Brixton features in 4 page feature in Qantas flight magazine
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Gramsci
Well-Known Member
I do hope you don't give up on this forum. Its good to have you posting on here.
editor
hiraethified
Now that you've linked to a discussion on a phone I don't own and are unlikely to ever own, perhaps you might reach your triumphant BIG POINT?
PS You can pick up an s7 for £395 if you're that interested.
mauvais
on reddit or something
The point couldn't be much clearer. One kind of consumerism = fine, another taking place on your doorstep = not.
It's not some newly invented opinion of mine for the purposes of argument either - we did this years ago: Dear! Tech! Forum!
If you can't see why one makes the other difficult for me to reconcile as coherent politics, then whatever, disagree away, it's just opinion. But it's hardly a complex critique, so don't pretend to be bewildered by it.
It's not some newly invented opinion of mine for the purposes of argument either - we did this years ago: Dear! Tech! Forum!
If you can't see why one makes the other difficult for me to reconcile as coherent politics, then whatever, disagree away, it's just opinion. But it's hardly a complex critique, so don't pretend to be bewildered by it.
editor
hiraethified
That's two old school posters in two days, ffs. This forum is beginning to reflect real-life Brixton, with the rich, the privileged, the pushy and the landlords elbowing out locals and silencing dissent.
No doubt some posters will view this as a victory, but it's not. It's a fucking disgrace.
editor
hiraethified
Oh, and stethoscope and TruXta : I'd really, really like it if you stayed and kept on contributing here.
SpamMisery
Pretty comfortable here right under your skin
Isn't a forum about Brixton supposed to reflect real-life Brixton?
serious about the advertising money btw,you coulda got advertising years ago and bought properties in brixton that everyone loves and invested it in community projects, but everyone would rather moan about not selling out to the man. lost opportunities init. 
editor
hiraethified
I could have indeed retired off the income but that's not how I like to do things.serious about the advertising money btw,you coulda got advertising years ago and bought properties in brixton that everyone loves and invested it in community projects, but everyone would rather moan about not selling out to the man. lost opportunities init.
The answer is you, isn't it?
mauvais
on reddit or something
Nope. I have a four year old S3 with a shattered screen, cos real Urban credentials
Could be worth as much as £12! And a (shit) Nexus 5X that work paid for
Nope. I have a four year old S3 with a shattered screen, cos real Urban credentials
And a (shit) Nexus 5X that work paid for
I have an iPhone 6 AND an iPad Air 2. I wouldn't waste money on artisan horse piss bread though.
Anyway, I said you could AFFORD it. Not that you had one.
mauvais
on reddit or something
I probably love a bit of artisan horse piss bread, whatever that is. And I probably can afford the latest phone iteration. But I'm the target audience of Qantas in-flight mags: middle class, cocktail drinker, 'foodie' (ick), frequenter of all this shit, would-be gentrifier. In fact I probably am already gentrifying somewhere, it's just not Brixton. That I can't afford, AFAIK.
There's no doubt about any of that, and you should probably hang me from a lamp post for my sins, but there aren't any contradictions in it either.
Glad to see you've backed down.
mauvais
on reddit or something
From what to where?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
So we need to ask why that happens.
I'd contend that at least part of the cause is people not declaring their interests in an argument of this nature. I try to always do so, by making clear my position on the loss of social housing and affordable housing, and the ongoing loss of retail and other outlets that service the occupants' needs.
Similarly, most people know the position of Gramsci and editor on what's happening to Brixton. They're both long-term residents who are community activists, if you will.
There are also, unfortunately, people whose only interest is to sneer and slang. Until such posters resist the urge, and engage in actually debating and rebutting each others' positions, we'll just get more twattery.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Nanker Phelge
Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
This thread might be the saddest descent into a point scoring derail that I've seen in a long while.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
What do you mean by "tourism"?
The way you identify what the word means, matters for whether "tourists" can be seen as drivers of gentrification or not.
More than a "little bit". This site and its' sister "Brixton Buzz", are seen as too "red" for the borough's political and civic elite.
I think you need to meditate on the difference between analytic journalism, and evangelisation.
It's little to do with the semiotics of negative experience, and a lot to do with the impact of the proliferation of such "boho eateries" on the local populace.
It's not at all NIMBY. No-one is saying "no restaurants, only Peoples' Canteens!", or "no cocktail bars, only pubs".
What we aresaying - as evidenced time and again on this and similar threads - is "there's too many, and catering to a minority is affecting the social and economic environment of the majority".
So we shouldn't worry about the hometown, because the mother-country is going to shit?
Way to massively miss the point.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I've just sat down on a Norwegian Flight. On the front page is "poo-smoked meat. The unusual flavours in Icelands latest food boom". That's house prices fucked in Iceland then
(Posted on an iPhone 6)
Not exactly new, smoking meat over burning dried dung. The Saxons did it 1500 years ago, the Greeks 2500 years ago. Who doesn't love mildly sulphurous smoked meat?
rather moan about everything instead, yeah? morals are so cool.
will lend you a fiver when my financial sector shares float because I'm nice.
mauvais
on reddit or something
In this case, it's pretty clear, the target of an in-flight mag. Someone who sees a destination in a magazine and thinks, I'd like to visit there, probably for days or a week on a one-off holiday.
Based on your other comments, which I certainly don't dispute, that doesn't surprise me, but it's not mutually exclusive from the opinion I expressed. It merely depends where these points are on the spectrum.
I simply don't agree that it's more the former than the latter.
The reason I posted on this thread to begin with (since I have nothing to do with Brixton) is in part because I feel the former is a theme of late, an attitude on here against a certain lifestyle and tastes that often is actually coming from people who live a closely parallel existence with a bunch of only superficially different proclivities. I read posts here most days and I don't feel like some sort of socio-economic outlier, after all. It's mostly similar people doing similar things.
Not at all. But barking at passing tourists, restaurant businesses and even passive gentrifiers with no infernal agenda is barking at the outcome, not the input or machinery, and my point was to boot, people not actually that dissimilar to some of the complainants. The mechanism is things like the massive national flow of everything towards London, the ridiculous globalisation and commoditisation of property, the private ownership of everything and the corruption of numerous nationally-held values like community. You stop any of those things and you stem the flow of these outcomes.
Now there's a few things to be said about that: I'm well aware that that is happening, on here, and indeed there's various threads on here that clearly evidence that. I'm also not oblivious to the fact that there's very little that can be effectively done in the face of the above and the forces that direct it. And if you were to say that in your battles with Lambeth etc, people like me might generally be a closer match to Lambeth's objectives than yours, then that might be a workable line, if not necessarily true.
However I do think this whole thing would only be a compelling argument if:
(a) the battle lines could be drawn more coherently such that people don't waste their credit directing vitriol at their neighbours and in particular people who are ultimately going about much the same lives a percentile or two away and face much the same problems
and to a slightly lesser extent
(b) it didn't jar with some of the other implicit and explicit narratives on here - not least, if you find yourself (not literally you) using ever more convoluted filters to distinguish your support for & patronage of enjoyable local facilities from your hatred for expensive gentrifiers, then it's already a crumbling rhetoric
As you can hopefully gauge, I consider myself reasonably well aligned to what you're pursuing in the longer term, even if not perfectly so. I just don't think the argument this thread - and many gentrification arguments in general, tbf - is based around is productive, not least because it folds in on itself and ends up directed at what would be its proponents, were it better structured.
isvicthere?
a.k.a. floppybollocks
Fast forward to point please.
3Zeros
Active Member
The influx of the "foodie" businesses, the promotion of them on a national and international level, the arrival of the monied middle classes, and the process of gentrification are all inextricably linked. To deny that is wilfully ignorant, or worse: it shows you don't give a fuck.
Claims that it all benefits the local economy ignore the fact that a "local economy" doesn't exist in any real sense. Most of the revenues are funnelled straight out of the area. Even if every business in the area was owned by a local (which they certainly aren't), it would still only be benefitting a minority, while the negative effects of gentrification would continue to impact those who can least afford it.
And for posters to repeatedly suggest that if you have ever been a "consumer", or have had a drink in one of these bars, or once produced a travel-blog, then your criticisms are null and void is, quite frankly, bollocks. We are all participants in this economy and it is how behave within it, and what we demand of it, that makes the difference.
Claims that it all benefits the local economy ignore the fact that a "local economy" doesn't exist in any real sense. Most of the revenues are funnelled straight out of the area. Even if every business in the area was owned by a local (which they certainly aren't), it would still only be benefitting a minority, while the negative effects of gentrification would continue to impact those who can least afford it.
And for posters to repeatedly suggest that if you have ever been a "consumer", or have had a drink in one of these bars, or once produced a travel-blog, then your criticisms are null and void is, quite frankly, bollocks. We are all participants in this economy and it is how behave within it, and what we demand of it, that makes the difference.
mauvais
on reddit or something
You mischaracterise this, as I'm sure you know. Everyone is inconsistent and hypocritical; everyone who expresses some value has almost certainly contradicted it at some point. The snapshots of that are irrelevant, as you describe.
Whether you're consistently inconsistent is more pertinent.
If (purely hypothetical), over time, you frequently engage in or even evangelise one thing, unapologetically so, whilst taking issue with someone else's differently flavoured version of the same, then it's probably not an immediately credible position. And so it is when it comes to challenging other people's arrival - be they new locals or tourists - when the fundamentals of it aren't far removed from your own behaviour.
And AFAICS, noone is denying that gentrification exists, nor what its effects entail, nor failing to give their quota of fucks. As before, I simply think it's futile to blame the outcome and people at the tail end who are basically just going about their lives as shaped by the rest of the system. How are you going to stop them anyway? Class War et al probably feel differently about that, and you can judge whether that's productive.
And this isn't really an individual thing, or about Qantas, or about Urban outside of the inconsistencies I described to VP - it's the whole gentrification argument when and wherever it happens, and the question of whether you should fight the symptoms or the illness.
3Zeros
Active Member
Your post suggests that those "at the tail end" are just "passive gentrifiers", which I don't agree with at all. The businesses at what I would call the "front end" are active participants in the process and a large percentage of the customers will be too.
You identified in your post to Violent Panda some of the higher level mechanisms at play (national flow of everything towards London, the ridiculous globalisation and commoditisation of property, the private ownership of everything) and we can be, and are, critical of those things. But I don't agree that we shouldn't be criticising the lower level mechanisms too.
You identified in your post to Violent Panda some of the higher level mechanisms at play (national flow of everything towards London, the ridiculous globalisation and commoditisation of property, the private ownership of everything) and we can be, and are, critical of those things. But I don't agree that we shouldn't be criticising the lower level mechanisms too.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Interesting, given that the main "tourism" affecting Brixton at the moment is an entirely different type - the same sort of "drinks and eats" tourism that affects Clapham and environs - to that which would see people staying in Brixton "for days or a week" (especially given the single medium-capacity hotel in the locale.
No-one has claimed that it's mutually-exclusive. My point was that you emphasised a particular quality - a point on your spectrum - that I rebutted.
Well, it'd hardly be in your interest to, would it?
I disagree. In my opinion, attending a pub that you've patronised for a decade or two, in your local area, or a cafe, is a vastly different thing to doing a Clapham at the new bars and eateries of Brixton. You may or may not have noticed the demography of the new custom over the old, but I have. It's different. I'd love to convince Lambeth Council to let me do a longitudinal - say 2 years - study on somewhere like Coldharbour Lane or Pop Brixton, recording the demographics of visitors, but I'm also fairly sure it'd produce results that the council would find embarrassing.
Some of us "bark" at all elements of the issues, as a non-holistic approach is, as you recognise, futile.
And why piss off one narrow stream of people, when you can piss off lots?
The problem there is that many of us are too busy keeping the roofs over our heads to be able to articulate and promote a message that might draw in support, except on a piecemeal basis.
So, it's a case of incorporate, incorporate, incorporate.
Politically, there's historically and currently one big problem with doing what you suggest - it makes the argument more "friendly", and therefore more amenable to being appropriated by the same forces that are causing the issues in the first place.
