If you want to read Dan Hancox’s Inner City Pressure, it’s best to open Youtube and cue up a track or two of grime, the brutalist, neon-hued music that is the book’s central subject. Skip past the major hits, like “Shutdown” by reigning superstar Skepta or “I Luv U,” the breakout from genre-defining MC Dizzee Rascal. Head instead towards the live end of the spectrum — Wiley, the music’s sonic godfather, with Dizzee Rascal and Dj Slimzee on a set recorded for the Sidewinder rave, or teenage wunderkinds Ruff Sqwad spitting live on Rinse FM, a labor-of-love pirate station with a constantly shifting address. You’ll hear a remarkably complex sound; a jaw-dropping mixture of buzzing, squelching, synthesizers, and frantic, slang-encrusted rhymes, with nimble vocalists rapping just this side of comprehensibility.

Hancox argues that in order to understand grime, you have to understand London, the city that birthed it. More specifically, it’s necessary to understand the working-class “informal city,” built around the high-rise tower blocks of council estates and concentrated in eastern boroughs like Hackney, Tower Hamlets, and Newham. Over the last two decades, many of these areas have been the subject of a profound transformation from above.

The story of grime — born from a dense working-class community, nurtured by a grey-market economy of raves, pirate radio stations, and under-the-table vinyl sales — tracks tightly with that transformation, both enabled and undercut by the remaking of its urban environment.