london

Truefact: The current book hostage you are holding comes from that very bookshop!

(I should probably attempt to get it back from you before you move and it disappears into boxed-up limbo, eh.)

i'm p good with keeping that sort of thing separate (i have a 'not my books don't take to indian restaurant' pile). i have finished it tho, so happy to do mid-frozen cold war forest hostage swap at any point.

herne hill is quite nice if I ever want to live in south london probably there. no tube though, obv.

Yes, the bookshop in Herne Hill is nice, and there is also an excellent oxfam bookshop on half moon lane. The half moon pub isn't going to open until the summer after the big flood. The Florence now has a creche. West Norwood FTW.

herne hill has a very lazy feel that i like, especially so close to the nonstop insanity of brixton

but yeah, it's been gentrified long before brixton went down that road, no?

yeah, no? no, yeah?

I found Herne Hill increasingly unbearably smug towards the end of living there, although this was probably due to the best pub, the Half moon, being closed for last 6 months, with the alternatives not being much cop and full of 4 years olds running around. Living within cycling distance of Brockwell Park has proved to be a good compromise personally, and I now live in a place twice the size of the old one. Also better connected now in comparison, although it's all buses and trains (as opposed to the Brixton tube).

I think the gentrification is a recent thing. My girlfriend thinks it's been within the last 5 years, and remembers her football team being thrown out of The Regent (for dancing on tables!) when it was an old spit and sawdust irish pub, and squats along Railton Road. Rent prices have certainly skyrocketed in the the 2 and a half years we were there.

My brother moved to Herne Hill in the mid-80s (he was a student and managed to get short life housing in one of the big houses up on Herne Hill itself, his room cost a princely £6 per week!) and the impression I have is that over that period HH started more (lower-)middle class than Brixton but the gentrification which has happened to HH has been Brixton led.

Quite how I've managed to pick up that impression I'm not sure; HH, as far as I can tell, never went through an edgy hipster phase, and I think Brixton's edgy hipster phase* surely started before Herne Hill had changed very much - I always thought it managed to appeal to people who liked the edgy-hipster element of Brixton but didn't necessarily want to live in the middle of it.

*think we still called them trustafarians in those days; I guess they were a bit different but probably performed the same shock-troops-of-gentrification purpose

edgy-hipster gentrification and yummy-mummy gentrification are pretty distinct things and i get the impression the latter is what's happening to herne hill? (also lower clapton)

herne hill as the stoke newington to brixton's dalston, or something

Yes, it's Yummy-Mummy Gentrification as opposed to Edgy-Hipster Gentrification, but, also, lesbians.

just like stoke newington!!

ehh there probably is a dalston-stokey causality given that we're nigh on 20 years of edgy east ldn

(I set 'em up, you nail the joke.)

x-post to Lex

Yes, Yummy Mummification nails it for Herne Hill, hence creches in the Florence etc. Although halfway up Railton Road (where the squats were based) sort of turns into Brixton anyway. If Herne Hill ever had an edge, it was based around the Half Moon pub. I guess the pedestriansiation of the square (in 2012) around the train station helped, turning it from little more than a fairly depressing junction to a place where you can do stuff. Sunday markets, outdoor films and the like.

stoke newington-dalston
herne hill-brixton
brockley-new cross

same thing? discuss

I dunno, when I moved here Stoke Newington had a rep for being (um, what was it called back then?) alternative, the cliche was the cider swilling end of the anarchist spectrum, right? There was never a great deal of that in Herne Hill, and what there was amounted to Brixton overspill as far as I could tell. Stoke Newington went through its own edgy -> yummy gentrification process, which seemed to me largely independent of what happened to Dalston (though it may have been partially responsble for what happened to Dalston, I guess?).

("When I moved here": here = London, not Stoke Newington, I'm firmly SE15/SE22 with a short sojourn all the way over in SE16; when = 1998.)

i feel like all these little micro-histories, growing patiently like moss and lichen - with the occasional kudzu vine bolting startlingly through the branches - have just been bush hogged, the whole thing plowed under. shitty fourth-floor council flats going for £385K in stamford hill and bow just makes a nonsense of this stuff.

I think that makes it more important to *remember* the micro-histories.

and to not buy shitty council flats in stamford hill for $385k

Remember though, Dalston and Stoke Newington were where people who couldn't afford Islington always wound up buying.

That's certainly been true for the last 10-15 years but Stoke Newington's position as somewhere with a bohemian, middle class reputation probably predates the rise of Islington as a particularly desirable neighbourhood.

Like Islington, it has always had huge pockets of deprivation and crime, though. I'm not sure it ever went through a phase of having an 'edgy' reputation as a whole, it's more like two separate places (one rough, one leafy and middle class) layered on top of each other.

When I first moved back to London (1998) right through the CTCL/beginning of Plan B years, Stoke Newington was a place of squat raves, edgey youngperson houseshares, free jazz basements and, yes, lesbians. There was a kind of leafy bit around Church St and the park, but that was Islington overspill, I guess, rather than the edgey gentrification that was coming up the A10 from edgey youngpersons priced out of Hoxditch.

Odd how so many views of different bits of London can coexist in people's minds.

aye, t'were nothing but fields when i moved here one score and four months ago.

i hear there was a bit around lordship road that was/is a red light district

xp, To me, the identity that people associate with Stoke Newington (the middle-class, leftist, gay one) is inseparable from its history as a place where a lot of liberal, secular Jewish people settled in the 70s. I think that's distinct from Islington in a lot of ways. That might be more around Church Street and Stamford Hill, rather than the High Street, though.

And yes, there's a red light district around Brownswood Road (iirc) near Lordship Lane.

See, this, to me, is more reason for remembering all the micro-histories, because without them, areas with a rich heritage end up just being associated with "whatever people you knew there/whatever things you did there."

Totally! The Islington overspill thing started in the '70s and basically went anyplace in the Borough of Hackney where flat-fronted Georgians and other old, pretty houses were available eg. Clissold Park, Mildmay Park and de Beauvoir. The 'trendy Jewish people of N16' thing makes sense, too - explains a few friends who are 10 years younger than me, who grew up there.

When I first came to London, Stokey *was* very crusty/lesbian; we called it Stoic Newington.

and to not buy shitty council flats in stamford hill for $385k

Stamford Hill or on top of Old Stokey as my friend David used to quip... and talking of Old Stokey

Dalston and Stoke Newington were where people who couldn't afford Islington always wound up buying.

And now Walthamstow has become the destination for people priced out of Stoke Newington

xp Love that egg stores sign

xp indeed, I am one of those ex-Stokey people now in Walthamstow.

we called it Stoic Newington.

idgi

better transport links in walthamstow than stokey

xxpost

xxxp Quite a common journey over the years, i believe. A lot of the suburban areas surrounding Walthamstow were populated by people moving out of Hackney and Haringey. I think of my London family as being from Waltham Forest but have lots of great aunts, etc, buried in Abney Park and am reliably informed that my great-great-grandfather used to sell carbonated drinks on Hackney Marshes in the 1870s.

hah that's great! I lived in Lower Clapton until I was 2, which seems to be the point around which I have gravitated for the last 7 years or so...

Herne Hill's gentrification is mostly due to being right next to DULWICH, it's nothing to do with Brixton. See also the pretty much complete gentrification of East Dulwich over the last 20 years, in which it's gone from being Peckham-with-nicer-houses to Stoke Newington South-of-the-River. But yeah, it's all yummy mummification, although a lot of them will be ex-hipsters now comfortably in their 30s.

Haha, Waltham Forest is getting way, way, way too close to where I grew up. Is there even still a forest there?

And that actually makes more sense, of Herne Hill being Dulwich overspill rather than Brixton overspill, that's actually kinda more its vibe. (Though things like the Lambeth Country Fair being in Brockwell Park make it Brixton-ish. Brockwell Park is a Brixton park.) I no longer understand Dulwich, though I'm not sure I ever did, as the "East" and "North" anexes of it don't correspond to geographical directions, but to train stations? It's so confusing.

Waltham Forest was the old name for Epping Forest which is still there.

edgy-hipster gentrification and yummy-mummy gentrification are pretty distinct things and i get the impression the latter is what's happening to herne hill? (also lower clapton)

Really it's the difference between people moving for cheap rents + cool places to go out and people buying up housing stock. Having a park nearby helps with the latter as well.

OK, these are childhood (under the age of 9) memories, so very unreliable. There's definitely a forest in Epping, and I was born in the borough of Epping, it says so on my birth certificate. Also I have been to Epping Forest lots, recently.

But there's another ancient woods near Waltham Cross/Cheshunt area (might be as far out as Cuffley?) which I think I might have decided was the actual Waltham Forest in my child-head? We used to walk there a lot. I've no idea what it was called now.

ayo, what's a good wood in SE? Done Nunhead reservoir/One Tree Hill to death.

I only know remnants of the Great North Wood stretched between Crystal Palace and Tooting. Some of that is love, but very small. Would be happy to know of other South woods accessible by TFL.

I've been looking at maps. Oh, England, I love you. There is no forest in the London borough of Waltham Forest. The woods are several miles north, in Waltham Abbey. That makes so much sense! Not.

weirdly google maps labels this bit as walthamstow forest
https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=waltham+forest&ll=51.599854,0.006523&spn=0.008623,0.016522&hnear=London+Borough+of+Waltham+Forest,+Greater+London,+United+Kingdom&gl=uk&t=h&z=16

That's not actually true btw. There is a bit of Epping forest that for some reason wasn't built over, from Hollow Pond by the hospital in the south east of the borough going up north to Chingford.