The Ghost Of London Present: Reflections On The Shifting Cultural Spaces Of A Megacity

Photo by Hannah Tang

It defies the laws of time and space to try and preserve London forever. Nevertheless, I still feel it slipping through my fingers, eroded by age. Within my mouth it is condensed to four small letters, home. Wistfully I watch once-familiar haunts crumble, replaced by luxury housing that starts at seven figures and ends as a bullet point in an investment portfolio. A postcode sounded out with a sneer is now the perfect gritty backdrop for an Instagram story. Slouching towards soullessness, the charm of my mammoth city may soon dim - swarmed by the hunger for profit. Home is not just summarised in the grandeur of historical monuments or the staggering artwork of a beautiful building. Home is also my corner shop that I’ve cried in twice, the local hair shop that makes sure to stock ‘rosso red’ permanent colour, the swings off New Kent Road where I used to watch girls smoking cigarettes. Sometimes it isn’t pretty, and it should be allowed that.

In the haze of memory, I’m still skipping through East Street Market, caressed by a September breeze. Within a year of my tenth birthday, the Heygate Estate and others nearby (which many of my friends called home) was reduced to a pile of rubble for sparkling new residential complexes. Sometimes when I’m wandering by, I feel a sudden chill, bordering on the uncanny. When I am age-ripened, rectracing these very steps, will this even be recognisable? I feel as if my hands are not quite clean when I stop for a coffee, thinking nostalgically of the butcher’s that haunted this location once. London is blessed with the richness of a thousand cultures, but it is not enough to say so, it is not enough to idle on it without taking meaningful action to embrace it.

Change is not necessarily evil, development can be crucial to a community. Despite this, I’m filled with malignance - cultural spaces in South London are fading away, only to be succeeded by construction that never seems to benefit local residents. Will the sparse green spaces south of the river slowly yield to rooftop gardens, paved with artificial grass? Areas that now have vintage clothing shops and deconstructed burger joints are ‘up-and-coming’, which means the rent is skyrocketing: but the food was better before, so what does it really mean? I don’t have the answers. From time to time, I still contemplate my friends of years gone by who were forced to move to places I’d never heard of, teetering on the M25. Perhaps I’m brimming with sentimentality and my reflections are tainted with the stain of memories. However, I can’t help but feel that something is drifting away, and the cultural spaces of London hold a special weight: they are an ode to the past as much as they are a home of the present. 

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Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson