The World is Full of Single Men

I will try to remember that. What you see everywhere are couples or people trying​ desperately hard to be coupled for the evening or forever. It all depends on the situation. I decided, I was tired of waiting to be coupled before living my life. I was happy to be single without  a care in the world. This means I don't have to indulge in certain self destructive temporary coupling habits involving others - like going to the cinema, call K. Going to an Art exhibition call C or wanting to eat out  call M or going to see a play in Shoreditch with B and listening to A's endless  monologue about sex non stop. A doesn't rile me. I'm a firm believer in personality make ups. A is a Scorpio and Scorpios are sex obsessed so equation solved QED. B is a fish and fishes are ethereal, so we tend to talk plays, music, psychology and astrology in whatever order picks our fancy. K is flat liner Capricorn with the emotion of a goldfish, which suits me fine as I get on very well with unemotional flat liners. D has anger issues and T is only available virtually. My friends tell me that I keep them in in silos or partitions, where it seems the twain shall never meet.

The issue -

The thing is that we are all single unwed in a big city like London full of single people looking for other single people to engage with but often with little success. We seem to be looking for the same thing and different things at the same time. I see the girls, many of them with better looking men, in London like elsewhere on this planet man still reigns supreme, never mind what the feminists and equal opportunists say. In many ways women want real men and want a man to be a man even if they dream of equal pay and equal status in the Board Room. And so you see lots of plain-Jane inner London professional types hanging on desperately to the few men who make themselves emotionally available. In most cases they are more sexually available than emotionally so. As they say a beggar has no choice, so short of becoming a Lesbian or a vestal virgin, you can as a woman be sexually available too, in that way you hope that you can snare your man with your girl trap.

The good thing about London though is its healthy mix of people from around the globe. The inner part reflects that mix more intensely than the outlying more mundane suburban parts. The majority group the white British live mostly in the 3 outer zones while most non-white Brits and expats live within the inner three zones. Minorities of all types live everywhere, but in the recent past the majority of minorities  inhabited the inner areas but have been priced out with the gentrification onslaught. The 3 inner London zones pulse heavily with the young and beautiful and the fabulously wealthy as well as social housing tenants. It is from this melting pot that most inner Londoners go hunting for partners. It is also because of the very nature of who they are that inner Londoners have relationships that are just as transient as the lives they lead.

Nothing comes close to the  inner London male - good looking, liberated from the shackles of the shires or whatever provincial European city they come from, to them the world is an oyster and London is its mother of pearl. Inner London men trade partners as frequently as they trim their hipster facial hair. The plain Jane English girls or pretty continentals running in tow often fall victim to Hoping that they can ensnare them but the inner London male only hopes to play the field for as long as they can before succumbing to a life of 2.1 kids in a grim outer London suburb with good schools or an even gloomier southern English town with even better schools and a duck pond, butchers and lone pub. This life is dreaded by the majority of males but most believe that it is a reality they must succumb to at some point in their lives.

The even more attractive foreigners make up a significant force in inner London. They  share similar characteristics to the British inner London male, primarily because they come to London to make money and to lose themselves to the many fleshly and material opportunities that the inner city has to offer.  Their equally attractive female counterparts are also running away from life in their provincial Polish, Spanish, Italian or Bulgarian communities with high hopes of learning English and of possibly finding a genteel English, German or Scandinavian catch.  Truth is most Englishmen are emotional flatliners and simply not available to engage with foreign women other than for cursory sexual encounters. foreign inner London men are too busy working and fucking in their spare time that marriage is often the last thing on their mind. To cut a long story short they are there but not there. Marriage and its responsibilities will only remind them of the dull mundane lives that await them back home, so there is a tendency for them to overindulge in more non-committal fucking with a cross section of equally exotic non British foreigners than necessary.

The life of minority ethnic inner Londoners can be radically different, depending on one's ethnic or religious background. If you're South Asian or middle eastern your inner London life will resemble that of your countrymen back home and vaguely that of the majority of up country and outer London Brits in their married bliss. If you are a Latino or American minority your life may or may not resemble other inner London foreigners. If you're black Caribbean the likelihood is that you'll by now have been proscribed to any one of the outer London banlieus that now serve as reservation areas for inner London working class evictees. Those Africans and other minorities left in inner London are often settled in their council estates in places like Woolwich, Catford, Walthamstow, Peckham, Stockwell and Wilesden  awaiting the gentrification police's expulsion order to the outer London banlieus when their time in inner London expires. On the whole many of these men remain single for economic or cultural reasons, cultural in the sense that singleness has never been a barrier to procreation or having as many women as one can possibly handle.

In the end, the single inner London male has one distinct advantage - don't judge and you will not be judged. In this milieu of the weird and wonderful anything and everything goes and most inner London men share something in common, they are smart, single and emotionally unavailable and the world is increasingly full of them.

Gentrification and the illusion

I have been following all the jive talk in the media about the pros and cons of gentrification in London, a city where houses are like unicorns - rare and unobtainable for the vast majority of Londoners including those already on the property market and looking to upgrade. I live on the doorsteps of both Clapham and Brixton or what you might call the posh end of suburban Brixton and the arse end of Clapham. Life in these parts have always been one of indifference, i.e. until recently when unhappy house hunters pushed out of prime Clapham and Fulham began hunting for bargains in Brixton with it lines of mostly terraced Victorian houses. Although gentrification is not new to Brixton and Brixton has always had it's own equivalent of gentry, the place has become abuzz with what one might call 'gentrification sickness' or 'gentrifcation blue' Brixton was a fine enough area, a unique place with it's own special identity, until Shoreditichfication kicked in a couple of years ago. Not content with it's fast rising property prices triggered by profiteering and exploitative estate agents bent on milking the area dry of its self-worth, the powers that then decided that Brixton's old and enduring left-field image was no longer attractive and relevant and so Brixton had to be fashioned into something else to make it more attractive to incomers. To put it bluntly Brixton was never Clapham and never pretended to be, it did not have the laid back vibe associated with Clapham with its army of yummy mummies, bankers and privately educated young professionals, neither could you associate Brixton with it's more conservative and wealthier neighbours of Herne Hill and Dulwich but what it had was it's own distinct identity with lots of edge, something close to Notting Hill before it became a bankers trap. Truth is that Brixton with it's edgy and colourful identity is fast disappearing, whether for better or for worse. Incomers keen to assure themselves that they have made the right choice are keen to promote the area's up and coming status as if this great area had only just been discovered yesterday (but perhaps it has by those who wouldn't have thought of living there but are now forced to do so out of the necessity of living close to a tube and getting to work or befuddled by media brainwashing).  Estate agents keen to lure desperate house hunters into securing a purchase have been marketing the place as the new 'Shoreditch' with the hope that those desperate house hunters will fall for the illusion and bite the alternative apple and many have. Properties in run down shabby parts of Clapham North and Stockwell are now being marketed as Brixton Central rather than Stockwell or Clapham North purely on the basis that you can command a higher price through association with prime Brixton rather than the arse end of Clapham and Stockwell. How ironic!  

In the meantime Gentrifiction continues apace. The nice bits, Windrush square looks great and so are the surrounding streets and the wild no-man's-land Coldharbour Lane has been tamed and contained. The area is much nicer but why does it have to take more affluent people moving into an area for Lambeth to even consider tarting up the place or for business to establish themselves here? We're the working classes, black and minority ethnic folk or affluent Brixtonians not deserving of even the most basic shops before 2010? This is a bafflement but the same could be said of Peckham. It is as if the veil has been lifted and the reality of London's housing market means that you can no longer turn your nose up at the humblest of neighbourhood. A Victorian or Edwardian house is the same whether in Chelsea or Catford and in a situation where only the wealthiest (and poorest) can afford to live in Zone 1, you are not left with much of  a choice because those neighbourhoods that were once snubbed by the middle classes are now the most desirable.  

Back to Brixton. Truth is that there have always been many affluent people living in Brixton but those were people who chose to live there because they simply loved the area and their homes without all the nouveau-gentry adornments.   They have even opened a Shoreditch-esque Boxpark style centre near Brixton market to complement Brixton market. All these developments are great and worthy but come at a price. Loss of identity, becoming a gentrified pastiche that people soon forget about because it has become too expensive, less distinct and too bland. In any case there is always the next big up and coming area for estate agents and their media cohorts to coo about such as Streatham currently being targeted as the new Clapham to attract yummy mummy types who can't afford Clapham or Balham but are too scared to live in Brixton, which they might also not be able to afford.

Clapham and its neighbours

It is often said that Clapham is one of those areas of London that you either love or loathe. Clapham has its fair share of haters and lovers and I suspect there are more of the former than the latter. The areas boundaries are not fully defined. There are reasons for that. This was the first area south of the river to undergo intensive gentrification and for a long time served as the gold standard for gentrification particularly for its neighbours. Moreover, North Londoners who dare to venture south of the river do not often go beyond Waterloo and Clapham South, as the rest of South London's tube-less terrain, to this day, remains an utter mystery to most people.

Twenty or thrity years ago places near Clapham were either branded as Clapham or the new Clapham or next Clapham. Such areas included the now smugly gentrified post codes of Battersea (SW11) and Balham (SW12). There was always a loathing admiration for Clapham and a certain inferiority complex in neighbouring areas which persists to this day regardless of the level of gentrification already achieved in those areas. For one, history has a key role to play but so does geography. Geographically Clapham Common and its immediate environs sits proudly at the top of a hill (Balham Hill) with a flat top sometimes referred to in old texts as 'The Clapham Plateau'.

In the old days people who lived in Clapham were considered to live up the hill by those living in the poorer surrounding neighbourhoods. Historically, Clapham was a very wealthy area, an out-of-town village resort for London's upper class. People from that class had migrated there at one point, to get away from the plague in inner London. Clapham's status was however, lost with the coming of the railways and the demolition of many of its fine historical villas and replacement with Victorian terraces and semis.

The area was also transformed into a commuter suburb by the coming of the London Underground, thus cementing it's status as a dormitory town for white collar City workers and civil servants thus giving rise to its most famous term 'Man on the Clapham Omnibus' or ordinary middle class man. Nevertheless the prestige of Clapham's faded historical grandeur still hangs over the area for most Londoners and Brits.

There are still many vestiges of history left in the area, including its forward looking left leaning activism drawn from its famous anti-slavery and anti poverty movement - the Clapham Sect led by William Wilberforce. In addition, the area, particulalry the Old Town still hosts some of the oldest surviving buildings in South London with a number of blue plaques.

It is often said today that Clapham divides opinions and that you either loathe or love the area. Claphamification is a term its once aspirational but now gentrified neighbours use to describe Clapham's encroachment on their identity. Once the by-word for youthful trendiness, coolness and hipness that cachet was first absorbed by Battersea, then Balham and laterly Brixton. The more like Clapham these areas have become the more they have sought to separate and define their identity from Claphamification.

First was Battersea which sought to disentangle itself from being Clapham's poorer industrial neighbour by becoming a Chelsea spillover or 'South Chelsea'. This cachet has stood the test of time as the once very poor Battersea area has been successfully transformed by Wandsworth Council in to a wealthy Class AB populated enclave, albeit at a price. Battersea's waterfront remains a prime victim of an over-ambitious Council's development, with its ghastly mix of prefab luxury high rise apartment blocks, that aesthetically may not stand the test of time but instead, will be seen as a testament to Wandsworth Council's over-development of it's Thames waterfront done in a bid to outdo it's wealthier neighbours. Battersea's strongest points are it's proximity to Chelsea and the very lovely Battersea Park. It's weakness - it's post industrial blight, ugly waterfront and its inhabitants forever looking across the river and wishing they could afford to live in Chelsea or Fulham.

Balham on the other hand has had a slow rise to fame, blessed with beautiful Edwardian gems and quiet streets radiating off Clapham, Tooting and Wandsworth Commons, this area which was once a thoroughly run down working class/Afro-Caribbean neighbourhood untill the late nineties, has slowly but successfully become the alternative to Clapham's raucous lifestyle. Today, Balham completes the Clapham-Wandsworth-Balham triumvirate of what is today known as Nappy-Valley. An area where young well educated white British couples from the provinces go to breed like penguins (i.e. after a spell of debauched-living in places like Clapham) before moving on to live somewhere nearer where they originally came from after selling their Clapham, Balham or Wandsworth homes for a handsome profit. Balham's strongest points are its Edwardian gems and its proximity to Clapham, for which it has benefitted as a gentrified alternative. Its weak points - being in Zone 3 and forever being refered to as cheaper than Clapham.

Brixton is an entirely different kettle of fish. Up till 2010 it was a crime and drug ridden no-go area for respectable middle class Londoners and incomers but was a solid and proud neighbourhood in it's own right with its own left-leaning community-active middle and working classes. Four years on, and every young upstart wants to live near Brixton's once infamous Market. The transformation of Brixton Village, one of its markets, into a street-foodie destination has led to the discovery of Brixton as a hip destination particularly for those priced out of Clapham's banker-ridden streets. The area is now being paraded as an alternative Shoreditch and it's once cheap terraces are now rivalling those of Clapham North in price. Brixton's strongest points include being at one end of the Victoria line, having Brixton Market and Brixton Academy and access to drugs, its weakest points are its reputation for drugs, being on a crime and social unrest faultline and being a strong candidate for a property bubble bust.

Stockwell, beautiful but council estate-blighted Stockwell remains caught inbetween the devil and the deep blue sea. The devil being Vauxhall and the deep blue sea being Clapham. Without a specific postcode of its own, Stockwell's identity remains entwined with that of its neighbours notably Clapham, Brixton and Vauxhall. People who live in its SW4 end can claim to live in either Clapham or Stockwell depending on proximity to Stockwell tube station, those who live nearer to the Brixton end of Stockwell road can now claim to live in cool Brixton, while most of north Stockwell's inhabitants will often hold on to the Vauxhall Zone 1 cachet and that cachet will become all the more important as the transformation of Nine Elms into a super hub for foreign embassies and overseas wealth comes into being. Stockwell's strongest points are the beautiful crescents and squares that lie beyond its central facade of Council estates and the Victoria and Northern line, its weakest points are its Council Estates and being caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Food and the City: Eating London

London is reputed to have the highest concentration of top notch restaurants in the world aside from New York. It also happens that the whole world lives in London or at least gravitates here at some point or the other. In any case the restaurant and eating scene has exploded a million fold over the last decade and a half, with all sorts of culinary houses springing up in the most unlikely of places including pop-up loos and in people's one-bed city flats. It helps that Gemini London, with it's mercurial penchant for constant re-invention, provides a fertile ground for a vibrant and somewhat quirky restaurant culture - a here today gone tomorrow foodie paradise of sorts. Thing is if you're not there today, it could be gone tomorrow.

There are 12 broad categories of London restaurants

Posh
Upmarket
Celebrity chef
Quality independents
Normal - ersatz
Ethnic-hip
Generic-ethnic
Gutter-hip
Gutter-trash
Roadside
Cafes
Dirt-bag outlets

Posh - Regardless of quality - I would lump all the key restaurants of Mayfair, Kensington, Knightsbridge, St James Park, Chelsea and Holland Park - in this category. We are talking about Le Gavroche, The Ivy, The Dorchester, the Wolsley, The Mandarin Oriental etc and other banal posh joints good or bad.

Frequenters - The super-wealthy and rich - notably Russian and Ukrainian Oligarchs and their mistresses, American Bankers, European and Arabian royalty, film stars, formula one drivers, premier league footballers and their partners, wealthy business moguls, senior members of the diplomatic corps, wealthy and established popstars rather than wannabe pop-ettes whose idea of eating posh is the Hackney Murder Mile, Brixton Village or under the Peckham Rye railway arches.

Upmarket - well watered and and good quality middle of the road British nosh, experimental cuisine a-la Heston Blumenthal or specialising in notable retakes of foreign cuisines.These restaurants can be found in historically or genuinely upmarket areas, notably Richmond, Hampstead, Barnes, St Johnswood, Marylebone, Islington/Barnsbury, Little Venice, Highgate, Wimbledon Village, Clapham, Wandsworth and Notting Hill

Frequenters - mainly wealthy Brits and Continentals (mostly bankers, glitteratis and politicals) who either can't afford the posh places or won't be caught dead in them

Celebrity - this includes good or bad restaurants owned by celebrity chefs - the Jamie Olivers, Tom Aikens and Gordon Ramseys of this world. They can be found anywhere but you will find them mostly in the Royal Borough, Chiswick and Fulham and in pretend-upmarket neighbourhoods in Wandsworth (namely Battersea, Balham and Wandsworth to be precise). A few can be found in the hip-trash enclaves of Hackney notably Dalston and Shoreditch.

Frequenters - the status-anxiety ridden South and West London yummy mummies of Wandsworth, Balham, Battersea, Fulham and Chiswick - these women and their spouses and sprogs often take to these celebrity joints in a desperate bid to flaunt their middle class credentials in the face of the local chavs whom they live amongst.

Quality independents - these are good sometimes reputable independent one-off restaurants, usually with a steady stream of professional or artistic clientele - found mainly in traditionally affluent or established gentrified areas - notably Richmond, Barnes, Putney, Clapham, Kew, Dulwich, Islington, Camden, Soho, Marylebone, Chiswick, Notting Hill, Hampstead, Muswell Hill, Highgate, Finchley, Stoke Newington, Blackheath, Greenwich and Crouch End

Frequenters - affluent professionals and local 'gentry'

Normal-ersatz - these are the usual bog-standard chains some good some bad, they are usually too chainy to be considered upmarket anywhere in central London otherwise they would qualify as upmarket if you happened to live between zones 3 and 6 or in the outer London deserts of Croydon and Bromley . Here we are talking about the Zizzis, Stradas, Prezzos, Cafe Rouges and Wagamamas of this world.

Frequenters - beer bellied men and their frumpy suburban wives and kids and ex-urban penguins and seals stuck in relatively affluent but mundane breeding grounds such as Twickenham, Teddington, Kingston, Bromley, Beckenham, Cockfosters, Purley, Wanstead, Southgate or Ealing. What else can you do in these areas except roost!

Ethnic-hip are broad and of varying quality - but they are mostly found in central and East Central London clustering around Soho, Fitzrovia and Covent Garden, Brick Lane, Bethnal Green and specialising in non-standard/rare ethnic fare, e.g. Scandinavian, French, Peruvian, Afghan, Indo-Iranian, Central Asian and Japanese cuisines.

Frequenters - experimental central Londoners notably media, professional and artistic types

General Ethnics - all Italian, Spanish, Lebanese, Greek, Turkish, African, Caribbean, Moroccan restaurants - many of which are similar to the normal ersatz category but are independents

Frequenters - anyone and everyone in a local neighbourhood

Gutter hip - restaurants serving micro-brewed beers in cardboard cups and tin cans in expensive trash-ridden East London hipster enclaves. There are very many and quite a number are pop-ups in Hackney and Peckham. They predominate in up heeled Hoxton, Shoreditch and Dalston, and in down heeled Hackney, Bethnal Green, and somewhat in yet to be fully categorised Brixton Village market and parts of Peckham and Newcross.

Frequenters - East London hipsters (twenty something year olds), student and young professional former Clapham-types who have chosen instead to live in Brixton and Peckham, artsy New Cross Crowd. Lately, Essex day trippers have been swarming to the Shoreditch-Hoxton-Dalston triangle for a legs up and when that happens, it is surely a bad sign.

Gutter-trash - all pretentious street food stands serving micro-burgers and pop-up restaurants found mainly in hipster enclaves of Hackney and Tower Hamlets but creeping steadily into wannabe hipster enclaves such as Brixton Village and Peckham

Frequenters - hungry students, Shoreditch and Spitalsfields' tourists, poor hipsters pretending to be hip

Roadside - any Indian, Chinese, Mexican or Thai restaurant everywhere.

Frequenters - anyone.

Cafes - greasy spoons up and down market and simple food joints everywhere

Frequenters - anyone

Dirt-bag outlets- the Macdonalds, KFC, Burger King, chicken and chips outlets, China town restaurants especially Wong Ke, eat as much as you like buffet dirt spots and Nandos .

Frequenters - people in transit between stations, suburban Londoners visiting central london, out of towners, bargain hunting tourists, council estate and chavy types.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Flight

When K-Baby fled inner city London for the suburbs in the mid-nineties, he was merely indulging in the end reach of a post world war II syndrom. He was amongst the last wave of native Londoners that had embarked on what is now referred to as 'white flight'.

London in the mid nineties was a different Landscape to the vibrant multicultural welt stadt that it is today. K-baby like those of his generation had been fleeing the decay and death of inner London Shoreditch for the safety of the outer suburbs, away from the hordes of inner city immigrants and run down schools to the safe haven of a clean little England suburban outpost with its good schools and 'people like me' atmosphere.

If K-baby had had more foresight at the time, he would have thought twice about leaving his council home in run-down Shoreditch and perhaps stayed put or moved a few blocks down the road to buy an equally run down but affordable cottage in what was to become the epitome of inner city 'organic' living - Stoke Newington. But at the time, no one could have imagined the hipster paradise Shoreditch and Hackney would eventually become.

However,  K-baby - newly armed with an MBA, waves of ambition and a somewhat vague intention of breeding and then colonising the high performing 'Waldegrave Girls' with the fruits of his loins - struck out for the semi woods. Not the Chilterns or the Cotswolds or anywhere in that vein, but to the anodyne and clean suburban Middlesex town of Twickenham.

Twickenham no doubt, has its charms and lies firmly within the clean-lined affluent English parkland of Richmond Upon Thames, but Richmond it ain't. K-Baby's settlement there and eventual fermentation into suburban life, meant that escape would become nigh impossible as the inner city heartbeat began to revive it's pulse.

Today the Kingsland road, Dalston, Hoxton and Stoke Newington areas are the heart beat of hip and trendy Europe. Property prices have more than quadrupled, wealthy bankers and the ultra hip have moved into K-baby's former stomping ground. The very people he had hoped to find refuge among, playing cricket on Twickenham Green or crossing the bridge to Richmond, are the ones who have traded places with him and now sip fair trade lattes and moccas from  hipster mugs  while munching on organic beef carpaccios in Stoke Newington and Notting Hill delis.

For K-baby and many other middle aged singletons now marooned in their suburban flats, the prospect of returning to cosmopolitan city living  has diminished with time and affordability.

It seems if you were not at the party before 2007, chances are you may never be invited except as a day tripper, this is because inner London's astronomically high property prices have firmly ensured that.

By way of an update, K-Baby did finally pluck the courage to flee the excruciating mundane of Twickers for life in the wild bushes of West Africa, where perennially  he will atone for his many sins. 

The short story

I am diverging from writing about London to comment on something more personal - the art of story telling, to be precise the art of short story writing. I am doing this because my blog entries are indeed a form of short story telling which in every sense is an internal construct  of the mind - my mind to be precise.

This isn’t a story but a stream of consciousness muse about short story writing and all that there is to it. I find writing stories a bit difficult at times cos of the need to be creative around them, which can be intense, particularly for a restless soul like me, who loves to do a thousand and one things at a time.

With the short story you are obviously creating something from nothing and that in itself takes inspiration to do. I find short stories most difficult to write, largely because you have to pack a punch into a few pages and drive it through to a definite end. For that reason, I’m not exactly an avid fan of reading short stories as I find them limited in scope and sometimes exasperating. Nevertheless, they can be very rewarding, and can be used to express a view about any given situation.

A short story to a writer is a like portrait painting to an artist (I paint by the way). You are painting life and the paper or word processor is your canvas. Your pen or keyboard is the brush and your finished work whether in book form or published article is your work of art. In that sense, short stories have served as a great vehicle for painting portraits of life, for vignettes of the mind and of the heart and of getting particular views across. I can always reveal my concerns about issues by penning a fable that loosely demonstrates the situation at hand, without directly getting involved – but allowing the characters to act it out independently off my direct control (I like to think that it is). This can usually lead to revealing results, for example, things you’d never expect to be the outcome of an interplay of characters and situations may crop up midway or at the end of the story.

In the end,  your view point about a situation might change as you might just see things from a different perspective or from multiple perspectives depending on the number of characters involved. This is what is satisfying about writing short stories. The unsatisfying bit can be the limited scope offered by one’s canvas. For the short story writer does not have the luxury of bright and bold brush strokes that enables the novelist paint life in as many layers of colour as they can afford.

As a writer I try to be as objectives as possible, but I understand that objectivity is relative and after all it is your story, conjured up from the relative depths and subjectivity of your mind or subconscious into reality. It is the sum total of our thoughts on a given theme/subject matter and at the end of the day, it is an expression of your mind.

The Illusion of Gentrification

The train arrives at last and I get to leave this godawful platform. The train is packed with people with a strong sense of purpose. With a strong sense of going somewhere fast. The Victoria line heads ultimately to Brixton if you’re heading south and to Walthamstow if you’re heading north.

I am headed for Brixton too, not for a good time but because I live there, in a more practical and sensible way and for more practical, sensible reasons. Not in the way that Chloe, Bert, Pippa and Ollie do. I say I live in Brixton or at least I used to till it all changed for the better of for worse depending on whose opinion you are seeking.

Brixton, that veritable hotbed of ethnic dissent and crime, once loathed by everyone except its natives and now neutered and loved-up by the seeds of gentrification and trendification planted in the last five years. Everyone 16-30 heads down there these days, drawn by a tsunami of fickle trendiness, that has sucked up the shores of Clapham, Balham and Battersea – once hotbeds of the same fickle-minded folk – and spat its debris of youth on the shores of Brixton. The place is crawling with them. They have a reason for being here.

Chloe and Bert and the married couple Pippa and Ollie are typical examples of people who come to London from the shires, who can’t afford to live in London but desperately want to live in London but can’t afford to live in Zone One and so, desperately want to live in Zone Two and so came to Brixton, which they sort of can afford as they cannot afford anywhere else in the area outside of Streatham and Camberwell.

Chloe (ex Chichester) and Bert (ex Aylesbury) live in a trendy flat off Effra Lane, in a house that was once a half way house for drug addicts, only thing is Chloe and Bert do not know that the house was once a half way house. It has been tarted up to cater for them because all Chloe and Bert and their next door neighbours Pippa (ex Lincoln) and Ollie (ex Hastings) and their two kids (both born in Edgeware), care about is that its is a stone throw away from their beloved Hootenany pub and a bus ride away from Mama Lan and Moo Burgers at their beloved Brixton Market and their heaving high street, which to most people including Brixton natives, is there for more practical purposes i.e. as a walk-through to get to where you’re going on the quick march. It is also irrelevant to Chloe and Bert and Pippa and Ollie that this is a scene repeated almost everywhere in Zones 1 and 2 in different variations.

One of the last of the SW postcodes save Streatham and parts of Tooting to be gentrified, Brixton, was once a no-go area for most of the middle classes save for the hard-of-mind and free of spirit. However, its cheap but solid terraces and council estates, have become a late hot spot in the game of hot spotting. The game which involves Estate Agents with the collusion of the media turning a once vilified crime and grit neighbourhood into a desirable one. This usually happens for two reasons – sky-high property prices and housing shortages occurring elsewhere, particularly in more desirable areas and the need for estate agents to make profits and the media to shape opinion.

The media and the Estate Agent who convinced the Chloes and Berts and Pippas and Ollies of this world to move to Brixton, convinced them on the basis that the once no-go ethnocentric Brixton market and the perilous Coldharbour Lane had gentrified to the point that it had now become a ‘so, so cool’ hotspot that everyone wants to live there, as if no one had ever lived there or thought of moving there before. Chloe and Bert were hooked on the idea and so were Pippa and Ollie. For one thing, they have no choice. They cannot afford renting or buying elsewhere in this part of Zone 2. An equivalent one-up, one-down property in Clapham or Balham next door is completely unaffordable unless you have in excess of a million to blow, neither are the big houses of Herne Hill and Dulwich or the expensive Kensingston-like squares and terraces behind the council estates of Stockwell which sell for millions of pounds. There are million pound homes at the end of Brixton and Streatham Hill but to be honest those homes are marketed as being part of Tooting Bec, despite having what is essentially a Brixton SW2 postcode. The reason being that in spite of the hype, you do not part with a million pounds to live in a bog standard London neighbourhood unless you are mad.

Streatham which is cheaper, is still being snubbed for being Streatham but if you scratch beneath the surface you will find exactly the same processes at work there as in Brixton. The once vilified Streatham High Street and Streatham Hill are now the darlings of gentri-pushers such as Foxtons who have recently opened shop in Brixton and Streatham after years of ignoring both areas.

Equally, yummy mummies unable to afford Clapham or Balham but who still find Brixton a tad distasteful for their postcode palates convince themselves that they are getting more for their money in Streatham which has grander homes in remote cut-off areas. Truth is that they could have got more for their money anyway without trying to convince themselves.

Now as the steady stream of property inflation refugees arrive to colonize Brixton’s terraces, others have caught on as the smell of young new money wafts through the streets accompanied by buggies and scooters in tow. So they have plunked several Sainsbury’s Locals and Tesco Metros up the hill for the newly arrived as if hitherto, only cattle lived up the hill and not humans who deserve proper shops. They are opening a big Sainsbury’s at the Water Lane junction, again for the newly arrived as if hitherto, the native animals who lived up there deserved nothing better than to trek to the shabby Tesco on Acre Lane or Sainsbury’s in Clapham, a mile away.

Even the shabby Tesco on Acre Lane has notched up a gear to welcome the new arrivals – the humans who matter, and so has the once-shabby M&S on Brixton High Road and the newly plunked TK Maxx and H&M – both of which once sold cheap tat.

Lets take it frankly – central Brixton is traffic choked, smog filled and teeming with petty crime, the market is passable but is gradually being taken over by over-hyped micro start up restaurants and quickly assembled glossy bars. Soon the over-hyped start-ups will either moprh into expensive places for the incomers or eventually close down because the attractive cheap rents and rates will soon be a thing of the past and the chains will move in.

Already, the native long-term residents are beginning to pay the price as stall rates are hiked to get them out, house rents are hiked to get them out, house prices (already expensive) are hiked so that no one can move locally and have to leave the area so that more economically desirable elements can move in.

The local council has also been actively selling off its huge swath of social housing, particularly the many terraces and semi detached homes, it once doled out to South London’s disadvantaged. Roads are hastily tarred and tarted up and police patrols increased. Even the once notorious Coldharbour Lane has been cleared of its drugged and drunken debris to make way for incomers. Old mansion blocks and hastily constructed luxury apartments are quickly replacing long-boarded up shells as gentrification intensifies apace. The difference between all of this and what has happened in area such as Clapham, Balham and Battersea is pace. These areas became gentrified sporadically over a long period of time, in Brixton this has all happened within a few years – the last three years to be precise.

What no one dares to admit and especially the new arrivals, is that they are in Brixton for one reason, not out of choice but out of lack of choice in one crucial and all determining respect – house price inflation. This means that you have to go where your money takes you even if it means following an illusion.

It is important to note that none of the crap being sold or rented to incomers in Brixton and elsewhere is really worth the price in real terms and that inflation is the oil in the wheel that drives the market, therefore Brixton, like Peckham and Hackney and everywhere else in gritland can suddenly be made to appear more attractive to the cash-strapped middle class buyer through the illusion of gentrification.