Photo © Stuart Griffiths
These days there’s erudition in London’s least pretentious neighbourhood, but there may be more prosaic reasons for Peckham’s popularity among the young and the arty. It was Gareth Owen Lloyd, of Food Face Gallery/studio space, who organized the Goldsmiths discussion. “The emergence of the Peckham scene has baffled me quite a bit but I’ve come up with ‘The theory of the 436’ to make sense of it,” he says. The 436 is a bus route which passes many of London’s key art colleges: Chelsea, the London College of Communication, Camberwell and Goldsmiths. “If you then look at the areas surrounding the 436 route the only affordable area to live in is Peckham.”
Gareth and Richard J. Butler, graduates from Chelsea College of Art, founded Food Face a couple of years ago. Peckham is nothing if not a DIY, collectivist place: “It didn’t matter what you were doing,” Owen Lloyd says. “All that mattered in Peckham was that you were doing something.” Food Face’s name derived from a sign above the door of a former café in the Bussey Building: initially the location served as a studio for Gareth and Richard, but they started using the space as a forum for weekly group art critiques. “At first only our friends came but then people we didn’t know showed up and it quickly became a community. Then a year ago we decided to be more focused and started doing regular shows.” Food Face encourage experimental art and offer the perfect space for it: by moving the studio’s hinged walls around, artists are able to literally re-invent the space.
Owen Lloyd dates the first Peckham tremors to 2008. “There are no artists here who graduated pre-2008. It’s not an exaggeration. They all moved to Hackney or Dalston and then came a real clear cut.” The same year also saw the birth of the music and art collective Off Modern (whose members include Will Hunt, Johnny Prichard, Tom Harrad, Yuri Pattison and Felix Petty), which started putting on club night-meets-exhibition events and brought an east London crowd down to Peckham. “It’s a weird mix of party turning into an art scene,” Gareth notes.
And the future? In many ways, Peckham’s new art underground mirrors east London’s boom, and every year brings bigger presences: White Cube Gallery recently opened their new space in nearby Bermondsey, Bold Tendencies attracted more than 45,000 visitors in 2010, and future plans to improve transport links will inevitably make it more accessible. In another sense, “Peckham” – the scene, rather than the place – had to happen.
“The funny thing is that it’s been weirdly like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Will Jarvis of The Sunday Painter. “There’s been a lot of hype about the area and for ages there wasn’t much happening, but because of the hype people have started doing stuff.”
Back in Bar Story, LuckyPDF are celebrating their goodbye party before embarking on a six-week residency in Australia. Member John Hill thinks Peckham and its artists will be just fine for the future, despite the hype: “There is a willingnesss to adapt. In part that’s due to a general resistance to being fixed from the outside to a particular set of ideas and a sharp awareness of how ‘new’ becomes not-new.”
One day, no doubt, the big-money art dealers will arrive. Perhaps the smell of money in Peckham will even bring Del Boy out of retirement. You can imagine him rubbing his hands with a glint in his eye: “lovely jubbly…”
From Sleek 34 “The Trip”