09
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Some people may ask, ‘How has this come around?’ The answer is complex. It includes accelerated gentrification as we eased into and out of lockdown, with councils subsidising new organisations, or franchises buying up ailing small businesses. Miss Milton highlights the link between the ‘suffocation’ of a community, and ‘the government or councillors trying to pump money into Peckham, trying to highlight its culture when actually in fact it was already there’. The sudden emergence of a vacuum (particularly on Peckham High Street) where people can no longer afford to live, or run businesses, has left vacancies in which up-market start-ups can take root. By injecting cash, by ‘highlighting its culture’, the local council and the big franchises have adversely diluted Peckham’s cultural variety. And so, the cycle resumes: flats and houses are bought as a result of an area’s improved image, the frontier of the middle class advances, and whatever remains of Peckham is slowly drowned out. So, what can we make of this? Should we view the idea of a location, and its identification with a community, as an invaluable concept that must be protected against encroachment? ‘Wait,’ a counter- argument might run: ‘Change brings with it more
The history of SE15 is rich, loaded and not always pretty “
cultural integration.’ Or is it in fact the very opposite: does the one-sidedness of this ‘integration’ threaten to push Peckham’s cultural identity to the periphery? The history of SE15 is rich, loaded and not always pretty. Might it be that to celebrate the so-called ‘authenticity’ of a Peckham now almost stifled by its quasi-fetishisation is to ignore its real roots, and to deny those who have grown up there the privilege of reminiscence? Equally, don’t fall, as Miss Milton warned with a telling anecdote, for the idea that it is ‘authentic’, and therefore desirable, not to have flushing toilets in a bar on Rye Lane. Buying into the seductive narrative of the authentic can be dangerous, no matter who is telling the story.
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker