Hello, I'm Sarah Hall, Deputy Director at UK in a changing Europe, and I'm delighted today to be joined by Phil Hubbard, who's a professor of urban studies at King's College London.

Phil studied at Birmingham University and has previously worked at a number of urban studies at King's College London. Phil studied at Birmingham University

and has previously worked at a number of institutions including Gloucestershire, Coventry,

Loughborough and most recently Kent. And the connection to Kent is important. He's here today

to discuss his latest book, Borderland, Identity and Belonging at the Edge of England.

Welcome, Phil.

Hi there.

So I've known Phil for a number of years and your research is most typically assumed to be about questions of kind of access to urban space, housing, etc.

So I was interested about what the inspiration for this book,

which is part travel, narrative, part academic analysis, part almost autobiographical, is.

It is something of a digression for me. I think I am known mainly as an urban geographer,

and I'm currently working on issues of housing and gentrification, particularly in London.

This book had quite a complex kind of genesis, I guess. It was partly due to the fact that I'm

from Kent originally, and I moved back to Kent to work at the University of Kent in 2010,

and then I left for Kings in 2017. And as I left Kent and I moved to Pastures New,

I suddenly found myself kind of constantly seeing Kent in the news. And that was kind of really

interesting for me and realized that as after the decisive kind of Brexit vote, you couldn't

really get away from Kent to the news.

And clearly there was kind of, the media was descending on Kent and kind of wanted to kind of

a discourse as a kind of a, not just the borderland, but the front line with Europe.

So it's kind of really interested to see the way that journalists, the media, politicians,

were descending on Kent to kind of articulate the future of what the UK and particularly England was going to be.

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