Why the typical urban radical isn’t who you think — and why it matters
When we picture a modern extremist, our mental image is often shaped by a familiar story. The “left-behind” white working-class voter from a deindustrialised town. The forgotten resident of a former mill city. Someone whose anger about immigration and identity has been kindled by economic decline and stoked by populist politicians like Nigel Farage.
That picture isn’t wrong. But it is incomplete. And my new research, just published in Political Geography (open access), suggests that contemporary extremism in Britain has another face we’ve been slow to recognise.
That face is younger. It’s more educated. It has a job. And it lives in London.
The bourgeois radical
In a survey of 2,377 UK respondents, I tracked the pathways that lead people from generalised political frustration to actually justifying political violence. What emerged was striking. London’s high-grievance, pro-violence cohort wasn’t drawn from the city’s most disadvantaged. They were younger and slightly better educated than the national average. They were significantly more likely to be in employment. They look, on paper, like the people the urban economy is supposed to serve.
So why are they angry?
The answer lies in the gap between what the global city promises and what it actually delivers. London sells itself as the engine room of opportunity — the place where graduates go to find their futures. But the futures on offer are increasingly fragile. Wages are eroded by rents that consume half a pay cheque. Home ownership is a distant rumour. Public services creak under austerity while, a few streets away, ultra-luxury developments rise into the skyline. This is the world of “Generation Rent” — credentialed, employed, and yet permanently locked out of the security their parents took for granted.
The American writer Barbara Ehrenreich once called this “the fear of falling” — the dread of the supposedly comfortable middle classes that their position is slipping away. London magnifies that fear into something fiercer. And in the global city, that fear curdles into a particular kind of politics.
How grievance becomes radicalism
My research traces a three-step pathway. It starts with what I call nativist grievance — not abstract racism, but a territorial anxiety about who belongs in your neighbourhood as it changes around you. Importantly, this isn’t a uniquely “white” phenomenon. The data show the pathway operates with equal intensity across religious-majority and religious-minority lines. Long-settled communities of any background can experience newer arrivals as a threat to the place they call home.
This grievance then translates into a powerful sense of relative deprivation — the visceral feeling that “people like me” are being unfairly left behind. And here is the crucial finding: this translation is dramatically stronger in London than elsewhere in the UK, even after controlling for employment and minority religious status. The city itself does something to grievance. The constant, unavoidable visibility of extreme wealth alongside profound deprivation acts as a daily psychological irritant. The Grenfell Tower fire — seventy-two deaths in social housing surrounded by some of Britain’s most expensive postcodes — wasn’t an anomaly. It was an X-ray of London’s spatial reality.
Finally, this materially-grounded sense of being deprived becomes the strongest predictor of whether someone justifies political violence. Generalised distrust of politicians, by contrast, has no significant effect on violent ideation. It’s the personal, place-based feeling of being shortchanged — not abstract political alienation — that opens the door to extremism.
Two different geographies of discontent
What makes this picture particularly striking is how it differs from another story I’ve been telling. In a paper published earlier this year in National Identities (open access), I looked at attitudes toward diversity among the UK’s white majority across five major cities. There, I found that local urban deprivation didn’t predict who became an “Anxious Nationalist” — that identity was being forged at the national level, in the heat of political rhetoric and media narratives. The Farages of British politics were doing that work.
Place, in the National Identities paper, mostly served as a volume control. It amplified how loudly people expressed views they’d already absorbed from the national conversation.
The Political Geography paper tells a different story. In London, ‘place’ isn’t just turning up the volume. It’s writing the song.
Why the difference? Because we’re looking at different phenomena. The National Identities work captured the broad anti-diversity backlash among the white majority — a constituency mobilised by political entrepreneurs trading on a sense of national decline. That’s a politics where Reform UK matters enormously and the precise local context matters rather less.
The new paper captures something narrower and sharper: the specific radicalism that grows in the soil of a global city. Here, place is doing real work. The financialisation of housing, the violence of racialised gentrification, the proximity of obscene wealth to acute precarity — these aren’t backdrops to politics. They are the politics. They actively manufacture the grievance.
What this means
Put together, the two papers suggest Britain is dealing with at least two different geographies of discontent — and they require different responses.
The populist authoritarian wave that benefits Reform UK draws much of its energy from places where political entrepreneurs have built a powerful story of national decline and immigrant blame. That’s a story policy alone won’t unwrite. It needs a political counter-narrative.
But the urban radicalism I describe in the new paper isn’t really about national politics. It’s produced by the structural conditions of cities themselves — the housing market, the labour market, the visible inequality. Counter-extremism strategies that assume the typical radical is “left behind” will miss this cohort entirely. You can’t deradicalise a generation of educated renters by promising them industrial revival. You have to give them somewhere they can afford to live.
If the global city is going to keep manufacturing its own extremists, the answer can’t only be policing the symptoms. It has to be reshaping the conditions. Spatial justice — affordable housing, secure work, decent public services — isn’t only an economic agenda. It’s a security one.
The places we build shape the politics we get.