Chicken Cottage

On the question of exactly who Housing Benefit claimants are (or were), the man who at Oxford with David Cameron introduced him to the Radiohead that featured among Cameron's Desert Island Discs needs to check his privilege. But apart from that, Stewart Lee writes:

The political class live in a west London playground no longer sullied by the unsightly poor, who have been ousted by housing benefit cuts and rent hikes. But where have they gone? And can the right's sudden and conspicuous consumption of Byron burgers be mere coincidence?

Check Byron's progress on Google maps and you'll see the shaped-meat retailer's eastern push follows the line of London's gentrification, and the enforced economic exodus of its underclass, in a microcosmic reflection of national trends towards the disappearance of the dispossessed.

The crushed-beef chain's surge into once neglected areas like Hoxton and Tower Hamlets, while welcomed by venal estate agents looking for evidence that their patch is up and coming, is bad news for indigenous people.

Chelsea types, in their pink trousers and yellow jumpers, are coming, displacing ordinary people, even as they themselves are ousted from the verdant pasture of their own west London homelands by the property power of Russian mafia and wealthy Arab spring escapees.

New Byron branches in Manchester and Liverpool reflect similar spurts of gentrification. The rich are eating at Byron in places where the poor once ate at Chicken Cottage, a name I will appropriate for my rural retreat when I too am finally displaced from the capital.