if New York can die so can London

[gumdrops]

yeah, im not saying its new, just saying its prob inevitable. in new york it was the village pre williamsburg but what was the artistic/creatives hotbed pre old street though?

 

[mms]

all i was saying was that if east london is getting too costly and ppl are being priced out then those ppl might end up moving further out to places like walthamstow or gasp, essex. essex could be the new place to watch (im sort of joking - maybe logan can tell us). then again essex is bloody far to get to anywhere isnt it.

but then a place like walthamstow would eventually just end up like old street. i.e. once young artsy but not so well off white ppl move in, and make it seem a bit more inviting and less risky than when it was all immigrants, it entices slightly richer, newer, mainly white residents, and so on and so on.

im just rambling really, i dont live or work in old street. and the whole focus on old street, cool as that area is/was, its still quite a diff market from the romford/essex/faces/if bar/fridgebar type of clubs. could be wrong but when luka was talking about london dying, i dont think he really cared or was talking about old street dying. i thought he was talking more about the 'hcc' lineage dying. and maybe there just isnt enough reward or energy in music anymore to motivate it into having the same momentum it had.

sure - and i wasn't talking about that - but the hcc is eastend music more or less - so discussing the tooings and throoings of the eastend is a good way to discuss it without entering into some kind of discussion of imagining what post dubstep and funky producers are thinking.

essex stretches out of the east end, suburban base was romford, happy hardcore came from essex - raves went on all around the east end and stretching out to the surrounding counties etc...
could that ever be activated again on a scale it was - there are certainly still raves but not like that time

what if all the people who go to iya napia never came back?

 

[luka]

for what its worth evreyone i know from my area (newham) who has bought a house has got on in essex... chadwell heath, all that sort of area. its been happening for years that stuff anyway.

 

[gumdrops]

yeah, everyone from east london eventually moves to outer essex, and then, they might even move further into deep essex.

could it be activated again? i think weve been asking that question of most areas lol.

what if all the people who go to iya napia never came back?

i dont know the answer to this question. unless you mean essex would be empty.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

once young artsy but not so well off white ppl move in, and make it seem a bit more inviting and less risky than when it was all immigrants, it entices slightly richer, newer, mainly white residents, and so on and so on.

well that's the nuts + bolts of gentrification isn't it. I remember seeing Mike Davis (whom for those unfamiliar is a lefty sociologist focusing on urban theory, mainly through the prism of L.A.) speak many years ago about the concept of "edge cities" - essentially as urban cores are gentrified the people who previously lived there are priced out and wind up moving to the older inner suburbs, triggering a flight from those suburbs to a new ring of outer suburbs (the so-called edge cities), which are connected to the urban core by highways, allowing the affluent to travel back and forth for work + play unhindered, w/the inner suburbs becoming the new slums on the order of French banlieues. I've never been to London + am unfamiliar w/its geography but I gather that's kind of what you're getting at in re: Essex etc. it's certainly the case in many American cities. for example here in Chicago many of the inner suburbs are anywhere from solid working-class to seriously rundown and the gentrification of Chicago proper was galloping along until the recession put a serious kink in the plans of most developers.

it seems to me that when people bemoan the "death" of cities, or rather neighborhoods, in this context what they're really mourning is the intermediate period between the first artsy transplants (or actually the squatters are first) moving in and the point when the condos go up + the hipsters are priced out by the yuppies. or, not the loss of the original neighborhood so much as the loss of the interplay between that + the transplants. I mean no one ever wants to be on the side of gentrification but I think it's kind of impossible to define the point at which you yourself are contributing to it...this is something I've thought about endlessly ever since I opened my first squat in a poor almost entirely black neighborhood in West Philly when I was 17. not that I have any particularly good answers. I will say that the white punk rock (or tekno free party types of whatever)/activist/etc types being the most virulently anti-gentrification of anyone has an almost schizophrenic quality to it...

 

[outraygeous]

Could I be as bold in saying somewhere like Brixton might become the new spot?

People I know are moving there, less artsy but vibrant

And where was this rave with the wide boy? I want to go!

 

[Slothrop]

I mean no one ever wants to be on the side of gentrification but I think it's kind of impossible to define the point at which you yourself are contributing to it...

The whole thing isn't helped by the fact that most young middle class professionals have essentially been priced out of traditionally middle class areas themselves...

 

[gumdrops]

Could I be as bold in saying somewhere like Brixton might become the new spot?

that seems more like clapham, finsbury park and around there. places that have just been gentrified in the standard way, but without any real kind of arts/creative community. you would never have gotten a cheese market in brixton before, but now you can find one (or so im told, i moved out of there around 2006).

 

[mistersloane]

Could I be as bold in saying somewhere like Brixton might become the new spot?

People I know are moving there, less artsy but vibrant

And where was this rave with the wide boy? I want to go!

Brixton is going kinda Broadway Market way, first couples with child who similarly ruined Clapham and should have fucked off to Brighton where they belong. Brixton's always had a hippy middle class though, Josephine Avenue and all that.

It's all gonna be New Cross/Deptford/Camberwell for the hipsters and art kids, already is.

They're welcome to it, as long as they stay out of Rotherhithe I don't care. Bermondsey is already a lovely bit of West London we got here, and will increase that way with the Shard.

Whoever said that about the Overground is way on the money, it's going to and already has radically changed south/east London. It's amazing, and is more significant than any of the Olympic stuff or Kings X.

 

[mrfaucet]

Yeah think Camberwell/Peckham/New Cross is the next place. As Sloane says you can already see indications of it. The fact it hasn't go tube connections makes it easier as rents are cheaper, although I guess they'll go up once all the new overground stuff is completed (that loop around London).

 

[gumdrops]

completely forgot about new cross and around there. weird cos i used to work with a girl who lived there. but yeah, that is the next place. i think the little scene the klaxons came from was around there.

 

[Blackdown]

Things change, loci shift - we know this. But to answer the question "die" it has to be a total mass migration et ... right?

 

[untied]

I don't have much to say about the "hipster" movement or whether it is necessarily detrimental (primarily because I don't know what being a hipster means, aside from wearing fashionable clothes), but I live around New Cross, and what I like about it the most is how well it accommodates people of all different stripes. Living round here feels like the London of old - still populated by locals, friendly, accommodating and with an excellent community spirit. It's not for nothing that the Green Party have their biggest support base down here and that so many creative/artistic venues and projects are community-run.

Gentrification has crept in, like anywhere in London I suppose, but, for the moment at least, NX/Deptford/Peckham is an area where groups from various social strata co-exist perfectly well. It's primarily an issue of space - there's still plenty of empty land around here, but it might not be for long. You only have to look at what the local authorities are trying to do with Lewisham town centre to see how quickly things can change.

But I also want to say that I don't think places/movements will ever "die". Gentrification doesn't mean that people will stop making music and whether music is made by a cash-strapped artist or middle-class hipster should have no bearing on its overall value.

 

[luka]

newe york was the capital of rap, then it wasnt. in this limited sense it can be said to have 'died' paris was the capital of the international avant garde, then it wasnt. in this limited sense it can be said to hav died.

 

[luka]

do london people have anything interesting to say about boris? i was sad to hear about the banning of booze on public transport.

 

[Leo]

newe york was the capital of rap, then it wasnt. in this limited sense it can be said to have 'died' paris was the capital of the international avant garde, then it wasnt. in this limited sense it can be said to hav died.

by definition, dying is something that can't be done in a limited sense, like being sort of pregnant. it's dead or it's not.

 

[mistersloane]

I got thrown out of a really important meeting with An Arts Council Funded Organisation for saying that I wanted to stab Boris Johnson.

 

[outraygeous]

I got thrown out of a really important meeting with An Arts Council Funded Organisation for saying that I wanted to stab Boris Johnson.

I owe you a beer

 

[Corpsey]

newe york was the capital of rap, then it wasnt. in this limited sense it can be said to have 'died' paris was the capital of the international avant garde, then it wasnt. in this limited sense it can be said to hav died.

Is this necessarily connected with gentrification, though? The New York rap thing, I mean. Was this not to do with rap in other parts of the U.S. becoming more and more prominent off the back of regional support (i.e. No Limit), breaking into the commercial mainstream etc.?

In a sense you could argue that what 'killed' NY rap was the weight of its history, it being in thrall to its own tradition/canon (interesting, I've just remembered Sick Boy (I think?) saying something similar about London 'nuum'-influenced music). On the other hand I suppose you could say that New York rappers fucked up by trying to ape the styles of other regions instead of sticking to what it does best... I don't really know enough about this subject to make a convincing argument either way!

I understand that New York has been subject to a process of gentrification, I just would have expected the same people (from project areas/non-affluent areas) to be making rap as there always has been in New York.

Again, I wonder if its simply a case of New York dying or if its more to do with other regions coming to life...

 

[gumdrops]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/17/london-olympic-regeneration