Lowri Griffiths on the neighbourhood cycle that turns every interesting place into an expensive place
By Lowri Griffiths
I moved to Peckham in 2016 because the rent was manageable and the neighbourhood was interesting. I moved away from Peckham in 2023 because the rent had become unmanageable and the neighbourhood had become interesting to a different kind of person than me, which is a kind way of saying that Peckham is now primarily interesting to people who can afford it, which I cannot, which is how gentrification works and which does not make me feel better about the fact that my contribution to Peckham’s cultural life was, at some level, a contribution to the process that made it too expensive for me to stay.
This is the gentrification paradox that nobody who talks about gentrification likes to acknowledge: the people who make an area interesting are generally not the people who can afford to stay in it once their presence has made it interesting enough to attract the people who can. The interesting people are a stage in the neighbourhood’s development, not its endpoint. The endpoint is a Gail’s bakery and a wine bar that serves natural wine at prices I can calculate but not justify, which describes Peckham Rye as of approximately 2022.
What Peckham Was and Is
Peckham’s creative scene in the mid-2010s was real, not a media construction. Bold Tendencies on the roof of the Frank’s Campari Bar multi-storey car park, which became a destination for contemporary art and architectural installations for several summers before it became too famous and too difficult to operate; Rye Lane, which was one of the most genuinely diverse shopping streets in South London; the community of artists and musicians in the Bussey Building who produced work that reached beyond the neighbourhood while remaining rooted in it. These things existed. They attracted coverage. The coverage attracted visitors. The visitors attracted investment. The investment attracted the kind of businesses that serve visitors rather than residents. The residents who couldn’t afford the new rents left.
Where People Went
The people I know who left Peckham mostly went to Lewisham, Catford, and in some cases further south and east to places that don’t have a Guardian feature yet and are therefore still affordable. Some of them are already describing their new neighbourhoods as interesting. I am telling them this description will age poorly but they are not listening because the rent is low and the buses are good and the restaurant that just opened does really good natural wine at a price that still feels surprising rather than insulting.
The Trust for London displacement data documents the process across London boroughs. The London gentrification mapping shows the geographic pattern. Lowri Griffiths covers London life at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
