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.
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