Photo © Stuart Griffiths
How did one of London’s most run-down suburbs become the epicentre for off-piste art? Sleek spent 48 hours there in search of “The Peckham Thing”
Text: Grashina Gabelmann
Photography: Stuart Griffiths
Six pm in Bar Story, Peckham, London. South London. It’s the start of the daily half-price cocktail happy-hour. The place is buzzing with students and young graduates. Everyone seems to know each other and is engaged in at least two conversations at once. There is a tangible excitability in the air, which is due to more than just the prospect of cheap booze.
The bar is situated in a converted railway arch, and somewhere deep inside it sits its owner, Ben Sassoon, a 59-year-old, grey-haired, front-tooth missing, paint-covered T-shirt-wearing chap from Fulham, up the road in the smarter zones of London.
“Fifteen years ago I was cycling through Peckham and thought ‘Wow, what a strange and ethnic area,’” he recalls. “I saw a house for sale, won the auction and moved here. Then in 2003 I saw an empty area underneath Peckham Rye’s railway arches and thought it would make a great bar.” Rather like a runaway train, Bar Story has been an unstoppable success in an area which isn’t exactly known for its boho social life. On the whole, young Londoners don’t go to Peckham to socialize.
“The kids had nowhere to go,” Sassoon goes on. “They immediately latched onto the bar and made it their own.” Over the next few years, Bar Story became a nexus of ideas and projects, dialogue and conversation between students – and art students in particular.
But who are those “kids”? Look around the darkened bar, and you see waxed Barbour jackets, chelsea boots and nerd glasses; there are funky-fresh stars ’n’ stripes leggings and candy-coloured rara skirts. Many of them are here because of one of the nearby art colleges: Camberwell College of Arts, a few miles to the west, and Goldsmiths College, birthplace of the YBAs, not far to the east. Still others live in East London but opt to sip their after-school cocktails here.
Those who do live in Peckham, it seems, can barely contain their excitement for the place. “It reminds me of Astoria, Queens, where I grew up,” says Chris, a rep for music video directors. “I love it here.” Suren Seneviratne, an artist and Goldsmiths graduate, adds, “It’s down to earth, exciting and creative here. “It’s how I imagine East London was a decade ago.”
Since Bar Story’s success, Ben has turned a second arch behind the premises into the Sassoon Gallery. He says that he doesn’t see himself as an artsy person, and lets others do the curating. And curate it they do, because it just so happens that Bar Story is the social epicentre of what you could call British art’s own new epicentre. Peckham, you see, is trendy these days.
The evidence? Listen to Bar Story’s happy-hour conversations, check out the event listings on Facebook or consult the blogs, and the names scroll through: there’s LuckyPDF, an everexpanding network of artists working in performance and new-media art; and Samara Scott, creator of lustrous, surreal objects. There’s the Son Gallery, which is focused on lens-based media, and Food Face, a studio and gallery for experimental art.
You hear about new-media art collective Emotion Driven Process Based Parallel Identities; The Pigeon Wing, a Victorian warehouse turned gallery hosting international residencies; project space Arcadia Missa dedicated to post-internet art; and Rhythm Section, a music/arts collective who put on a lot of Peckham’s parties; creative collective Garadio Studiage, who, among other things, make Peckham-inspired artefacts such as sweatshirts and bags. The list goes on and on.
In recent years South London has been put on the art map – in fact the website SouthLondonArtMap.com is dedicated to doing just that. Last year the New York Times described Peckham as “a go-to cultural destination” while the Guardian sent a journalist on an alternative art tour with Holly Willats, the editor of contemporary art magazine Art Licks.