I Could Be So Good For You

I Could Be So Good For You is a unique portrait of north London's working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, and how it lived, struggled, survived and sometimes thrived.

I Could Be So Good For You tackles head-on the pernicious and implicitly racist fiction that London, most especially north London, has no "real" working class in comparison to a more "authentic" working class in a place called "the North".

In doing so it offers a history and a portrait of north London's working class from the 1950s to the 21st century, based on a wide and original range of sources including personal memoirs, autobiographies, collected oral histories and new interviews conducted by the author. The result is an important social history and a rich panorama of working-class life — its struggles, work, celebrations, events, triumphs, tragedies and the occasional nice little earner. 

For good or ill, from the start of post-war affluence in the 1950s to the economic crash of 2008, north London's working class had a life experience like almost no other part of the British working class, one not just of poverty, racism and exploitation, but also of bold new housing schemes in the heart of the city, of great opportunity and diversity and enjoyment. Its about time to tell that story."Fantastic - a much-needed history of a class claimed regularly not to exist, and a compendious, endlessly quotable book of facts, anecdotes and tales of the 'working class bohemia' that existed, and crucially still exists, and changes and grows and thrives, in the lands south of Watford, east of Staines, north of the Thames and west of the Lea'" - Owen Hatherley, author of Red Metropolis

"This is a Dickens for a postwar North London... an intimate letter to the North London working class, written out of a tough love, completely shorn of sentimentality. This is an important book. I know of no other quite like it. I wish I had written it." - John Marriott, Kellogg College, University of Oxford

"It's great to see that ordinary London working class voices, not normally heard, are well represented in this cracking social history." - Chip Hamer, author of A Class Act: Poems 2000-2015

"A vivid and compelling account of North London society from the 1950s to the present... This is grass-roots local history at its best." - John Davis, author of Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher

"A humane and energetic defence of London against the racists and those who would try to obliterate its working classes, past and present." - Aditya ChakraborttyJohn Medhurst was born and raised in Camden, London, and studied History and Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. He works for one of the UK's largest trade unions and is an Executive Director of the Labour Research Department. He is the author of That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76 (Zero, 2014); No Less Than Mystic: A History of the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left (Repeater, 2017); and Sub Culture: The Many Lives of the Submarine (Reaktion, 2022).