Roger Robinson on the actuality of gentrification in Brixton
Sidra Ahmed reflects on the words of acclaimed writer and T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize winner Roger Robinson, who delivered UCL Urban Laboratory’s annual Cities Imaginaries lecture on 20 May.
“Brixton was always a place for me where I could exist comfortably. Even when I wasn’t staying there, it was always the destination,” Roger Robinson remarked on his 30 year relationship with the south London neighbourhood at the start of this year’s Cities Imaginaries lecture.
It was the place he would visit to celebrate friends’ birthdays at Atlantic Road’s The Lounge and have dinner at The Crypt in St Matthews Church. It is where he looked up spoken word and listened to hip hop at the legendary Dogstar. Where he went for his first ever open mic at the Urban Poets Society Speakers’ Corner at Brixton Art Gallery that marked the beginning of his literary career. It was the destination for Friday evening drinks at the Satay Bar, or the place to get a fresh fade cut at Twin Barbers.
It was from a mosaic of personal affection and memories that Robinson presented his poetic and inspiring narrative on the gentrification of Brixton. A narrative that went beyond gentrification’s characterisation as a displacement of local people by an influx of higher income, typically White people, capitalising on low property values. Robinson focused on gentrification’s impact on the lived experiences of Black and Brown communities in Brixton. For if people’s experience of space is shaped by factors of class, ethnicity, religion and age, then the neighbourhood, livelihood and cultural changes produced by gentrification are a matter of social justice, as Robinson argued.
Drawing from his own experiences in Brixton and those of Black and Brown residents he had spoken to, Robinson offered a “deeply personal” account and deconstruction of gentrification as a “good process” in Brixton. He chose to depict a pre-gentrified Brixton through the lens of the 1980 cult reggae film Babylon. And this was followed by narratives on the gentrification of sound, food and space during the latest wave of gentrification in Brixton since 2010 to the present day. He painted a picture of what has been lost and what has replaced it.
In the 1950s, Windrush communities began settling in the neighbourhood. Many property owners abandoned their homes in the hope of receiving compensation. But Brixton’s vacant properties were instead filled by “politicised gay squatters, Caribbean immigrants, anarchists and some left-wing working-class Whites.” Brixton from the 1950s to the late 1970s was “built on the sweat equity of Caribbean people”. Robinson set the scene for pre-gentrified Brixton, as depicted in the film Babylon. The area was afflicted by crippling recession, rife with racial tension and police brutality towards Black people. Recession and unemployment during Thatcher’s years as Prime Minister fuelled resentment among poor White working class people toward Black communities. Brixton was a hotbed of “influential anti-establishment organisations, people, thinkers, activists and intellectuals” and an area of massive disinvestment. It was represented as a dangerous place to live although it was “never as dangerous as it was made out to be” highlighted Robinson.
One of the narrative focal points of Babylon that Robinson touched on was that of the Brixton sound systems. First and second generation Caribbean communities faced exclusion from and harassment in existing social spaces such as pubs and clubs. This led Black and Caribbean communities to create their own mobile music scene based on sound system culture. Setting up underneath trainline arches, in ad hoc venues, houses and community spaces, this music scene grew with its infamous “rumbling” bass, “followers of the sound”, dances, and dress code, as an expression of Black culture. This counter culture was “steeped in protest and [the struggle] for rights,” and heavily patrolled by the police, but still it continued to grow. As Robinson said, “reggae has been the soundtrack of Brixton for a long time,” setting it apart from other gentrified areas as a destination for music fans from other London neighbourhoods and further afield.
“This was the perfect set of pre-conditions for gentrifying developers. The real estate at rock bottom, a reputation that only favours the brave, lots of unowned and dis-repaired large houses that could be acquired cheaply and easily, a council desperately in need of money, quick access to central London by train and years and years of disinvestment.”
— Roger Robinson
Which brings us to the first of Robinson’s triad of gentrification signifiers — sound. From the moment you stepped off the Tube and climbed the stairs of Brixton station, the air was filled with reggae music — in a pre-gentrified Brixton. Cut to present day, the area’s soundtrack has changed to a “chill Ibiza playlist”. Old sounds have been “recalibrated to middle-class and upper-class norms”. The existing music scene is seen as a nuisance by new gentrifiers and subject to complaints and council restrictions, while the new sounds of orchestra and the earth-shattering decibels of relentless home renovations are deemed acceptable. As Robinson highlighted, there is an important relationship between sound and erasure. The sound of reggae, for example, indicates the presence of racial sets and subsets, asserting their presence and rendering local culture public; while its absence indicates their loss.
The second signifier is food — a medium through which existing resident communities assert, communicate and cater for their local culture. There is more to be understood from the tagline of “the hipster foodie effect” that comes with gentrification. Robinson provided a rich narration of the diverse cultural foodscape that used to exist in Old Brixton Market, but is now lost. He spoke about the milieu it provided for expressing cultural identity, setting cultural roots down and also enabling transcultural interactions. “Food can make you travel through different cultures” he expressed, recalling how he made, and ate with, friends from other cultures.
For middle and upper class gentrifiers however, this milieu was perceived as mayhem. Robinson pointed out how middle and upper class gentrifiers were “openly distrustful of [shops] catering for Black and Brown people”. A South Asian butcher, for example, was perceived as “an eyesore or health hazard” as opposed to catering for the specific dietary and cultural needs of its local Brown community. Those who had been shopping in the Market for decades now faced higher prices from new food vendors. Black and Brown communities’ role now “is to window shop [in Brixton] and travel to nearby Peckham for accessible price points”.
The new “hipster foodie” scene in Brixton presents an irony then — an irony of ‘Brixton authenticity’. Old Brixton Market’s past culture established by immigrant communities is also the very foundation for the current food market’s “principles, stories, tastes and traditions”. But they have been packaged in middle and upper class aesthetics.
Space itself was Robinson’s third signifier of gentrification. He was referring to the politics of belonging and behaviour set by White middle-class norms. “Gone are Brixton’s shop signs with reference to identity, no more Jamaican or Trinidad flags, gone are the Arabic script on signs, or any signs of community or cultural inclusivity” commented Robinson. And the signs replacing them are “cryptic”.
With the local space being populated by a new aesthetics of “middle-class modes of dress” and “hipster” stores for everything from stationery to “fromage and champagne”, local communities face microaggressions through looks and profiling from gentrifiers and new retailers. The places where local Black and Brown communities expressed their culture and stories begin to disappear. And they are increasingly given a “clear signal” that any new development and ‘improvement’ to the area is not for them.
Ending the lecture with a reading of his poem New Maps (listen here), Robinson presented the audience with a litany of thought-provoking questions. “Do you want to live somewhere with meaning or somewhere with an idea of meaning?”; “is the town made up of the people or real estate? And when people are displaced, is it the same town?” he asked, leaving the audience to reflect on his insights into ‘the actuality of gentrification’, witnessed at first hand.
Sidra Ahmed is an urban geographer researching London skyscrapers and urban verticality. Sidra is currently an ESRC doctoral researcher working within the Department of Geography at UCL.
You can watch back the lecture on The Bartlett’s YouTube channel until Thursday 17 June. An edited podcast is available on UCL Urban Laboratory’s Soundcloud page until Thursday 1 July. In both versions you can also hear a response to Robinson’s lecture by Lara Choksey (University of Exeter). Subscribe to the Urban Circular newsletter to hear about upcoming events from UCL Urban Laboratory.
Cities Imaginaries is the UCL Urban Laboratory activity strand encompassing the curation and creation of cultural representations of cities and urban life. Led by Professor Matthew Beaumont, previous annual lectures have been delivered by high-profile cultural figures, including David Olusoga, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Urvashi Butalia, Gus Casely-Hayford, and Linton Kwesi Johnson.
