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Bohemian Brixton
Destination story...
Every day Brixton’s cultural carnival meets at Electric Avenue. At the Brixton Market, you can admire the tenacity of penniless artists creating figures from wire, art from scrapped household appliances. You can buy fish fry and tofu from the Chinese shops, flying fish and plantain from the West Indies – or how about cuttlefish and goat’s cheese from the Mediterranean? The African shops are populated by skinned goats festooned to hooks, and gawking pigs’ heads; while the Middle Eastern stalls, shrouded in the fragrance of fresh coriander, offer prickly pear and okra and halal meats.
If you don’t feel like shopping, you can watch the African women garbed in their turbans and silk shawls, listen to raggae or Middle Eastern wails, or hang out with the rapid-talking Jamaicans with bushy dreads and a joint perpetually lolling in their mouths. Or sit in the poetry café and observe the African saloons across the road building elaborate hairstyles and crafting perfect fingernails.
In many ways Brixton is to London what Harlem is to New York. It boasts a community of bohemians that is rare in a big city, some excellent clubs, and enough pot to make you a plane spotter.
Ironically, Brixton’s vibrancy today is all down to its grimy history. When the train network – railway viaducts characterise Brixton – connected the district to central London in the late nineteenth century, the middle classes build the monumental Victorian houses. But Brixton quickly slunk out of favour given its locale south of the Thames. The proud Victorian houses were divided into flats for working class inhabitants and poor actors who worked in fledgling West End theatres. At the middle of the twentieth century the waves of West Indian and African immigrants made Brixton home (making up thirty percent of the inhabitants).
Brixton resisted the turbulent Margaret Thatcher years in the Brixton Riots of the 1980s when the inhabitants revolted at overbearing police discrimination and brutality. The rioters defended the frontline (where Coldharbour Lane meets Atlantic Road) with torched cars and molotov cocktails. Brixton blazed, and when, in the aftermath, many residents fled, the vacant buildings attracted a new wave of migrants like air into a vacuum: artists, writers, political activists, and plain dropouts who squatted empty properties. These formed arts collectives, green co-operatives, and championed the emerging Acid House scene in illegal rave parties. In 1991 the CoolTan Arts Collective was set up in a squat, offering a roof for outside artists, an alternative café, volunteers offering courses in anything from philosophy to photography, jazz bands playing every night, and raves on weekends. Today’s anti-globalisation direct action movement owes much to CoolTan: it is where Reclaim the Streets, Earth First and Freedom Network first bandied.
The 39-year-old Shane Collins, one of CoolTan’s prime movers, remains an inexorable ideologue on unemployment benefit to free his time for his chosen causes. Short and fairy, he sports a light gait and easy laugh. He’s one of the organisers of the Cannabis Festival, a candidate and drugs’ spokesperson for the British Green Party. “Our policy,” he explained, “is to legalise all drugs irrespective of whether we think drugs are good for you or not. In a country that has the highest drug use in Europe and one-third of crime is drug-related, we believe the best way for the government to reduce crime and control drugs is by legalisation."
We sat in a restaurant on Coldharbour Lane, Brixton’s cultural and nightlife precinct, watching the trickle of revellers jostling into clubs. Across the street, the Living Room is the latest DJ Bar with designer décor, expensive bottled beer, and middle class clientele flaunting their designer clothes – the epitome, to many, that Brixton is going full circle and attracting yuppies. I asked Shane what has changed. “There are a lot less empty buildings to squat,” he said, “and the political, artistic movement is now fragmented and scattered.”
The squat scene now revolves around The Voice, a former office block that throws rave parties on weekends. You’re likely to meet the bohemians at the effortlessly hip Prince Albert, a pub on Coldharbour Lane, and the Hobgoblin on Effra Road, which doubles into a club on weekends – where word is spread of parties elsewhere. The Windmill, another pub on Brixton Hill, hosts local bands and DJs experimenting with trippy and warped electronic sounds. The Effra, on Kellett Road, is a grand Victorian pub that serves Jamaican dishes such as curried goat and jerk chicken, and offers live jazz and jamming sessions. The publicity-shy Club 414 is a small club that dishes out hard house to a buzzy crowd.
The Dogstar, London’s original DJ bar, showcases different music every night; free on weeknights, hideously packed on weekends. Mass, situated in St Matthews Church (one of Brixton’s oldest buildings erected in 1812), has London’s best drum’n’bass and hip-hop nights. The Brixton Academy, a massive theater converted into concert hall, puts up some big trance and hard house parties, and hosts concerts from Madonna to Orbital.
Brixton is famous for its pot. Virtually every doorway in Coldharbour Lane has its drug tout, peddling mostly locally grown weed but also the full range of exotic incarnations. The Brixton police have recently adopted a more tolerant stance: cannabis for personal use is confiscated without even booking the user. That Brixton is the only district in the UK where cannabis possession won’t lead to arrest is tribute to Brixton’s liberal and counterculture demeanour.
© Victor Paul Borg
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