Let’s move to: Bermondsey, south-east London: a chaotic collage of its eventful past

Eighty years of change have left a cityscape that looks as if it has been put together by a vigorous game of consequences

What’s going for it? Bermondsey has been so pummelled by fortune that it looks as if it has been put together by a vigorous, acid-fuelled game of consequences. The past 80 years, in particular, have been eventful. The blitz, postwar rebuilding, deindustrialisation, the death of the docks and gentrification have left a cityscape that is collaged to a degree perhaps unequalled in this most chaotic of cities. Take a walk from its ancient heart, the old high street Bermondsey Street, past the Victorian parades of Tower Bridge Road and along Grange Walk, which once abutted Bermondsey’s abbey and 18th-century spa, and the game begins: Georgian terraces opposite 80s Brookside vernacular houses, next to 30s council flats, beside Victorian cockney terraces, facing 00s luxury apartment complexes, round the corner from 19th-century philanthropic housing. Take a right and you hit intense foodies hunting for single-estate hazelnuts at Spa Terminus food market, then repeat, repeat, repeat until you hit Peckham. On the plus side, you are never bored...

The case against It is hard to know whether this fragmentary neighbourhood comes together or remains a collage of atomised bits, but that is contemporary London for you. Lots of property speculation along the potential route of the Bakerloo line extension.

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from Property | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2yvIUli
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