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for those unfamiliar with Larry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_(cat)
or Westferry Printworks, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05

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The process of gentrification is a process by which people, communities, workers get pushed to the margins of the city. The extents of these margins too undergoes changes through infrastructure, where areas once considered affordable through combination of policy and infrastructure become accessible for global speculation of land, thereby compelling displaced citizens to once again move to newer margins. 

This process of displacement is not only restricted to people but also landuses. Past 4 decades of liberalisation, has made the urban land increasingly expensive, making provision of open space, social infrastructure, markets, university campuses, student housing etc extremely challenging. Encouraging a concerted effort towards moving these landuses to new peripheries under the rational of math needs to add up, decongesting the city centre, creating new opportunities elsewhere...a series of arguments that present the act of relinquishing the right to exist in the city centre as a combination of market driven inevitability and ofcourse prospects of future opportunities when these margins will become new accessible centres.

Billingsgate Market and its move within a span of 40 years sits within this context.

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From UCL Archives, George Orwell's conviction for disorderly behaviour during his time at the Fish market. An interesting as well as encouraging coincidence that George Orwell would find his way into my narrative of Billingsgate market, few cats and Canary Wharf.

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Unlike other nations where one can see strays (cats and dogs), in UK they are chipped and are considered property by law. So stray cats or dogs do not exist in the UK. I found this aspect of legality of domestication where Life itself comes under the broad classification of being property quite interesting. So like poetry or a beautiful Wes Anderson film it does take a leap of faith to relinquish the logic of a our immediate banal context (of positive intentions) and imagine a group of feral cats living in Billingsgate Market away from human gaze.

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An article from the Guardian, about 12 years old, when the policies of Porters working in Billingsgate Market and their licensing was undergoing changes.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/aug/03/billingsgate-fish-market-porters-licences
explains the redundancy that was implied was not because the Market no longer had demand / need for the Porters' labour but instead there was an interest to liberalise the trade through stopping the licensing and allowing the Fish mongers to hire labour from the open market.

Photography artist Claudia Leisinger has covered the last porters of Billingsgate Market very beautifully in a photo essay last seen here https://vimeo.com/40644907

This trend is repeated over and over again across various sectors of the economy, from Black Cab drivers to NHS workers, where workers with skills are gentrified from their work, place of work and places where they live.

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A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift is a work of satire that captures the idea of paradoxical and ludicrous ideas represented as objective and rational, using data and  technocratic processes within a constructed inevitability of “how the world works”.

For me it captures very precisely the army of planners, advocacy experts, community participation experts and rest of paraphernalia of positive intentions, each highly specialized than the other presenting "solutions" that sit comfortably within the status quo of liberal free market...where issues of access to resources, universal access to housing, healthcare, well being are all sacrificed or ignored in the interest of "numbers need to add up". This precisely is the starting argument that Swift puts in Modest Proposal to conclude with a solution of the poor selling their children as food for the wealthy.

Quite paradoxically, the antithesis of Modernist top down hero architect (who had a socialist manifesto and composition to their merit) is a circus of Jane Jacobian Post Modernists working within exactly the same top down structure (but now without composition or a single manifesto). Bravo.