I was born in Camberwell in the London borough of Lambeth, high up on the 8th floor of the Ruskin wing of Kings College Hospital. Upon being lowered to earth I was taken across the nearby border to a house in the borough of Southwark. Later I was to work several short stints at that hospital, labelling samples, ferrying intravenous fluids up and down the Escher-like backstairs of that Victorian structure. In my mid-teens I spent a week clearing out and cataloguing old medical records from a dusty hovel of a room in the basement, my arms rash red from the ancient detritus and mites left undisturbed for decades. Turned out that dank oubliette was paradigmatic of the NHS’s attitude to what we now call data integrity. Years later I trespassed upon a quasi-ruin of a hospital in the process of being demolished in West London to discover wicker baskets full of records secreted in long forgotten places. Somewhere along the line I developed a healthy dislike for hospital environments – as many people do – and have been thankful for remaining largely free of their mixture of bureaucracy and disfunction, interspersed with what devotees of the art call “Healthcare”.
I attended schools in Southwark and the neighbouring borough of Lewisham. These were my three psychogeographical Graces, the tripartite alma mater of my formative years. I would not live or work outside of their borders until I was 22 years old. This latter fact would count against me as the tide of “anywheres” swept over the Capital during the 2000s. People who had come into the city for work or study would look disparagingly upon someone born here and who chose to stay, as many of my school and university friends had not. But If London was such a great place to be, full of opportunity and “buzz” then how could they begrudge me for having been here all along? This attitude prevailed most strongly amongst the home-counties pavenus, those small town high achievers who took to the city as if they had won a special prize, bringing with them their market town kitsch and insularity. These people were the principle beneficiaries – though not the architects – of successive waves of gentrification which claimed once affordable working class areas of the city, from Dalston and Stratford, to Brixton and Clapham.
One of the most visible consequences of this interior migration has been the replacement of pleasingly down-to-earth and integrated communities – each with their own character - with a network of twee BoBo enclaves, all extolling a variation on the same monoculture of vacuous coffee house chic, faux street food and boutique urban living. Oh! insipid parochial bumpkination, oh Bermondsey and Borough Market, your stalls once laden with affordable produce now overflow with cupcakes and artisan vegan scotch eggs! Oh Electric avenue! whose pioneering illuminations now light the way to “Brixton Village”; the countryside as a military Green Zone, inside the city walls, evicting the traders and welcoming well healed beardy craft brewers and premium Ramen bars.
I attended the opening of Brixton Brewery’s expanded production facility in late 2018. The only non-white faces were in the steel drum band. Pints of Pale Ale held by men in gilets with kid skin gloves. Brixton’s long and chequered history distilled (or fermented if you like) into easily marketable brand names; Coldharbour, Atlantic, Electric; streets once rocked by the riotous voices of the unheard are now as unaffordable and neutered as any of London’s most fashionable boroughs. The average monthly rent for a single room is over £1000, and the rent inflation has driven out many of the traders and small business owners that used to line those streets whose names the brewery has appropriated. It’s not an isolated phenomenon. Across the capital the same process of gentrification has taken place, turning once characterful districts into expressions of the same shallow white middle-class vision of urban life. It’s not that the black and brown faces have disappeared, far from it in fact, but what we now have is a stage-managed version of a multi-ethnic city where expressions of diversity and difference are only acceptable as a live-your-best-life narcissistic consumer product (or career path) for the white middle-classes, many of whom have come to the city late and approach its history and varied communities like a continental breakfast buffet, rather than a genuinely integrated form-of-life. Liberal Progressivism sits happily amid all of this, since the activism it promotes is skin deep and its administrators are made up predominantly of the same laptop class who have an interest in maintaining the status-quo.
One especially acute example of this I experienced last year was in Walthamstow, another once affordable edgeland now being given the hipster craft-beer Bobo urban cleansing treatment. On the long weekend of the late Queen’s Platinum jubilee a friend and I visited the craft beer breweries and their associated taprooms which now sit on the East side of the Maynard and Lockwood reservoirs, forming what is colloquially known as the Blackhorse Beer Mile. Nothing unusual or distinct was seen at first, just the usual mix of “high-class bar snacks” and highly hopped brews in converted railway arches and industrial units. Only later in the evening did we notice the bass that was rocking Exale brewery’s “favela chic” taproom was emanating from a huge dub sound system set up around the corner, outside a local Caribbean eatery and community centre. In a flash of 20 yards we went from white middle-class progressive monoculture of craft beer, gender neutral toilets, and indifferent clientele to an all black street party of goat curry, Dancehall and Red Stripe. We lingered on the fringes before a woman came across and invited us to join in. Clearly she found the unofficial segregation taking place as uncomfortable as we did. So, we stayed for a couple of beers and some bone shaking bass.
Later I asked a young woman working behind the bar of the Exhale brewery what she thought of the spontaneous division. She hadn’t thought about it at all, not noticed. She was of student age, perhaps attending some London college or university, which no-doubt makes a big deal of progressive politics and diversity, and yet she experienced no feeling of being out-of-joint at such blatant racial divisions. Was this perhaps because such divisions were common in whatever small Shires town she was from, or perhaps she just spontaneously preferred white urban monoculture? Whatever the truth, I had never seen the shallowness of modern London’s so-called multi-culturalism so clearly displayed.
In Lewisham, my secondary school – Forest Hill School for boys – was a hugely diverse place and had a high proportion of kids of Afro-Caribbean heritage. This resulted in a sort-of pigeon of Jamaican and London slang becoming the lingua franca of the playground. This way of talking is so common now that it’s become almost synonymous with London youth culture as a whole. But in the early 90s it was fairly new and quite scandalous for white working-class parents whose sons would come home talking like a cockney Horace Andy. It was also independent of hip-hop culture which didn’t take over until a few years later. The point is we grew up together, we blended and took on bits of each other’s backgrounds in a context of open, mutual and non-judgemental exchange. When in the mid-2000s I moved to West London, I started finding myself in pubs and other public places that were almost entirely white. Then as now I found it disconcerting.
As time went by I found myself in such spaces more frequently and in areas with large long-standing minority communities. Lambeth and Southwark for instance, saw huge amounts of gentrification in the first decade of this century. By 2010 I often found myself in newly regenerated pubs and bars that I now recognise as catering for that same white urban monoculture. What was jarring was that this was happening against a backdrop of historically high levels of migration into Britain, especially London. So, although on a purely numerical basis London was becoming less-white, less European; more and more I found cultural segregation and an increasingly boring, white middle-class expressing itself through parochialism and a small-town mentality.
Paul Kingsnorth made similar points about gentrification and standardisation in his 2009 book Real England; “the same chains in every high street; the same bricks in every new housing estate; the same signs on every road; the same menu in every pub”. He wasn’t wrong, and the “blandification” of life has only continued apace, now amplified by a burgeoning digital first culture that seeks to manage your preferences before you even know you have them. But what I think was difficult to foresee in the late 2000s was how a bland monolithic urban culture could rise that doesn’t appear like the usual chain shop takeover of the high street or corporate shopping mall experience. Instead, it appropriates the language of cultural and urban diversity while sanding down all the sharp edges, especially those which resist big finance and the myriad forces driving proletarianization. What you get then is a high street where kitsch sits alongside poverty, where market town twee cohabits with the gig economy, cashless craft beer bars with Poundland. The same powerful corporate forces are present, but now they sit under the surface of a superficially affluent and diverse urban environment which maximises consumer choice and “experience” to the detriment of everything else. As I have written elsewhere, the slogan for this new world, born from out of an unholy alliance between crisis response the DEI industry, is the now unavoidable “Be Kind”. And yet at the same time society becomes more isolated and spiritually atomised. Nihilistic, anti-social behaviour across all ages and backgrounds is now commonplace.
Gentrification, infantilisation,
disneyfication, gigification, museumification, civilisational decline; there
are many terms that try to capture this phenomenon. All express something of
the truth of London’s story over the past three decades but perhaps none
capture how it feels to experience these transformations first hand. How a home
can become an alien and unliveable place, and why so many people who were born
here have chosen to leave, including myself.
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