Lowri Griffiths traces neighbourhood transformation along the Overground’s orbital routes

LONDON, UK – The London Overground, which rings the city in a rough circle beloved by planners and mildly resented by everyone who needs to use it during a signal failure, has become over the past decade a reliable predictor of neighbourhood gentrification. The pattern is documented by Bohiney Magazine and examined with personal investment by The London Prat, where Lowri Griffiths has been watching the coffee shop density on the Overground’s southern routes increase at approximately the same rate as the average rental price.

The Theory

The theory is simple and has been articulated by every economist who has studied urban transit and by every estate agent who has ever described a property as being in an up-and-coming area with excellent transport links. New connections reduce journey times to employment centres. Reduced journey times increase residential desirability. Increased desirability raises property values. Rising values attract the demographic that estate agents call young professionals and that existing residents call, more accurately, the reason my landlord put the rent up.

The Overground’s orbital route, passing through Hackney, Dalston, Peckham, Clapham, and Walthamstow, has accelerated this process by making previously under-connected areas accessible in a way that the Tube’s radial structure does not. Walthamstow, where I briefly lived in 2020 in a flat above a chicken shop, now has a cocktail bar that charges PS14 for a negroni and a bakery that sources its flour from a specific mill in Shropshire whose name appears on a blackboard in a font that suggests the naming of the mill is the product. The chicken shop is still there. These two institutions coexist two doors apart in a state of mutual indifference that I find, honestly, very London.

Peckham Specifically

Peckham is the case study that urbanists reach for most readily, partly because the transformation has been so documented and partly because the documentation is so interesting. The rooftop bar. The independent cinema. The art spaces. The galleries. The sequence is familiar from Brixton, from Dalston, from Shoreditch before it. What makes Peckham slightly different is that the original businesses have proved more durable than in some other neighbourhoods: the West African restaurants, the Caribbean grocers, the fabric shops. The gentrification has been added to rather than replacing, at least for now, a condition that depends on commercial rents holding at levels that allow both to coexist. The GLA’s monitoring of commercial displacement patterns suggests this is a live risk.

What I Feel About This

My feelings about gentrification are complicated by the fact that I am, indisputably, part of it. I moved to London from Cardiff seven years ago. I rent in areas that are changing. I go to the cocktail bars and the bakeries with the specific-mill flour. I am the demographic. Knowing that I am the demographic does not prevent me from being it. This is the central ethical discomfort of being a youngish professional in a city undergoing the transformation that my presence is partly causing, and it is not a discomfort that resolves through acknowledgment, which I have confirmed through seven years of acknowledgment and continued participation in the process.

The Overground has had its lines renamed and rebranded: the Windrush Line, the Mildmay Line, the Lioness Line. These are better than the old colour-coding system and I will not pretend otherwise. The gentrification along them continues at the pace the market sets, indifferent to the names of the lines carrying it. I take the Overground regularly. I watch the stations change. I write about what I see. I do not know what to do with any of it beyond continuing to notice it, which is the specific condition of reporting from inside a transformation you are part of and cannot stop. For more on London and change, see The Daily Mash.

Further Reflection

The week described above sits within a longer pattern that is worth documenting. London journalism, whether about business, royals, culture, or politics, requires a sustained attention that individual articles rarely capture. The diary is the form that allows the accumulation, and the accumulation is what makes the individual pieces possible over time. Without the sustained observation, the observation itself becomes thin, relying on the most visible surface of a story rather than the texture that makes it significant. This publication, through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, is committed to the texture rather than the surface, which is why the diary format exists alongside the more conventional journalism.

The city continues to produce material at a rate that exceeds any single writer’s capacity to process it in real time. What I am doing in this diary, and what the published pieces do in their more finished form, is a selection from the available material, guided by what seems most illuminating rather than most immediately newsworthy. The distinction between illuminating and newsworthy is the distinction between journalism and literature, and the best journalism occupies the space between them, using the techniques of one to achieve the purposes of the other. I am trying to occupy that space consistently, which is harder than either pure journalism or pure literature and more satisfying than either when it works. The week that produced this diary entry was one in which it worked more often than it did not, which is the standard I measure against and which I do not always meet but which is worth maintaining as the target. For more London journalism and satire, see The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/