Wembley Speaks

Wembley Speaks is a new type of grassroots sociology. Based entirely on postings on Nextdoor, the hyper-local community app, over the course of one calendar year, the book offers a twenty-first-century equivalent of Henry Mathew’s groundbreaking study, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). For the first time in print, the reader is able to gain a fascinating insight into what matters to people, what triggers their attitudes and emotions, how they engage with each other, how they support and challenge each other, how they use language, what they find funny and even how they think. The community under observation - Wembley, in north-west London - happens to house England’s national football stadium, but is also a very typical suburb, ethnically diverse, with stresses and strengths that this book fully reveals.