Brixton Village

...Brixton

This used to be called the Granville Arcade. It was a covered market which had been in decline for years. It’s now the thriving ‘Brixton Village’ and packed with small independent shops, restaurants and coffee houses, with not a PretBucksNero in sight - so far.

I’ve been going to Brixton for 35 years - for shopping, eating, entertainment, council facilities, transport and coffee - first when I lived off Brixton Hill for a couple of years and since I moved to nearby Clapham.

Brixton Village is part of a change in the area. Indeed, Brixton may be turning back to more what it was like when it started to become part of the London sprawl. I like Brixton Village but I don’t think I’ll like all the effects of gentrification.


Here is my guess of what might have happened over 150 years based on a little knowledge, a bit more observation and lots of generalisation.

1) First came the grander houses and people who could afford their own horse and carriage to create a semi-rural suburb of London well away from the stench and teeming masses.
2) Some time after came the railway and, in its wake, many more people who moved to smaller houses built for the middle classes.
3) Maybe there followed a boom in building houses for the middle classes for which there was not enough demand. So gradually the teeming masses moved first into the excess housing stock and eventually to all of it as the middle classes moved out to escape them.
4) More and more houses were divided into cheaper and cheaper flats and houses of multiple occupation.
5) Later, some of the more modest and even not so modest houses were bought to live in at what in retrospect are bargain prices, including by some of the early essential workers who came from the West Indies in the 1950s and 1960s, some letting rooms and floors to their compatriots.
6) Then the very first gentrifiers arrived: artists, teachers and other public sector workers bought homes to improve and live in.
7) In recent years as now, these early buyers started cashing in on homes some couldn’t afford to maintain and moved to cheaper suburbs for more comfortable homes and cash in the bank.

What next? Could Brixton become like Battersea, one of the highest income areas in London and where you find the sort of people who may once have lived in Kensington and Chelsea but who can no longer match the prices paid there by the very, very rich? My grandparents lived in Battersea in the 60s and 70s in a relatively modest terraced house with bay windows and a small front and back garden. They rented the upstairs from the owner who lived downstairs. It was not a self-contained converted flat of the sort that came later with gentrification. Those houses where my Nan lived now have paid nannies living in them and sell for £1.5m to £2m.

I don’t want Brixton to become like Battersea. Maybe it can hang on to some of its wonderful mix of human beings of all ages, many income levels, many ethnic types, varied outllooks, different ways of life and who go to different shops, pubs and restaurants. We’ll see. What will be will be. Brixton’s large stock of social housing which was never bought under the right to buy may help.