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All That You Change

Jayraj Singh, Generation Gentrification: Hackney

This documentary examines how gentrification in Hackney is mediated digitally — how social media amplifies and accelerates the displacement of working-class communities while constructing a new image of the borough for incoming residents. The filmmaker, whose family has called Hackney home for three generations since arriving from Punjab in the 1940s, draws on TikTok content by local creators, semi-structured interviews with long-term residents, and auto-ethnographic research to trace how the same streets once represented as the 'ghetto' are now framed online as leisure destinations. Situating this transformation within structural forces — from Thatcher's Right to Buy to the 2012 Olympics — the film asks what is lost when a place's image is rewritten online faster than its people can respond.