Matt Bolton explores the role of art in the 'so-called "regeneration" of Peckham', where the top floor of a disused multi-storey car park has become a new hang-out for 'creatives'.
Bold Tendencies is the art space and cocktail bar standing imperiously on top of a Peckham multi-storey car park. It is charged with so much architectural symbolism it's almost funny: a sky-high contemporary gallery in one of London's poorest districts, packed each evening with painfully well-dressed young white people supping Campari bitters, who gaze down upon the streets of pound shops, mobile phone stalls and cheap clothes stores below.
The Evening Standard loves it, naturally. A recent piece extolling "Peckhamania" was filled with picture after picture of white "creatives" making art or tucking into artisan street food, with Bold Tendencies held up as the "epicentre of new Peckham". Not one black or brown person was featured, despite Peckham being one of the most ethnically diverse areas in Britain. At last, the paper seemed to be saying, we can finally welcome Peckham into our white supremacist fantasyland of a city and we've got art to thank for it.
For those opposed to the so-called "regeneration" of Peckham – and of London generally – Bold Tendencies has unsurprisingly turned into something of a whipping boy. And with it, the question of the relationship between art and gentrification has once more been raised. It seems that wherever artists go, rising property prices, cafes filled with seats from 1940s railway stations and low-level ethnic cleansing appears to follow: is art itself to blame? If so, can the trend be broken?
Bold Tendencies is the art space and cocktail bar standing imperiously on top of a Peckham multi-storey car park. It is charged with so much architectural symbolism it's almost funny: a sky-high contemporary gallery in one of London's poorest districts, packed each evening with painfully well-dressed young white people supping Campari bitters, who gaze down upon the streets of pound shops, mobile phone stalls and cheap clothes stores below.
The Evening Standard loves it, naturally. A recent piece extolling "Peckhamania" was filled with picture after picture of white "creatives" making art or tucking into artisan street food, with Bold Tendencies held up as the "epicentre of new Peckham". Not one black or brown person was featured, despite Peckham being one of the most ethnically diverse areas in Britain. At last, the paper seemed to be saying, we can finally welcome Peckham into our white supremacist fantasyland of a city and we've got art to thank for it.
For those opposed to the so-called "regeneration" of Peckham – and of London generally – Bold Tendencies has unsurprisingly turned into something of a whipping boy. And with it, the question of the relationship between art and gentrification has once more been raised. It seems that wherever artists go, rising property prices, cafes filled with seats from 1940s railway stations and low-level ethnic cleansing appears to follow: is art itself to blame? If so, can the trend be broken?