black&white
By the Marquis
Find out who you really are
Camberwell, where I have been recently living, feels like an admixture of both Clapham and Hackney. Like Hackney, the locals are liable to describe themselves as ‘young creatives’ and as in Hackney, ‘creative’ most often means ‘in marketing.’ Occasionally: ‘in film.’ But like Clapham, and very much unlike Hackney, they are unashamedly well-to-do. There is no pretence of late-in-life flatshare squalor the way you find in Haggerston. Nobody here looks like they’d settle for a Tesco’s own brand hummus picnic on London Fields for their birthday dinner; that part of their lives has been and gone.
Retired from the scene, they are fashionable in a more relaxed, less self conscious way than they might have been in their 20s - friends’ DJ sets and gigs have been replaced by opening nights for galleries and restaurants. NTS Radio is wafting gently from the kitchen speakers out over the back patio. Ahead of them is a long, leafy thirties full of dinners in the garden, long, leafy dinners lined up in rows. They sometimes moan half-heartedly that they’ve had to go to too many destination weddings this year - but that’s not so bad because these days, with work, with the kid (one per couple, like pandas), with the dog, it’s about the only time they get to do coke. Otherwise it’s all clean living, and they look it - they all look great for 36. If they weren’t so obviously well-off, they could pass for 25.
I am growing to like them; they are less pretentious, more hardworking, less stupid than their near-relatives in East London. Just by being close to them, I feel myself moving up in the world - these moseying, gentle people, who seem to swat away life’s stresses with one lazy swoosh of the tail; these herbivorous dinosaurs, late in the Indian summer of youth, enjoying the cud al fresco until middle age crashes like an asteroid.
Unbeknownst to them, they are the people the British Right have been rushing to defend in Twitter’s latest rehashing of the well-trodden ‘gentrification’ debate - sparked initially by a post from Sam Bowman, head of publishing at Stripe, which, much to the ire of the black population of South London as represented in his quote tweets, described Camberwell as ‘gentrifying nicely.’
The high-water mark of anti-gentrification rage in Britain has arguably been and gone, with the riots that broke out in protest of Shoreditch’s since-deceased Cereal Killer Cafe (a Millennial gimmick institution, which had people queuing to pay something around the £5 mark for a bowl of Lucky Charms) in 2015, and the arguments against - that the more established communities in places like Shoreditch and Camberwell are being priced out of their homes by the incoming middle-class adventurers - have remained virtually unchanged. In some important ways though, the debate looks very different than it did back then.
