Gentrified Brixton

I ate jerk chicken for lunch in Brixton. A few of us bought boxes of it with purple rice and carrots from a man drinking a Jamaican Ginger Beer in a food truck around the corner from the market. The chicken was delicious, but the experience was not a horribly unique one for me. While my blonde hair and burnable skin definitely stood out from the hair salon I stood in front of to shovel in my lunch, Brixton reminded me of the neighborhood where my best friend lived in Dallas.

What was surreal and uncomfortable for me, happened an hour later. Plastering my face with jerk chicken was probably a typical Brixton experience--at least I hope so since that food was so good. The tiny gentrified white area, though, where I drank my double espresso from a royal blue cup and sat next to a faux distressed brick wall vividly displayed how gentrification invades a community. Around the corner from the three fish displays all having staring contests with one another, was a little haven of primarily white, upper middle class, hipsters. There was a coffee shop, a bakery, and a few other little stores. One of the walls was made of recycled cardboard tubes.

On the street outside, the current residents of Brixton laughed and joked with one another. That is their city, with their friends, and their children. None of those residents, so comfortable on the street or with the fish, were in this newly gentrified area. I asked myself why this area existed (cheap rent?) for the businesses certainly were not trying to expand the culture of the area, or become a part of the community. There are a thousand hipster villages in London. For an area with so much culture and vibrancy, this gentrification is a bit unsettling.