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Say hello to Barratt Homes' 'Brixton Square' on Coldharbour Lane (old Cooltan site)

tommers said:
Isn't all this exactly the same as any other wave of immigration? "Oh, they're all separate! They keep themselves to themselves! They're changing the area! Local people are being forced out! We've lived here all our lives!"
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Money seems to be playing a far bigger role in this particular wave, no?
 
Strangerdanger said:
Ah. See we all judge don't we? OK can I change my comments from people with big prams being douchebags to people in North London with big prams being douchebags then? Still a judgment, but probably also fact.
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They are probably also just mums- your highlights and house can be as expensive as you like, a small baby is baffling and stressful, and a mum is just doing the best she can. She is likely to be existing on much less sleep than you and be feeling more vulnerable and inadequate than ever before in her life: if that translates as thoughtlessness, rudeness or taking up too much pavement space (in the view of the nimble singleton trying to dodge past) it's unintentional in most instances, just preoccupation. Whether in north London, Brixton, Cardiff, Stoke, wherever. // end of derail/rant

We do all make assumptions, but should, IMO, challenge them and try and avoid them. The saner posters on here don't attack yuppies, they attack 'yuppification'. It's the process of a society becoming inaccessible to some of its members- you can be concerned by that process even if, just by doing the best you can for you and yours with the resources you have available, you are part of the process. What you can do about it is a different and more difficult question, but the first step has to be admitting the issue exists and your part in it.
 
editor said:
Money seems to be playing a far bigger role in this particular wave, no?
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Money plays a big part in any immigration doesn't it? Whether because an area is cheap or because it gets trendy and people with more money want to live there. The East End is funny cos it's had both in recent years.
 
tommers said:
What is this? Semantics day? I told you what I didn't understand. "In what way is it different?"
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Back then it was poor black people coming in to a mainly middle-class white area, not it's white upper/middle-class people bumping out working class/lower middle class people.
 
TruXta said:
That'd be you, ed.
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Yeah a real mixed bag, white guy with dreads, a couple of people dressed in 60s hippy style outfits, a couple in the corner having a joint, the pub was empty everyone was outside, I felt out of place with my pimms.
Had a good night though really diverse crowd. AND VERY FRIENDLY
 
story said:
I'm not saying that you, the individual you, is someone who is ignorant or problematic. Individually, most of the newcomers I've met (those who've not shied away or snubbed us lowly locals.... seriously it has happened...) are nice interesting people.

One of my concerns is something that I think can't be helped: you have arrived in Brixton knowing nothing much about what it was like before. You don't know which shops are family run, or have changed hands, or are brand new. You don't know about the specific beggars and buskers (wither The Philosopher, by the way?), that strange influx of Roma in long colourful skirts who came and went over a couple of years, the Russian lady with the outlandish make-up and the towering black nylon hair, the local kids who were kicked down the stairs by the cops, the one who refused to take sides in a heated dangerous situation, went home to his mum, and thus, possibly, averted a riot, the fact that Patrick insisted that any restaurant run on his property must be vegetarian, that the Courtesan bar used to be run by an idiot who named it BangBang the weekend after a shooting, that the tree in Windrush Square used to have fairy lights all over it, that the Drinking School who used to hang out there is all gone entirely, that the land that was ripped up to lay Windrush Square was filled with interesting plants, some dating back to the banks of the Effra, that there is a rare example of kinetic sculpture in the garden of Lambeth College, that the old oak on Josephine Avenue apparently shaded the canoodlings of Sir Walter and Queen Bess, that there used to be a grand old squat on Porden Road that is now a car park, that the old clock in the park used to work tick tock, doesn't now, and is being refurbished by local subscription, that the little toy houses outside the secret garden were part of a village that is now somewhere in Australia, that the Tesco by the prison used to be a great little venue... and so on and so on and so on.

This is not to say that I am precious about all this. It is to recognise that anyone who is new to an area does not know, and cannot know, what that area was like before they popped up out of the ground. When this is a few people, a few families, well they have the chance to hear and learn and join in and find out and bring their own stuff and on we go.

Right now, it's like we're being colonised. So many people all arriving at once, and all bringing with them the kind of culture that has deliberately and strongly stayed away from Brixton in the past, derided Brixton, dismissed and shunned Brixton as a place of danger and poverty and strangeness. And for many of us, one of the reasons we ended up in Brixton was exactly because we didn't find ourselves as individuals, as the people that we are, welcomed or supported by the people who shunned Brixton. We came here, some of us, to get away from that kind of snidey judgement. Outsiders, misfits, rebels, we all ended up here because here we felt comfortable.

So now we find that not just one or two pioneering curious interesting people, or families, are arriving in Brixton, but droves and packs of people who either drift through on a weekend, getting in the way of people who are doing their weekly shop and making ridiculous comments about how weird or lovely or quaint (yes, really) it is to have a real life butcher opposite the vintage store... as if the butcher is the pop-up novelty, and then going home to wherever they've come from like tourists on a week's holiday in Senegal going home to claim that they really did get a sense of the local commuuuunity, such friendly people except for the strange angry ones, but who can blame them when they struggle so with the poverty and crime, bless 'em. Or they (you) are finding that Brixton is borderline affordable, so they're buying up blocks of property, that was sold outside of the community, like the Brits who arrived like locusts in the South of Spain in the eighties.

We, many of us, feel alarmed and disturbed by this. We feel sidelined. We feel as if we have been marketed as one of the charming assets of the locality.

This will pass. We are in flux at the moment. It will settle down. Not for a while yet, judging by how many many developments are still being planned. But while our squatted arts centre, our college, our social housing are being taken away from us, from people who have lived here decades, generations, and tarted up to be sold to incomers, we are kind of edgy and mistrustful. Not least because no-one asked us about any of this. It has been done to us, to Brixton. We've lost a lot, and we're not able yet to see what has been gained.

Brixton Square: I'm sure it will be a lovely place to live, and I'm glad that you and yours have been able to get a toehold on the property ladder. I'm glad that Barratts have been decent and helpful, and I'm very glad they've bothered to plant trees. But every time I go past, I remember the CoolTan and the fun I had there, and how sad it is that we no longer have the place itself, and I am also sad that these days, we no longer have any option for such a place to ever exist again in Brixton.

And by the way, no one in France would ever eat cheese and drink champagne at the same time. It's madness!
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Nicely put.

I imagine the same kind of arguments were put by Brixton's residents before Story and friends 'popped up out of the ground'!
 
fortyplus said:
I am completely with story on gated "communities". I can see that it might help sell properties in edgier, more vibrant areas - you get the vibrancy without the fear of having your car vandalised etc etc. But they're by definition exclusive places (and often marketed exactly as such), which is the opposite of inclusive. It's inclusivity that really makes a community, and there's a real danger that the inclusivity of Brixton is being lost. Has been lost. Twenty-five years ago, we were (like strangerdanger) yuppies moving into Brixton. Brixton stole our hearts the day we moved in, the neighbours came out to help us hump furniture and two little boys asked themselves round to play (no fear of stranger-danger for them) until their mum knocked on our door at their teatime.
As, by necessity, we have to live more densely in urban centres, we need to rebuild inclusive communities, with plenty of shared public spaces, like the piazze in old Italian cities. This doesn't come naturally to the reserved British, our homes our castles, but we're going to have to learn. It really doesn't help when exclusive spaces are plonked right in the middle of our crowded community.
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^this, completely.

If you build a cube with one entrance, and put a gate on it, people will wonder what is behind that gate (perhaps especially if you say repeatedly that it's nothing exciting but no, they can't look), if you leave the gate off people may look, decide its dull and never go back again, but in both instances you have a cube plonked as if from outer space in the middle of an area. As you say, on the continent they are much more likely to build a 'u' shape with bars and cafés at the bottom: or have a pathway through so the new housing becomes part of the existing ebb and flow of normal pedestrian traffic and is physically part of the area. I'd have thought that was safer too, as people will see what is going in, whereas once you get past the gate of somewhere like BS you 'belong' so are unlikely to be challenged.
 
editor said:
I remain informed by punk ideals. Truly. I ain't no lentil-munching, yoga-stretching bongo basher.
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What's wrong with lentils, YOU MONSTER?! Bongos should die, yoga... not for me, but hey, I'm not gonna judge anyone that does it (as long as I don't have to watch).
 
TruXta said:
Back then it was poor black people coming in to a mainly middle-class white area, not it's white upper/middle-class people bumping out working class/lower middle class people.
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I certainly agree with the 2nd part, but are you sure about the first? I don't know the history of Brixton but I'm not sure how they would have afforded to live in a posh area.

http://www.urban75.org/brixton/history/history.html

Knackered privately rented houses were often sold to cash-strapped occupiers, while some houses on the end of their leases were left to quietly fall about as landlords tried to squeeze the last few bob out of the property.

With many houses in appalling disrepair, slum clearances followed with Council housing filling the gaps, leading to a demographic shift in the area.

In the 1940s and 1950s many of the immigrants who came to Britain from the West Indies settled in Brixton
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ETA: Actually I'm not sure I do agree with the second bit, I might, but whatever. I don't live in Brixton so I don't see it every day.
 
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