The decline of Atlantic Road

[Brixton Hatter]

give me brixton in the 50's any day, nice neigbours, hardly no crime.

Oh yeah, the Golden Age of the 1950s when everything was perfect and you could leave your door unlocked.

 

[editor]

I think maybe what the 50s had that we've lost now is a sense of optimism and excitement. A dreadful war was slowly fading into memory, there was a real prospect of living standards improving for people, the NHS was established, TV was becoming widely available, technology was improving at a rate of knots with people buying time saving appliances available and maybe people felt that things really were going to get better.

Fast forward 50-odd years and we've got everything they could have possibly wanted back then and we're not exactly bursting with joy and optimism, are we?

 

[potential]

imo people had a sense of belonging,
now its you out for what you can get

 

[editor]

imo people had a sense of belonging,
now its you out for what you can get

That's not true for everyone, you know.

 

[potential]

That's not true for everyone, you know.

granted...
whenever my mum comes around she ask's to see all the old pic's of brixton and tells me she saw "gone with the wind" at the cinema thats now the fridge or spent ages looking in the windows at the clothes shop next to the bon marche...
but now if she wants to go shopping she will go to bromley or john lewis its just safer and thats soo tragic....

 

[Mind]

brixton is in a sorry state, but why are you saying it needs an injection of cash ?
brixton has had more grants, improvement cash injections than anywhere
its the people who make it shit, you can have an army of road sweepers but if the locals dont give a fuck, pissing in the street, muggers drug dealers.
give me brixton in the 50's any day, nice neigbours, hardly no crime.
if a shop owner cant even keep the outside clean, what do you think the store rooms where the food is kept looks like

Too right.

There's a block of flats that looks like a huge mansion just by the Harmony bar on Railton. There are quite a few families with young children living ther, yet I regularly see people going inside to urinate because it has a lot bushy greenery.
It really is quite disgusting.
The families actually had to put a sign up telling people not to piss in the garden where their children play.

Sadly those are the types of neighbours we have here, and there's no amount of grants or cash injections that will solve that.

 

[poster342002]

London's always been grubby.

This was/is indeed the case with parts of London, but it seems like more and more of it is falling into a shabby and rundown state.

Furthermore, the contrast between the central area and the rest has never been more stark, imo.

 

[tarannau]

I don't see this at all. When I was a nipper, huge swathes of South London were pretty much fucked - Brixton, Clapham, Battersea and the like all had crumbling multiple-occupancy housing stock. Now it's 3-wheeled pram territory, with even the tatty warehouses by the river replaced by luxury 350k one bed flat in a tower monstrosities by St George.

Camden, Kings Cross, even the Charlotte St area have been massively cleaned up. Even Croydon's gone all glass fronted and corporate welcoming.

Where and when are you thinking about Poster?

 

[poster342002]

I don't see this at all. When I was a nipper, huge swathes of South London were pretty much fucked - Brixton, Clapham, Battersea and the like all had crumbling multiple-occupancy housing stock. Now it's 3-wheeled pram territory, with even the tatty warehouses by the river replaced by luxury 350k one bed flat in a tower monstrosities by St George.

Camden, Kings Cross, even the Charlotte St area have been massively cleaned up. Even Croydon's gone all glass fronted and corporate welcoming.

Where and when are you thinking about Poster?

I think we're sort of coming full circle with it again. Many areas now are full of derelict shops and houses. The luxury flats are the preserve of a few.

Basically, we've got a return of a situation with a lot of impoverished people living in the grotty bits that the developers aren't interested in while the rich and big business live/function in almost surreally different luxury.

take Walthamstow - as mentioend further back. Once I can remember a bustling community there in the early 80s - but now it's in a right state.

 

[tarannau]

What? Are you really that delusional? Full circle in 30 years?

So in the mid-70's people around here all lived in perfectly-mixed harmony, in decent quality housing stock, thriving local shops and without huge contrasts in wealth.

Meanwhile, on earth, without the rose-tinted memories and belief that everything is much more miserable now...

 

[Giles]

I would say that in the last 10 years, many derelict places have been fixed up. The rise in prices made a lot of owners of run-down places realise that they were worth spending the money on, because they could then sell them for loads more......

It wouldn't surprise me if some of the Atlantic Road buildings are owned by some organisation that is too big or incompetent to see or care about the potential value of their near-derelict properties.

In my experience most individuals or small companies won't leave places empty because its their money they are wasting and they can see this.

Big organisations where no-one takes responsibility frequently seem to leave places to rot.

Giles..

 

[Stobart Stopper]

Brixton is going to be on tv tomorrow night, Inside Out, BBC1 at 7.30, something about buying guns in the area/gangs etc.
There was an article about it in today's Evening Standard.