We moved to Shoreditch in 2007. It was buzzing with life: bars, clubs, music, food, but what really drew us was the grit, the dirt of it. The warehouses with their bare light fittings, the abandoned houses pumping out music all weekend, the vintage shops selling Carhartt and Dickies, flannel shirts and trucker hats.
The people living there were, for the most part, nice kids from comfortable homes, working in galleries, cafes, bars or aspiring to act, none of them, as far as I can remember, bricklayers or factory workers. This didn’t seem like a problem at the time, we were all of a like mind, the everyman (or woman). We always joked that the day a Starbucks appeared on Brick Lane we’d know it was over, the corporate takeover complete. We didn’t realise we were the early symptoms, the strange lump or the cough that wouldn’t go away.
What happened to British working-class culture is easiest to see in music, because music has always been where class made itself loudest.
In 1995, with Britpop on the rise, the music press manufactured a war between Oasis and Blur. On the face of it, it was a north/south thing, but underneath, and no one quite said it, was a class argument.
Oasis were the real thing, lads from a Burnage council estate, Liam and Noel with the swagger and attitude to match. Blur were art school, London, technically accomplished. Damon Albarn understood working-class culture the way an anthropologist understands humans, intimately well, but from the outside.
The music press, largely middle-class and mostly London, picked Blur. The public, mostly not those things, picked Oasis.
This tension wasn’t new. It had existed for years, but the de-industrialisation of the 70s and 80s, the miners’ strike, the collapse of the shipyards and steelworks, made the divide deeper. It didn’t just destroy jobs. It destroyed the communities that had been producing British working-class culture for decades.
The music from those places had force because it came from lives with consequence. Every decision had to be weighed, every penny accounted for, tough work and then no work. When those communities were dismantled, the culture that had grown out of them went too.
Things moved fast in the 90s. The BRIT School opened in 1991 and arts degrees multiplied through the decade and into the 2000s. The drive to get more kids into higher education worked if you’re just counting numbers, but the split between upwardly mobile middle-class kids and working-class ones was dramatic. By the 2000s, young people from professional and managerial families were around twice as likely to attend university as those from working-class backgrounds.
Fee-paying schools, which had always dominated politics and law, noticed that the best route into the music industry now required what they were good at: professional networks, performance confidence, industry visibility. When authenticity was still tied to class and charisma, Harrow and Eton were a bad fit for rock and roll. When you could just pretend, they were perfect.
As the graduates moved into media, journalism and the arts, entry-level work meant unpaid internships. London rents, or travelling in daily, were simply beyond most people’s means. There’s no conspiracy here, no one keeping kids from council estates out. It’s just economics and opportunity, but the numbers show what that produces.
Around 70% of the UK music industry now comes from higher socioeconomic backgrounds (A, B and C1 if you ever worked in telemarketing). Only about 1 in 5 of those working in music and the performing arts come from working-class homes. That figure covers the whole workforce: the A&R staff, the managers, the journalists, the label executives and, increasingly the artists themselves.
The music industry, always tuned to profit, had already asked the obvious question: does authenticity actually need to come from anywhere real? The answer was no. It could be performed, which meant there was no longer any requirement for the environment that had originally produced it. The BRIT School isn’t a finishing school for the wealthy, it draws from across London, and across class, but it does represent something: once professional training could replace lived experience, the industry no longer needed to go looking for it. The last reason to find your acts in council estates disappeared.
This new, packaged version sounds close enough to the real thing that most people don’t stop to question it. Sometimes you have to listen twice.
When I first heard Louis Dunford’s England ‘Til I Die, I had to go back and listen a few times to figure it out. Something wasn’t quite right. I pulled up the lyrics, and this leapt out:
“You say ‘these refugees should fuck off home,’
But your favourite footballer,
Who was born in Africa can stay,
But only if he brings it home.”
This line isn’t impossible. I’ve heard far worse in pubs and bars and Upton Park over the years. But England ‘Til I Die is intimately associated with England football culture, an anthem from the terraces through the pub to the living room. To put those words in the mouth of the man singing it isn’t malicious, it’s just what England fans look like from where Dunford is standing. He’s drawing on available material: headlines, social media, the version of working-class England that circulates in his world. The actual texture of what it means to support England from a town that’s had a rough twenty years just isn’t in his field of vision, so he fills the gap with the nearest thing to hand. It almost sounds real, but it’s slightly out of tune.
The Molotovs are a brother-and-sister punk band from London. Catchy riffs, killer basslines, a style that reaches straight back through Weller to the Pistols. Thirty years ago this music would have come from the kids of builders and taxi drivers, rebelling because they had something real to rebel against.
In an article for Asbo magazine they were described as emerging from “London’s street corners,” technically true but not in any recognisable sense. Both siblings left mainstream education, as the article puts it, by choice. When they talk about busking, it’s described as a decision to stand out. An aesthetic choice, not an economic one.
In the same interview, Matthew describes feeling confined by “the system,” school, university, career, and speaks about how lucky some people are to escape it. He’s speaking to something real, but for a great many working-class children that path isn’t a straitjacket at all. It’s something they are never offered, never expected to follow, and often simply cannot access.
Opting out of formal education and treating dissent as a form of self-expression are choices that require money and security. His experience of constraint is sincere. It’s just not universal, and it’s treated as though it is.
What working-class culture had was stakes. The physical weight of a job, the specific economics of a Friday night, belonging to a community you couldn’t opt out of even if you wanted to. That knowledge doesn’t automatically produce better art, there’s nothing inherently magic about working-class lives, but when it is filtered out entirely, that gap does not stay empty.
What we can’t point to is who isn’t there.
We can’t name the songwriter writing the 2025 equivalent of Eton Rifles, the punk band whose rebellion is economic rather than aesthetic, the voice that could correct Dunford from the inside. We don’t know who these people are because they never got a mic. Nobody planned it that way, but it’s what happens when a profession draws from the same environments, the same cities, the same universities: the same assumptions accumulate quietly over time.
Last September, the Grand Ole Opry celebrated its centenary with a show at the Royal Albert Hall. Luke Combs headlined; Marcus Mumford joined him on stage for a duet of Willie Nelson’s Always On My Mind. Country music grew from the lives of sharecroppers and coal miners. Mumford attended King’s College School Wimbledon, one of England’s oldest independent schools. In 2024, Springsteen, the voice of working-class America, played three nights at Hyde Park, Frank Turner was the support act. Turner attended Eton. Neither Mumford nor Turner is a fraud, but who else was there that could have played?
Working-class life arrives in the culture and gets translated: observed from the outside, filtered through frameworks assembled from headlines rather than experience. and there’s nobody left that can hear it’s wrong.
Jamie Webster and Sam Fender are there, and when they break through, the response is telling. Audiences react the way you react to something true rather than something merely well-made, but two exceptions don’t correct a system, and there are hundreds of other artists locked out, unable to compete against a tie and a crest.
A culture that can’t hear from large parts of itself can’t accurately describe them. So it doesn’t.
Amended 12th June to remove the reference to Garden House School in Kensington.