![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/SG3.jpg\")
Photo \u00a9 Stuart Griffiths<\/p>\n Photo \u00a9 Stuart Griffiths<\/p>\n
How did one of London\u2019s most run-down suburbs become the epicentre for off-piste art? Sleek spent 48 hours there in search of \u201cThe Peckham Thing\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Text: Grashina Gabelmann Six pm in Bar Story, Peckham, London. South London. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cFifteen years ago I was cycling through Peckham and thought \u2018Wow, what a strange and ethnic area,\u2019\u201d he recalls. \u201cI saw a house for sale, won the auction and moved here. Then in 2003 I saw an empty area underneath Peckham Rye\u2019s railway arches and thought it would make a great bar.\u201d Rather like a runaway train, Bar Story has been an unstoppable success in an area which isn\u2019t exactly known for its boho social life. On the whole, young Londoners don\u2019t go to Peckham to socialize.<\/p>\n \u201cThe kids had nowhere to go,\u201d Sassoon goes on. \u201cThey immediately latched onto the bar and made it their own.\u201d Over the next few years, Bar Story became a nexus of ideas and projects, dialogue and conversation between students \u2013 and art students in particular.<\/p>\n But who are those \u201ckids\u201d? Look around the darkened bar, and you see waxed Barbour jackets, chelsea boots and nerd glasses; there are funky-fresh stars \u2019n\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Those who do live in Peckham, it seems, can barely contain their excitement for the place. \u201cIt reminds me of Astoria, Queens, where I grew up,\u201d says Chris, a rep for music video directors. \u201cI love it here.\u201d Suren Seneviratne, an artist and Goldsmiths graduate, adds, \u201cIt\u2019s down to earth, exciting and creative here. \u201cIt\u2019s how I imagine East London was a decade ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Since Bar Story\u2019s success, Ben has turned a second arch behind the premises into the Sassoon Gallery. He says that he doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s own new epicentre. Peckham, you see, is trendy these days.<\/p>\n The evidence? Listen to Bar Story\u2019s happy-hour conversations, check out the event listings on Facebook or consult the blogs, and the names scroll through: there\u2019s LuckyPDF, an everexpanding network of artists working in performance and new-media art; and Samara Scott, creator of lustrous, surreal objects. There\u2019s the Son Gallery, which is focused on lens-based media, and Food Face, a studio and gallery for experimental art.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s parties; creative collective Garadio Studiage, who, among other things, make Peckham-inspired artefacts such as sweatshirts and bags. The list goes on and on.<\/p>\n In recent years South London has been put on the art map \u2013 in fact the website SouthLondonArtMap.com is dedicated to doing just that. Last year the New York Times described Peckham as \u201ca go-to cultural destination\u201d while the Guardian sent a journalist on an alternative art tour with Holly Willats, the editor of contemporary art magazine Art Licks.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0To those familiar with pre-hype Peckham, all this may come as something of a surprise since Peckham\u2019s reputation as anything other than an art epicentre precedes it. It\u2019s a rough-and-ready, deeply un-chichi district of London. The cult Eighties BBC comedy \u201cOnly Fools and Horses\u201d crystallized the national perception of Peckham in the unlucky but irrepressible form of Derek \u201cDel Boy\u201d Trotter, a caricatured Cockney wheeler-dealer who lives in a high rise with his grandad and hapless brother Rodney.<\/p>\n \u201cOFAH\u201d was a laugh, but the gang violence, turf wars and murders that have blighted Peckham in the last few years weren\u2019t quite so funny. Until very recently, the last thing Peckham was associated with was conceptual art, let alone the notions of \u201cpost-internet\u201d or \u201cobject-oriented ontology\u201d. Yet it\u2019s there when you know where to look.<\/p>\n Peckham\u2019s 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 \u2019dos done to the sound of heavy bass music. Balls of hair come wafting down the pavement: \u201ctumbleweave\u201d, as the art students refer to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a coincidence that we came to Peckham and happened to meet the people whose work we believed in,\u201d she explains. If Ben Sassoon is the kingpin of Peckham\u2019s 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an amazing feeling that people all contribute to supporting each other in a special way. It sounds a bit mystical,\u201d she tentatively says, \u201cbut it\u2019s been a transformative thing for so many people, inspiring creativity within people\u2019s minds and imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n On nearby Bellenden Road, there\u2019s Arcadia Missa, a project and studio space founded in 2010 to research \u201cpost-internet\u201d culture and provide a physical platform for online art. It was founded by 24-year-old Central St Martin\u2019s graduate Rozsa Farkas, who has lived in Peckham all her life. \u201cSince it\u2019s been noticed as an art area, Peckham has been narrowly described,\u201d she says. \u201cMany will say that there was nothing here before, but that\u2019s 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\u2019ve witnessed a change in demographics and the production of more interesting stuff.\u201d Sven M\u00fcendner, a curator at the gallery, notes, \u201cPeckham was suffering from a stigma which wasn\u2019t justified, and the rapid change has enabled Peckham to get rid of that. There is a lot of momentum here and there\u2019s something resonating.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There certainly is, including the fashionable Sunday Painter Gallery right next to Peckham Rye train station, which opened in 2008 and offers affordable studios and exhibition space. Will Jarvis and Harry Scoging Beer started the project on a whim, with little experience but plenty of optimism. While the duo claim not to be making money with their space, it has developed in other ways: \u201cWe are seeing a growing strength in who we can ask by the weight of stuff we have done in the past.\u201d Recently Will and Harry gave new media\/online gallery Bubblebyte.org a physical space to celebrate their first anniversary. \u201cIt was stressful but no one would ever try anything new if all the problems were evident from the start,\u201d explains Harry. The duo see the space as a physical portfolio, which pushes them and their exhibited artists, like Ben Wheele and Jesse Wine, forward.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re a recent graduate from an art school trying to start a business \u2013 who’s going to take you seriously?\u201d Will wonders. Hannah Barry would be one such person \u2013 she was so impressed by the boys\u2019 DIY spirit that she asked them to exhibit at Bold Tendencies a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n Peckham\u2019s new popularity comes just as some are asking whether east London \u2013 the bar-, condo- and hipster-filled region where, 20-odd years ago, artists in search of cheap studio space led the vanguarde of gentrification \u2013 is dead.<\/p>\n North of the City and east of Old Street, rents have been hiked, corporations have moved in and the formerly creative zones around Shoreditch no longer seem like the remote, gloomy and underground places they once were. Peckham, meanwhile, largely remains its salt-of-the-earth self. It has limited going-out choices, and its cheapness fuels ideas.<\/p>\n \u201cI find Dalston and Peckham are a mirror of each other,\u201d says Suren Seneviratne. \u201cThere is something more about Peckham though \u2013 it seems like people aren\u2019t trying that hard here.\u201d<\/p>\n Once, students would commute from east London to their south London art schools but now the east has become a place for many to avoid. \u201cI get anxious crossing the river,\u201d says Mitchell Bridges, a member of the art collective Emotion Driven Process Based Parallel Identities, who also works at the South London Gallery. \u201cI\u2019m going over the Tower Bridge, I\u2019m freaking out!\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to imagine that discussions like that happen in and around Peckham, along with rather more sophisticated ones. In a darkened room at Goldsmiths College on the Saturday when Sleek visited, for example, there\u2019s a conflab being held on the meanings of \u201cpost-internet\u201d and \u201cobject oriented ontology\u201d: terms in the art-critical vernacular that are too new to really define. Opinions on \u201cassumed network culture as reality of everyday life\u201d, the consequences of network society, and the relationship of objects, are heatedly exchanged among the 25 or so people here. Post-internet, a discussion which started in New York, has now arrived in Peckham, of all places. But what does it mean?<\/p>\n \u201cMany of the galleries and projects we know in Peckham are trying to embody the ideas of post-internet structurally, rather than simply trying to produce or exhibit them with traditional models,\u201d explains John Hill of LuckyPDF.<\/p>\n Perhaps what that means in concrete terms is that the nature of Peckham art, the things themselves and the way they are made, is about connecting gallerists and squatters, institutions and graduates. It\u2019s a grassroots, off-piste, under-the radar approach to the game. \u201cThe space between graduating from university and showing in galleries is really interesting and exciting,\u201d says Sarah Jury of The Pigeon Wing. \u201cIt\u2019s a real struggle for artists and they become really inventive. That\u2019s where agency really happens.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These days there\u2019s erudition in London\u2019s least pretentious neighbourhood, but there may be more prosaic reasons for Peckham\u2019s popularity among the young and the arty. It was Gareth Owen Lloyd, of Food Face Gallery\/studio space, who organized the Goldsmiths discussion. \u201cThe emergence of the Peckham scene has baffled me quite a bit but I\u2019ve come up with \u2018The theory of the 436\u2019 to make sense of it,\u201d he says. The 436 is a bus route which passes many of London\u2019s key art colleges: Chelsea, the London College of Communication, Camberwell and Goldsmiths. \u201cIf you then look at the areas surrounding the 436 route the only affordable area to live in is Peckham.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cIt didn\u2019t matter what you were doing,\u201d Owen Lloyd says. \u201cAll that mattered in Peckham was that you were doing something.\u201d Food Face\u2019s name derived from a sign above the door of a former caf\u00e9 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. \u201cAt first only our friends came but then people we didn\u2019t know showed up and it quickly became a community. Then a year ago we decided to be more focused and started doing regular shows.\u201d Food Face encourage experimental art and offer the perfect space for it: by moving the studio\u2019s hinged walls around, artists are able to literally re-invent the space.<\/p>\n Owen Lloyd dates the first Peckham tremors to 2008. \u201cThere are no artists here who graduated pre-2008. It\u2019s not an exaggeration. They all moved to Hackney or Dalston and then came a real clear cut.\u201d 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. \u201cIt\u2019s a weird mix of party turning into an art scene,\u201d Gareth notes.<\/p>\n And the future? In many ways, Peckham\u2019s new art underground mirrors east London\u2019s 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, \u201cPeckham\u201d \u2013 the scene, rather than the place \u2013 had to happen.<\/p>\n \u201cThe funny thing is that it\u2019s been weirdly like a self-fulfilling prophecy,\u201d says Will Jarvis of The Sunday Painter. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of hype about the area and for ages there wasn\u2019t much happening, but because of the hype people have started doing stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cThere is a willingnesss to adapt. In part that\u2019s due to a general resistance to being fixed from the outside to a particular set of ideas and a sharp awareness of how \u2018new\u2019 becomes not-new.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201clovely jubbly\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0From Sleek 34 \u201cThe Trip\u201d<\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Photo \u00a9 Stuart Griffiths How did one of London\u2019s most run-down suburbs become the epicentre for off-piste art? Sleek spent 48 hours there in search of \u201cThe Peckham Thing\u201d Text: Grashina GabelmannPhotography: Stuart Griffiths\u00a0 Six pm in Bar Story, Peckham, London. South London. It\u2019s the start of the daily half-price cocktail happy-hour. The place is…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5638,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[440,441,201,141,442,443,444,445,446,447,448],"class_list":["post-5632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-arcadia-missa","tag-bar-story","tag-grashina-gabelmann","tag-london","tag-luckypdf","tag-off-modern","tag-peckham","tag-rosza-farkas","tag-stuart-griffiths","tag-sunday-painter-gallery","tag-yuri-pattison"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Photography: Stuart Griffiths\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/SG1.jpg\")
Photo \u00a9 Stuart Griffiths<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/SG2.jpg\")
Photo \u00a9 Stuart Griffiths<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/SG.jpg\")
Photo \u00a9 Stuart Griffiths<\/p>\n