ‘Suburban Settlers’ have higher financial capital than Connected Artisans but not as high as Beer Entrepreneurs. Their resources of social capital are varied with some operating alone but others working with friends and being close to local artisanal networks (e.g. neighbourhood beer shops, delis, food markets). The extent of their cultural capital seemed relatively limited with few particularly ‘cool’ or cutting edge breweries in evidence. This group includes youngish middle class men (and some women) who have moved out of the inner city to have families as well as older, in situ suburbanite hobbyists mobilising a personal passion (akin to the micropub owners found by Hubbard (2017)). I found that this group tends to narrate itself as running localised, sometimes ‘down-shifting’ business ventures and beer brewed by these businesses seems to be more localised (i.e. limited to local pubs and shops).

Unlike the other two groups, this cohort have typically set up breweries near to or in their own neighbourhoods albeit they often work out of similar sorts of premises (arches, light industrial estates). There appears to be a greater sense of place attachment for these brewers. Notably, beer and brewing were presented by two owners in this group as offering an important social lubricant for a professional masculinity that inhabits, perhaps, more relatively ‘bounded’ middle class London suburbs (see Butler and Robson, 2003) and less about in creating (and policing) an inner-city taste spectacle. One told me that they: ‘make session beer that is for Dads like us and that is fine. Three pints of something not too strong and then home’ (‘Ally’, ‘suburban settler’, south London). ¹⁰ Similarly, one suburban brewery was set up by a group of 10 local fathers who met through their children’s local primary school (‘Belleville’ in Wandsworth, south-west London): ‘A seed was planted when I heard that another school in the area had organized a beer festival as a fund-raiser. I put the idea to the PTA who whole heartedly agreed on an evening for the “dads”.’ ¹¹

By contrast, another fraction of Suburban Settlers, including those living in or near to neighbourhoods they might perceive as ‘unstable’ (see Butler and Robson, 2003) presented their breweries as symbols of spatial rehabilitation, suggesting that their brewery could enhance the reputation or vibrancy of ‘dull’ or ‘dangerous’ urban fringes. This appeared to be a somewhat racialised discourse coded through different spatial-cultural markers. On the one hand, Brockley Brewery in south-east London – set up by a group of well-resourced, middle-aged white professionals – markets itself via the slogans ‘think global, drink local’ and ‘peace, love and understanding in Lewisham’, associating the brewery (and the neighbourhood) with both a glib cosmopolitan imaginary and a ‘neo-local’ sense of (selective) belonging (see Flack, 1997; Watt, 2009). On the other, two owners, aged in their mid-30s in different multi-ethnic districts of south London reported that they explicitly set up their breweries in the aftermath of the 2011 London ‘riots’. One, a long-term resident, suggested having a craft brewery would ‘make local people proud of the area again’ (‘Will’, ‘suburban settler’, south London), while another, a white gentrifier living near to an area with a sizeable black British population told how, with his tongue only slightly in his cheek, ‘it used to be difficult to get friends to visit ******* and we thought “we can help change that”’ (‘Jack’, ‘suburban settler’, south London). This reading of place – filtered through these individuals’ raced and classed privileges – as problematic and in need of redemption was one striking finding here. Further, it brought to mind the notion of neighbourhood ‘plate tectonics’ (see Jackson and Butler, 2015) and the extent to which craft breweries in locations with multi-ethnic, low income communities provide a ‘legible’ setting for largely white, middle class social dwelling and consumption; that is, one set amid but untroubled by the racialised ‘edginess’ of the surrounding area (see Hubbard, 2016).

The craft brewers I met were almost all well versed in discourses of liberal multiculture but there is no denying that Brixton Brewery (owned by white, professional Suburban Settlers and which recently sold a minority stake to Heineken) sells a beer called ‘Windrush Stout’ (from their website: ‘take a sip and say cheers to the vibrant Caribbean culture that makes Brixton come alive’) and says its visual branding was inspired by ‘exuberant African batik fabrics’. ¹² Brixton’s owners admitted that whilst they were trying to diversify their customer base, their tap room is largely frequented by white drinkers. Similarly, Old Kent Road brewery’s flagship beer is their Heygate Pale Ale. As they note on their website: ‘the brilliantly brutalist Heygate estate was an icon of the south London skyline. It was a bold utopian vision designed to be enjoyed by everyone – just like our signature pale ale.’ ¹³ It is probably not too much of a stretch to assume that ex-Heygate residents or indeed residents of Southwark’s remaining council housing estates many of whom are black, asian or minority ethnic are not regular consumers of this particular niche product (retail price £4.30 for a 440 ml can).

Craftwashing: Making Place in a Gentrifying City

London has a multiplicity of craft brewing geographies, each shaped by differing political economies and entrepreneurial dispositions. This will continue to mutate and shift as, for example, breweries move to find larger premises, brewers’ life patterns change and leases are wound up and land is sold. Indeed, as the British craft beer industry has matured, more established breweries have begun to set up outlets in London (e.g. Bristol’s Moor Beer Company acquired space on the ‘beer mile’ in 2018), further reworking the spatial politics of beer production. This emerging geographical promiscuity invites questions about the continued dispersal of brewing or even the possibility of a more formalised brewing ‘quarter’ in the future.

In the meantime, one consequence of the diverse and somewhat capricious geography as it stands has been craft breweries becoming entangled in the restructuring or rebranding of whole neighbourhoods or districts. This involves a complex set of relationships between brewers and place. As noted, some brewery owners, typically more suburban, infuse their branding with imaginaries of local place, history or some other socio-cultural resonance. Others, like the artisans and entrepreneurs of Bermondsey, enjoy being part of a socio-spatial project which trades on artisanal cache rather than place per se. This brings to attention a dilemma that many breweries face in London, participating as they do in an urban cultural economy which valorises aesthetic competence and fetishises ‘authentic’ production to such an extent (see also Zukin, 2008). Across the city, developers and local state authorities have started to try and leverage these imputed components of craft brewing as a means of encouraging local ‘creative’ economies and cloaking local places and new real estate in what we might call an artisanal symbolic. The ripple effect of ‘super-gentrification’ in London (see Butler and Lees, 2006) has meant that prospective homebuyers have been forced to consider moving to districts they might have previously shunned. Further, with the advent of London’s affordable housing crisis (Edwards, 2016), the local state and real estate developers have been blamed for failing to provide affordable housing while selling property to globally mobile investors and absentee landlords (Watt and Minton, 2016). Both of these trends may explain the emergence of what I am calling here ‘craftwashing’. ¹⁴

We can point to two specific manifestations of this. First, like with the Bermondsey and Tottenham examples, we see ‘makers’ and small batch producers being encouraged to take up space to invigorate local economies and gloss districts with a patina of cool creativity. This is being replicated across the city, notably in established suburbs such as Walthamstow in the north-east where warehouses, railway arches and even ex-council property (Frearson, 2016) have been repurposed as ‘makerspaces’, studios and workshops for small and medium businesses, including food and drink producers. Second, in previously unheralded areas we see craft breweries (alongside other invocations of creative making) firmly embedded in huge, new-build residential developments. For example, the 20-year, multi-billion pound ‘Meridian Water’ development in Enfield in the north-east promises not only 10,000 new homes but to bring ‘high-end fashion manufacturing and brewing to the site to help create London’s newest neighbourhood’. ¹⁵ Similarly, in the former docklands area of Canning Town, the ‘Goodluck Hope’ site managed by developer Ballymore promises a ‘burgeoning community of creators and cultural pioneers’ including an ‘experiential’ craft brewery which will deliver, via an app, local craft beer direct to the doors of the 3000 new apartments. ¹⁶ So determined are the developers to cloak their real estate product in the authentic cool of craft beer that sales people in the development showroom distribute free bottles of beer to prospective homebuyers. The brewer working in partnership with Ballymore also owns Brick Brewery in Peckham and is one of a number of ‘Ballymore People’ through which the developer tries to signal its creative credibility. Similarly, in the south-eastern district of Deptford, developer Anthology advertises in billboards and online a cast of wholesome, creative ‘local heroes’ – including a local craft brewer – who work nearby (Deptford Foundry, 2016). Presumably this craft washing helps reduce the perception on the part of middle class incomers – usually the targets of new-build private housing developments in London – of friction with classed and raced others (if there is a craft brewery, there must be ‘people like me’). Further, sensitive to accusations of gentrification perhaps, the artisanal symbolic possibly helps euphemise neighbourhood class restructuring as the mere hailing of particular tastes and aesthetic communities.

Conclusion

It is understood that in the prevailing economic climate, the revalorisation of making and crafting has spread throughout the Global North and beyond. This article has suggested that this revalorisation has had a marked urban impact as a new generation of neo-artisanal entrepreneurs have begun to inhabit new spaces of production and encourage new styles and geographies of consumption within the city. While London is somewhat unique in a British urban context, these findings do invite us to explore the ambiguous role of artisanal producers in altering space within other post-industrial cities across the globe.

While we find artisanal entrepreneurs ‘brewing the truth’ and reproducing the kind of hipster capitalist milieu identified by Scott (2017), it was also found that London’s brewers are a diverse group. It was argued here that how breweries claim and inhabit urban space in London is, in part, related to the capitals, in the Bourdieusian sense, their owners can access. In some districts, breweries help ‘cleanse’ and conquer ‘messy’ industrial spaces and perhaps signal a restructuring of valorised work in the inner city, with brewers heralded as makers and producers who can give districts an entrepreneurial ‘craft’ profile. It was suggested here that a well-connected artisanal disposition dovetailed neatly in these new ‘creative’ frontiers with craft brewers thriving in this gritty milieu as they embark on their quest for brewing ‘truth’ often in close proximity with other members of an ‘authentic’ cognoscenti. Out in suburban neighbourhoods, we find evidence of perhaps less culturally attuned craft brewers occupying space in subtly different ways. Some convene spaces of dwelling and consumption for London’s gentrifying middles classes amid the excessive and ‘unstable’ multi-ethnic, low income neighbourhoods they increasingly call home while others reinforce a largely white, male middle class habitus in more established ‘bounded’ districts. The branding and imagery of some beer in these contexts was held to reflect the cultural and social distances and ‘playful’ consumer culture that deep inequality and class restructuring has helped generate in London.

In this regard, the article argued that craft brewing casts further light on the prevailing spatial and cultural politics of London, an intensely polarised and stratified city. It is important not to characterise what is a rich landscape of production – hobbyists brewing humble amounts of beer in tiny spaces and selling to local shops to large-scale operations who sell to national supermarkets – as a wholesale urban catastrophe here. In advanced economies riven with offshoring and warehousing, craft production doubtless offers some attractive counterpoints (see Fox Miller, 2017). Indeed, craft brewers in London can be well meaning, invoking a moral register worked through notions of localness, collaboration over competition and slow creativity. Several are ‘living wage’ employers and some have progressive political agendas. ¹⁷ Indeed, it may well be that in less intensely polarised towns and cities, ‘hipster’ production feels sociologically less fraught.

That said, there is surely no question that some craft breweries in London do inhabit space in ways that energises the consumption and residential dominance of middle class groups. Some of this can be laid at the door of brewery owners themselves; relatively well-resourced white men who, through their breweries, have carved a pivotal position in contemporary urban cultural economies and through their products furnish ‘informed’ consumers with new registers of taste and enclaves of privileged sociality in often divided and charged urban settings. However, we also know that breweries are caught up in the same speculative pressure from which they can often benefit. The recent purchase of Network Rail’s railway arches by a property developer for £1.5 billion is a case in point (White, 2018). Further, we see an artisanal symbolic being deployed by developers and authorities as they try to tempt middle classes to gentrify somewhat unheralded London territory. Here a dialectical entanglement of the artisanal impulse with logics of urban renewal and capital accumulation is unfolding in districts like Deptford but in ways that wholly marginalises how an extant multi-ethnic working class community survives ‘on the make’ in contemporary London. In this sense, making things (or consuming ‘made’ things, or indeed living in proximity to the makers of things) might have emerged as a means of managing or retarding the accelerations and precarities of modern life for some (see Luckman, 2013: 251), but we are reminded that the very polarities, erasures and injustices that brought us to this point do not disappear with the neo-artisanal invocation, but can still be glimpsed with an attuned critical gaze.