Photo © Stuart Griffiths
To those familiar with pre-hype Peckham, all this may come as something of a surprise since Peckham’s reputation as anything other than an art epicentre precedes it. It’s a rough-and-ready, deeply un-chichi district of London. The cult Eighties BBC comedy “Only Fools and Horses” crystallized the national perception of Peckham in the unlucky but irrepressible form of Derek “Del Boy” Trotter, a caricatured Cockney wheeler-dealer who lives in a high rise with his grandad and hapless brother Rodney.
“OFAH” was a laugh, but the gang violence, turf wars and murders that have blighted Peckham in the last few years weren’t quite so funny. Until very recently, the last thing Peckham was associated with was conceptual art, let alone the notions of “post-internet” or “object-oriented ontology”. Yet it’s there when you know where to look.
Peckham’s high street, Rye Lane, is typical inner-city London: you push through crowds of shoppers, teenagers and people waiting for buses, past pungent Halal butchers and hair-braiding shops full of African ladies getting their ’dos done to the sound of heavy bass music. Balls of hair come wafting down the pavement: “tumbleweave”, as the art students refer to it.
Just around the corner is the Bussey Building, a former cricket bat and air rifle factory, now home to the Hannah Barry Gallery, which has become the most commercial and well-renowned gallery in Peckham. Established in 2008, it emerged from the squatting underground that was once a big thing around here: Hannah Barry herself used to work with 78 Lyndhurst Way, an artist-run exhibition space on a street parallel to Bellenden Road. Her current gallery is rather more upmarket, and she represents 16 artists once associated with the Lyndhurst squat.
“It was a coincidence that we came to Peckham and happened to meet the people whose work we believed in,” she explains. If Ben Sassoon is the kingpin of Peckham’s boho scene, then Hannah could be its fairy godmother, establishing the means to support young artists not only with her gallery but also with Bold Tendencies – a three-month-long monumental sculpture exhibition on the top four floors of a nearby car park, which is now into its sixth year. The event has attracted exponentially more visitors each year and is in many ways responsible for putting Peckham on the art radar.
“There’s an amazing feeling that people all contribute to supporting each other in a special way. It sounds a bit mystical,” she tentatively says, “but it’s been a transformative thing for so many people, inspiring creativity within people’s minds and imagination.”
On nearby Bellenden Road, there’s Arcadia Missa, a project and studio space founded in 2010 to research “post-internet” culture and provide a physical platform for online art. It was founded by 24-year-old Central St Martin’s graduate Rozsa Farkas, who has lived in Peckham all her life. “Since it’s been noticed as an art area, Peckham has been narrowly described,” she says. “Many will say that there was nothing here before, but that’s not true. There has always been South London Art Gallery, the colleges and a strong art community, though it was more crafty than contemporary. Instead of witnessing a non-art place become an art place, I’ve witnessed a change in demographics and the production of more interesting stuff.” Sven Müendner, a curator at the gallery, notes, “Peckham was suffering from a stigma which wasn’t justified, and the rapid change has enabled Peckham to get rid of that. There is a lot of momentum here and there’s something resonating.”