Brockley’s neighbours
Brockley is not tall. Brockley Road runs through the modest valley between Hillyfields and Telegraph Hill. Unlike in Lewisham Centre, where new-build towers sit on stilts of gold, in Brockley you can’t watch over the borough from a penthouse. You also can’t commute directly to Canary Wharf, which is what the New Lewisham Centre – end (or beginning) of the DLR line – is becoming in miniature. Lewisham, you fear, is becoming ideology as high-rise. Some minutes west of Brockley are Dulwich and Peckham. The former has stature in its reputation as an Affluent Area (it is a village amidst urban sprawl). The latter’s ego comes from its rapid development, expensive cocktail bars and characteristic ‘edginess’. Peckham once had a reputation for violence and poverty; those things have not gone, but have instead been swallowed into an aesthetic ‘authenticity’ (the necessary evil that compliments the postmodern: "belong," ironically, in this place, but be prepared to pay the price). Williamsburg, Shoreditch, Kreuzberg, Peckham. By contrast, Brockley is humble. Again, you can’t watch over the borough from a penthouse. Rather, you watch Brockley from the streets: from a bench, from the top deck of a bus, or perhaps from the vantage point of Hillyfields. Brockley is humble.
In defence of Brockley’s hipsters
Brockley today is a paradigm of misconceptions about gentrification. The Brockley Barge – not a boat but the sixth best Wetherspoons in South East London – is home to Brockley’s Greek chorus. Functionally a mass, this Chorus really consists of old boys, garishly-dressed students, football lads, committed ambassadors of bygone subcultures, every caricature that your liberal mother might warn you to avoid, and your younger sibling’s mates who you’re sure are still only fifteen. Within this demographic stew is The Guardian writer’s wet dream, a chance to pit each group against each other as though these residents of the same streets, drinking in the same pub, should be natural adversaries. That is because Brockley “feels like London used to feel, only with decent coffee.” Here, The Guardian writer conjures the fetishistic semiotics of the common beverage. Coffee – the universally-popular bean-based drink and somehow, also, the signifier of metropolitanism, elitism and hipsterism – has apparently been brought into Brockley by the newer, younger crowd; a crowd naturally adversarial to the old boys (those who represent how “London used to feel”). According to this logic, no one over sixty drinks coffee or, at least, they certainly don’t drink decent coffee. A typical piece written about a recently “gentrified” area such as Brockley will find a way to both romanticise and demonise the older, working-class residents of an area. That is to say, there’s a longing for a bygone (authentic?) “feeling,” but also a resentment of said feeling’s essence. The older, working-class residents are a nostalgic reminder of how London used to be, before all these awful developments, but also an irremovable rot of conservatism, backwardness and culturelessness (or rather, an agent of the wrong culture). And the coffee hipsters are only nominally safe: despite being the supposed suppliers and buyers of decent coffee, the people who inject that much-needed multiculturalism and metropolitanism into the area, they are also parasitic and entitled. These young hipsters expect everything despite never having worked a day in their short lives. Decent coffee is a privilege but these wretched young people expect it straight from the kitchen tap. Yet, as Joe Kennedy notes: “it is often claimed that it is hipsters, rather than people who bought vast amounts of cheap property in the nineties with the intention of profiting from it, who are ‘gentrifying’ areas and ‘socially cleansing’ them.” It’s hard to swallow, but those students who pay £850 a month for a squalid bedsit aren’t actually the problem – even if they do have colourful hair. A spectre looms over Brockley and it isn’t Goldsmiths College.
Deflatable Brockley
Culture is ordinary. On June 1st 2019, nineteen-year-old grime MC Yizzy performed on an inflatable stage plopped on Foxberry Road, just off Brockley Road. To stage left was the aforementioned Brockley Barge and all it contains. To stage right was the new-build housing development that replaced the iconic Brockley MOT Centre and the much-loved murals celebrating black artists Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Maya Angelou that had graced its walls. Behind the stage was the recently-built Sainsbury’s Local that had been subject to some – albeit muted – protest upon its opening (being “Local” in name only). This convergence of people, places and signs – of a young grime MC on an inflatable stage, between a Wetherspoons of a diverse and working-class clientele and the new-builds intended for a decidedly different demographic, with a shining Sainsbury’s Local sign looming in the background – crudely represents Brockley. The prospect of capital – that "unnamable Thing" – encroaching, with even the seemingly-eternal Wetherspoons pub subject to proposed changes (that isn't to say we like Wetherspoons, so much as we like its imitation of communal solidarity). One doesn’t have to stretch too far to imagine the stage deflating, its youth aboard, leaking air and shrivelling into a sorry plastic puddle.
Brockley votes
In the election of December 2019, Gavin Haran – Conservative MP for Lewisham Deptford, the constituency within which Brockley sits – received 6,303 votes (or 11.4% of the total share). Who are these 6,303 Tories, and how can they exist in Brockley, of all places? To start, they’re probably your neighbours. Possibly even your relatives. More concerning, perhaps, is the 5.1% gain for the Liberal Democrats, who finished with 10.4% of the vote. These voters, flocking to Brockley Market in their masses to buy £9 burritos, are in most senses of the word conservative: we like Brockley how it is (now, at last) and want it to remain this way. “New Brockley,” or so it’s called, divorced from itself and injected with the fantasy of Dulwich, serves these people well. It feels like London used to feel but there is also decent coffee. Feel is the important word here, for they are glad it is only a feeling and nothing more substantive (London didn’t used to have decent coffee). This growing breed is only ostensibly liberal, for the Liberal Democrats are the party of crypto-Conservatives. Brockley is bourgeois but multicultural; there is decent coffee but a third of the greater borough's children live in poverty. The rise of the Liberal Democrats – ‘Party of Remain’ – in Brockley makes sense, for it is not only decent coffee that we might lose if we leave the EU (our entire metropolitanism is at stake!), but cheap labour too (for who is going to clean my four-story house on Breakspears Road?).
Brockley in my heart
"Most of the mandem rep the postcode / But I don't know why we like the postcode." Where Soho is pornographic London, Peckham is authentic London, Stoke Newington is fantasy London, Shoreditch is gilt London and Beckenham is suburban London, Brockley is simply London. One’s home is always neutral. That Brockley is increasingly the clean, desirable backdrop for films, television shows and advertisements raises concerns that Brockley is becoming the media’s de facto decent coffee London, as wherever Outnumbered or Lead Balloon were filmed once were. Perhaps, soon enough, Brockley will be cupcake London. But Brockley lives on in my heart; not untouched or unchanging, but as something consisting nevertheless of an immovable spirit. Brockley's streets are lined with empathy. Recently deceased fast food restaurant Lions Fried Chicken is memorialised by a Facebook group. The long-gone video rental shop Homeview lives on fondly in local memory despite its crass replacement. Somehow still-standing bric-a-brac shop Sounds Around, now nothing more than a haunted house, is a constant reminder not only of struggle and death but family and community. The hipsters come and go, the old boys fade away, but Brockley remains Brockley.