Brixton features in 4 page feature in Qantas flight magazine

[editor]

It's all taking a turn for 'the better' thanks to Brixton Village and Pop Brixton, apparently, so we're now a vibrant foodie destination.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Slight hyperbole by the author.

 

[Gramsci]

What an aggravating piece to read.

I was in Market Row on Saturday. My shopping was to get 5 Brixton£ from the machine next to Francos, kitchen roll from one of last remaining non hip shops and Nour.

Nor did she notice the cafes in Brixton Station road.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Nor did she notice the cafes in Brixton Station road.

The cafes probably didn't have enough of an "edgy vibe" for her.

 

[Rushy]

Qantas.

 

[JimW]

Qunts

 

[editor]

Nor did she notice the cafes in Brixton Station road.

Of course not. They don't exist to people like her and her target audience and they won't exist for anyone else soon once the rents have soared and every shop has been turned into a chain, a fucking foodie theme park, a pop up craft beer trinket-shunter or some vibrant edgy hipster bollocks.

 

[hendo]

It's great that Brixton is featuring on several pages of a leading airline's inflight magazine. It means tourists and their money will keep pouring in here, and that's a good thing for jobs and the local economy.
The piece focuses on the food scene and that's a fair thing for a lifestyle magazine piece to do. It's not that journalists job to write a gritty piece analysing the social cleansing effects of gentrification, it's not what her employers want. Instead (in the inset box) she's suggested having a picnic in Brockwell Park or going to a gig at the Academy. In the main piece she's focused on local start up restaurants and it's hard not see their arrival and coverage here as positive, given it's these - and not the tax avoiding chains - who pay tax.
No, it's a decent piece given the brief. We have to look elsewhere for coverage of the disaster overtaking the housing situation in our capital.

 

[editor]

It's great that Brixton is featuring on several pages of a leading airline's inflight magazine. It means tourists and their money will keep pouring in here, and that's a good thing for jobs and the local economy.

It's great if you're lucky enough to own your home or live in secure housing because all of this publicity will continue to increase the area's appeal, and thus send property and rent values soaring. Landlords rejoice!

The same applies if you're a business person who owns your own premises. But for many others, the news is not so jolly. Tourists aren't particularly interested in unfashionable businesses that operate on low turnovers, so there'll be the first to go once the rents ratchet up even higher and we all know what's been happening to housing rents and house prices. Already, many of my friends have been priced out of the area and many more are just hanging on. One more rent increase and they'll be gone too.

As for the jobs, most of the new ones are in the notoriously low-paid service sector, many with zero hour contracts. Not every new business hires locals either and they're sometimes just replacing existing businesses who did.

So no, having my hometown being presented as a tourist hotspot for Champagne-quaffing, foodie globe-trotting travellers isn't something I feel like celebrating. Anyone who's lived long enough in London to know what happened in Camden may understand my lack of enthusiasm.

 

[skyscraper101]

I do so hate the word 'foodie'

 

[hendo]

I'd certainly agree that a lot of the side effects of this consumer led prosperity in Brixton - and in many other areas of the capital - have decidedly negative results for many members of our community. It's impossible not to sympathise with the people on the Guinness estate and Cresswell Gardens who are being priced out to god knows where. I miss AC Continental Deli as much as anyone and I'm in Cafe Max every Sunday morning so I'm in some sympathy with what you say. The Arches is a scandal, really harmful to the area's character.

I'm not going to argue that zero hour contracts are a good thing either - but neither can I pretend that the revitalisation of the area is all bad and I don't think you can either editor. The fact is that these new businesses do employ people and do pay tax locally and nationally. People are coming into Brixton, and they're spending money in businesses a great many of which started here and continue to be based here. A great deal of what is happening in Lambeth is happening across the capital under a government which is hostile to social housing as we've enjoyed it for decades. None of this is the fault of people who produce and read a Quantas in-flight magazine.

It's kneejerk to describe the tourists who'll read this piece as 'Champagne quaffing foodie globe trotting travellers' - anyone who's been say, to New York for a few days to sample the nightlife could be described as that. Frankly if they've hacked economy for 23 hours to come to Brixton I'll give them a bloody medal.

 

[editor]

It's kneejerk to describe the tourists who'll read this piece as 'Champagne quaffing foodie globe trotting travellers'...

The article is - by its very nature - aimed at globe trotting travellers - and opens with a reference to Champagne & Fromage and then concentrates more or less solely on new foodie enterprises and cocktail bars. There's a whole strata of this community that receives little benefit from Brixton being turned into a tourist-luring, internationally-promoted tourist hotspot, so I find nothing in that article to celebrate or feel good about.

And of course not all of the area's revitalisation is bad, but there's a growing feeling amongst my friends that it's now way out of control and really only benefiting those at the top.

 

[hendo]

Mama Lan and Kaosarn have been here for years, and it's surely in everyone's interest that people visit the Ritzy, another of the piece's prominent suggestions.

 

[editor]

Mama Lan and Kaosarn have been here for years, and it's surely in everyone's interest that people visit the Ritzy, another of the piece's prominent suggestions.

The multinational owned Ritzy has long become unaffordable to many residents and should be shamed by the prices offered at the Peckhamplex. Why should I care if international tourists go there when it remains unaffordable to locals?

 

[T & P]

The article is - by its very nature - aimed at globe trotting travellers - and opens with a reference to Champagne & Fromage and then concentrates more or less solely on new foodie enterprises and cocktail bars. There's a whole strata of this community that receives little benefit from Brixton being turned into a tourist-luring, internationally-promoted tourist hotspot, so I find nothing in that article to celebrate or feel good about.

And of course not all of the area's revitalisation is bad, but there's a growing feeling amongst my friends that it's now way out of control and really only benefiting those at the top.

The article is aimed at anyone who finds themselves on a plane flying to a different country. A lot of the people on that plane, more than 80% of them in fact, will be travelling economy and not necessarily wealthy at all, as any of us who have ever flown abroad can testify.

The article is not any different from every article I've read on any airline in-flight mag to any destination, whether it might be British Airways to the USA, or Easyjet to Spain.

To see the publication of that article as anything other than positive seems uber bizarre to me, tbh.

 

[hendo]

Isn't it a bit rough to single out the Ritzy as somehow worthy of opprobrium because it's unaffordable to many residents? London is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Frankly, a lot of London is inaccessible to the people who live here; one of the curses of living in a capital with massive influxes of global cash. I don't think the Ritzy is a brilliant example. Like any business I would assume it aims its offerings at the local community and other consumers at a price it thinks they can afford and which allows it to operate at a profit.

But this argument isn't about the Ritzy, it's about the piece in the Quantas in-flight magazine; which I think, despite the stringent criticisms here, is a good thing. Brixton is becoming famous and a lot of the reasons are positive. I'm not going to lose sleep over this article.

 

[editor]

Isn't it a bit rough to single out the Ritzy as somehow worth of opprobrium because it's unaffordable to many residents? London is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Frankly, a lot of London is inaccessible to the people who live here; one of the curses of living here. I don't think the Ritzy is a brilliant example. Like any business I would assume it aims its offerings at the local community and other consumers at a price it thinks they can afford and which allows it to operate at a profit.

You brought up the Ritzy as something that was in "everyone's interest" to support. Given that its prices are very much unaffordable to many, I'm not sure why it should be deserving of universal and uncritical support, even more so when their prices are nearly three times as much as a cinema a couple of miles away.

 

[twistedAM]

Damn. They left out the Windmill but we were in the Easyjet inflight mag for a while

 

[hendo]

Without wanting to get into a he said she said spiral, I felt the need to defend the Ritzy as an example of a business that was in the piece and deserves general support because it enriches the area culturally. At any rate, it'll continue to get mine. I don't want to see our local cinema close. I can't imagine many people do. I stand by my original point; that's it's in everyone's interest that people visit it, be they tourists or other Londoners. Obviously if movies are cheaper down the road and loads of people are getting the bus then that's a problem for the Ritzy, I'd suggest.

 

[Dan U]

20 pages.

 

[editor]

To see the publication of that article as anything other than positive seems uber bizarre to me, tbh.

Maybe this article may give some ideas why tourism doesn't come without its downsides;

“Gentrification and tourism,” concludes Gotham, “are largely driven by mega-sized financial firms and entertainment corporations who have formed new institutional connections with traditional city boosters (chambers of commerce, city governments, service industries) to market cities and their neighborhoods.”

Miriam Greenberg tells a similar story in Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World. Concerned that the city’s reputation had been all but annihilated by high rates of crime and poverty, the New York State Department of Commerce launched the “I Love New York” campaign in the late 1970s as part of an effort to make the city attractive to tourists and moneyed outsiders.

This new emphasis on “out of towners,” writes Greenberg, sought to transform New York’s image as a “product in the mind of targeted consumers while pursuing the interests of business, real estate, bond holders, tourists, the new middle class and elites over those of lowand moderate-income New Yorkers and the working class.” While “poverty rose, the middle class shrank and the city became a prohibitively expensive place to live”—benefits were “measured in the rising value of New York city bonds and real estate, the growth of the corporate headquarters complex, the service sector and the rebound of the tax base.”

Is Banning Tourists the Solution to Gentrification?

 

[krtek a houby]

 

[ViolentPanda]

It's great that Brixton is featuring on several pages of a leading airline's inflight magazine. It means tourists and their money will keep pouring in here, and that's a good thing for jobs and the local economy.

Sorry, but I have to disagree - so far, much of the service industry employment generated has been low-grade and "zero hours"-based, according to local councillors, and the local economy only benefits either from the wages generated by those workers, or if the business services some of its' supply needs locally. According to local suppliers, a majority don't.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I do so hate the word 'foodie'

Would you prefer "gourmand" or "gourmet"?

 

[Rushy]

But this argument isn't about the Ritzy, it's about the piece in the Quantas in-flight magazine;

Qantas.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I'd certainly agree that a lot of the side effects of this consumer led prosperity in Brixton - and in many other areas of the capital - have decidedly negative results for many members of our community. It's impossible not to sympathise with the people on the Guinness estate and Cresswell Gardens...

That's Cressingham Gardens, you charmless nerk.

...who are being priced out to god knows where. I miss AC Continental Deli as much as anyone and I'm in Cafe Max every Sunday morning so I'm in some sympathy with what you say. The Arches is a scandal, really harmful to the area's character.

It's not merely a matter of being "priced out". It's also a matter of social cleansing. If you think that "social cleansing" is too emotive a term, we can go with "demographic homogenisation", if you prefer, because that's the result - not just of rising rent and property prices, but of the complicity of our local authority in facilitating and promoting change that benefits those with disposable income over and above any other resident.

 

[editor]

.... but of the complicity of our local authority in facilitating and promoting change that benefits those with disposable income over and above any other resident.

That's pretty much nailed it.

 

[hendo]

I've a good deal of sympathy with this latest broad point. It's a more narrow, on-thread topic argument I wanted to pursue. It's pointless to ask people running a pop up dumpling shop to carry the guilt for deregulated labour in the UK and it's equally futile to lambast the writer of a lifestyle piece for a give away airline magazine for her writing about Brixton's diverse range of restaurants.

 

[editor]

It's pointless to ask people running a pop up dumpling shop to carry the guilt for deregulated labour in the UK ....

Has anyone done that?

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

The article is - by its very nature - aimed at globe trotting travellers

So who is the extensive guide to NYC on this site aimed at?

While the gentrification problems are very real, I don't think this article is quite as bad as people are making out...