Changing Brixton: gentrification, gated communities, new opportunities and increasing disquiet

There’s no denying that the issue of gentrification in Brixton is one that brings about some very polarised opinions.

Debate has been raging on Brixton’s most popular forum, urban75, for years about the issue, and one of the threads about the Brixton Square development has brought forth some of the most spirited exchanges.

As well as the usual argy-bargy, there’s some really interesting points being raised, and I thought this spirited essay by long term resident Jack Intrepid (reproduced below) was particularly worthy of a wider readership.

[Before and after: Cooltan 1994, Brixton Square 2013] 

Jack Intrepid: “I don’t like gated communities. Having a great big locked gate between your residential community, and the larger community within which you live is not the same as having a front gate between your street and the front door.

It’s more like the gate at the end of the drive. It keeps outsiders out, and gives the insiders (who are often better off than the people who live outside the gates) a sense of separation. And it preserves that sense of separation, making those who venture out look and often behave like sightseers.

One of the most important things about gated communities is that they are often carved out of territory or open space that was previously considered “ours” by the local pre-existing community.

I’ve seen this in the States, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable to find it happening in my local area.

[Locked gates, Brixton Square, June 2013]

Here in Brixton, both the Brixton Square development and Clifton Mansions (whose gate is now firmly locked at all times) were previously places occupied and utilised by musicians, artists, squatters, idealists, the lost and the low, and a whole bunch of people who made some kind of life for themselves here and decided to stay in the area once they could afford to pay rent.

A lot of those people are now being priced out of Brixton by the recent changes.

[Anti-evictions protest, Windrush Square, July 2013]

Brixton is changing. But Brixton has always changed. Imagine the reaction when the Jews moved in, and then the Theatre luvvies with the chorus girls and the queers, and then the disquiet when the West Indians started buying up properties, and then when the punks and anarchists and squatters arrived.

Brixton has always been a place of changing populations and fortunes. It’s a wonder this current round of gentrification hasn’t happened a lot sooner. Our reputation as “a bit dodgy” has probably delayed it.

I have a lot of misgivings about these changes, not least the rent hikes, which have led to businesses and people being priced out of the middle of Brixton Town.

And I really have to grit my teeth sometimes when I’m going about my business in Brixton these days. I was thinking today how the high street is almost more like old Brixton now, than some parts of the Market are, because despite the chain shops, I still see Brixton people not being outnumbered by the new tribes.

I tend to stick to the less Bo-Bo parts of Brixton these days for coffee and chats, and trying to get breakfast at the weekend is a fucking chore because of the enormous rambling crowds of visitors ambling about and queuing to get a seat.

[Granville Arcade – now Brixton Village – April, 2001]

I like a lot of the changes. I like having more choices about where to eat and what to eat, gifts and cards to buy for birthdays. I like having a couple of art galleries and plenty of places to buy vintage clobber, even if the prices seem pretty steep.

I like having more cafes and bars, more reasons and places to spend time in public spaces. And I like the way these changes have made it possible – and more likely – for Brixton folk pay more attention to each other, stop and chat and visit in the street with each other.

[Rushcroft Road evictions, July 2013]

But I am worried that Brixton will become a pasteurised homogenised Sunday Supplement version of itself, all polite and shiny and no-where to buy Sari fabric or stacks of takeaway boxes or bunches of callalloo or pigs trotters or tired short-life veg at knock down money for stew for a week.

I’m prepared to be wrong. I hope – really really hope – that we’re not going to see an unbridgable schism open up between us old Brixton people and the new comers; or worse, a Brixton that has no real living relationship to what it’s always been, an ersatz theme-park version of what people remember it as being.

I’ve been in Brixton for about thirty years, first because friends and lovers all lived here, then because I rented and then bought property here.

[Champagne & Fromage, Brixton Village, October 2013]

Until this year, I have always considered myself a bit of an incomer, an upstart. But suddenly people are saying to me “Ah, you must have seen a lot of changes over the years…!” Yes, I have, and most of them have been in the last three years.

I’m not saying that you, the individual person who is you, you who have recently discovered Brixton for yourself, are someone who is ignorant or problematic.

Individually, most of the newcomers I’ve met (those who’ve not shied away or snubbed us lowly locals…. seriously it has happened…) are nice, thoughtful, interesting people. But it’s as if a large group, a whole tribe of people has been airdropped in all at once.

[Granville Arcade, Feb 2003]

One of my concerns is something that I think can’t be helped: you have arrived in Brixton knowing nothing much about what it was like before.

You don’t know which shops are family run, or have changed hands, or are brand new.

You don’t know about the specific beggars and buskers (wither The Philosopher, by the way?), that strange influx of Roma in long colourful skirts who came and went over a couple of years, the Russian lady with the outlandish make-up and the towering black nylon hair, the local kids who were kicked down the stairs by the cops, the one who refused to take sides in a heated dangerous situation, went home to his mum, and thus, possibly, averted a riot, the fact that Patrick insisted that any restaurant run on his property must be vegetarian, that the Courtesan bar used to be run by an idiot who named it BangBang the weekend after a double shooting, that the tree in Windrush Square used to have fairy lights all over it, and is now protected by law, that the Drinking School that used to hang out there is all gone entirely, that the land that was ripped up to lay Windrush Square was filled with interesting plants, some dating back to the banks of the Effra, that there is a Kenneth Martin kinetic sculpture fountain in the garden of Lambeth College, which is about to be ripped down and the land sold to yet more developers, that the old oak on Josephine Avenue apparently shaded the canoodlings of Sir Walter and Queen Bess, that there used to be a grand old squat on Porden Road that is now a car park, that the old clock in Brockwell Park used to work tick tock, doesn’t now, and is being refurbished by local subscription, that the little toy Tudor houses outside the secret garden, which have recently been fixed and painted, were part of a whole village that is now somewhere in Australia, that the Tesco by the prison (did you even know you had a local prison?) used to be a great little rock and roll venue… and so on and so on and so on.

This is not to say that I am precious about all this: all knowledge passes into history, and nothing can grow without change.

But anyone who is new to an area does not know, and cannot know, what that area was like before they popped up out of the ground. When this is just a few people, a few families, well they have the chance to hear and learn and join in and find out and bring their own stuff, and on we go.

Right now, what it’s like now, it’s like we’re being colonised.

[Coldharbour Lane, Sept 2003]

So many people all arriving at once, and all bringing with them the kind of culture that has deliberately and strongly stayed away from Brixton in the past, derided Brixton, dismissed and shunned Brixton as a place of danger and poverty and strangeness.

For many of us, one of the reasons we ended up in Brixton was exactly because we found ourselves as individuals, as the people that we are, shunned and ignored by those people who derided Brixton.

We came here, some of us, to get away from that kind of snidey judgement: outsiders, misfits, rebels, we all ended up here because here we felt comfortable.

So now we find that the new people, the incomers, are not just one or two pioneering curious interesting people, or families, but droves and packs of young white apparently affluent crowds who drift through on a weekend, getting in the way of people who are doing their weekly shop, and making ridiculous comments about how weird or lovely or quaint (yes, really) it is to have a real-life butcher opposite the vintage store – as if the butcher is the pop-up novelty – and then going home to wherever they’ve come from, like tourists returning from a week’s holiday in Senegal claiming that they really got a sense of the local commuuuunity, such friendly people except for the strange angry ones, but who can blame them when they struggle so with the poverty and crime, bless ’em.

Or they (you) are coming here because they’re finding that Brixton is borderline affordable, so they’re buying up blocks of property, that were sold outside of the community, like the Brits who arrived like locusts in the South of Spain in the eighties.

We, many of us, feel alarmed and disturbed by this. We feel sidelined. We feel as if we have been marketed as one of the charming assets of the locality.

This will pass. We are in flux at the moment. It will settle down. Not for a while yet, judging by how many many developments are still being planned.

[Tribute to Cooltan Arts, formerly on the site of Brixton Square]

But while our squatted art centre, our college, our social housing are all being taken away from us, from people who have lived here decades – generations, even – and tarted up to be sold to incomers, well, we are kind of edgy and mistrustful, not least because no one asked us about any of this.

It has been done to us, to Brixton. We’ve lost a lot, and we’re not able yet to see what has been gained.

[Brixton Square artist’s render]

Brixton Square: I’m sure it will be a lovely place to live, and I’m glad that you and yours have been able to get a toehold on the property ladder. I’m glad that Barratts have been decent and helpful, and I’m very glad they’ve bothered to plant trees.

But every time I go past, I remember the CoolTan and the fun I had there, the things I learned there, the people I met there, and how sad it is that we no longer have the place itself; but more than that, I am sad that these days, we no longer have any option for such a place to ever exist again in Brixton.

I am trying hard not to be one of those grumpy old git oldtimers who never allow newcomers to become oldtimers. It’s hard, though, when what I encounter in newcomers is a kind of worried confusion that seems to keep them always slightly on the back foot, or worse, barging arrogance.

So, yeah. In conclusion, I’m ambivalent about it all.”

Let’s hear your opinions!

Please post up your responses in the comment box below, or feel free to get stuck into the lively debate on urban75.

More:

Barratt Homes’ ‘Brixton Square’ on Coldharbour Lane debate (2,000+ posts)

Brixton forum on urban75