Stairway to arty coolness
BOLD TENDENCIES: CREATIVE EXPLOSION CHANGES FACE OF ‘BAD’ PART OF LONDON
You must be local , work on cummunity projects for Peckham Levels membership.
For Londoners in the know, the must-do culture activity last summer wasn’t a major exhibition or a West End show. No, it was an art installation commissioned by the arts organisation Bold Tendencies – a stairwell of an old car park in Peckham, South East London, painted a bubble gum pink by the London artist Simon Whybray. The pink space was the cultural hit of the year and drew crowds from all over England.
“I had no idea it would be this popular,” said Hannah Barry, founder of Bold Tendencies and owner of the gallery, about the installation. The staircase leads to the top of Frank’s Campari bar, one of the city’s most fashionable drinking spots for London’s cool kids and bankers alike.
Among the Caribbean grocery stalls selling mango and plantain, pawnbroker shops and acrylic nail salons of Peckham, beats the heart of London’s most dynamic art scene. Far from fringe, the neighbourhood is on the circuit of art world bigwigs such as the Tate Modern Director Frances Morris, for its combination of art with $1 million price tags and a creative scene that includes craft-makers, food and drink.
Peckham is now the place Britons go to for counterculture art, with artists, makers and galleries lured to the area by cheap rents and a recently established East London commuter train line connecting the neighbourhood to the centre of the city.
Peckham Levels puts a premium on creativity within the community by encouraging local artists who were born and raised in southeast London to have their studios at this newly opened centre. And Peckham is set to boom. “Peckham has always been an area where things happened,” said Rozsa Farkas, director of Arcadia Missa gallery, located under the railway arches. “But it’s only in recent years that it’s been known for this.”
Farkas’ gallery is typical of the area and of its commitment to exhibiting avant-garde art such as the current exhibition, Mouth, a video installation that explores gender binaries by New Yorkbased artist Maja Cule, as well as exhibitions about marginalised communities, like last summer’s show We Lost Them at Midnight, about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender culture in London.
“There’s a spirit to Peckham that you won’t find anywhere else in London,” said Luds van de Belt, site director of the newly launched Peckham Levels, a 10-story car park that’s been transformed into a studio block for artists.
The enterprise, off the neighbourhood’s main street, Rye Lane, offers some of the least expensive artist studios in the area – a 4m² studio space rents from £260 to £290 (about R4 200 to R4 700) per month. Yearly, 10 studios are offered for monthly rents of just £90 (R1 500) to artists with the lowest incomes.
The artist and craft-maker Anastasya Martynova, who has a studio at Peckham Levels, sees the area as an integral part of her creative process. “I think art as a whole has a tremendous power to unite people and encourage positivity,” she said. “And Peckham is the creative centre of southeast London. There is a real feeling of optimism for the future, and lots of raw, creative talent.”
The requirements for Peckham Levels membership reflect the neighbourhood’s sense of community.
You have to be local and 10% of membership fees will go back into neighbourhood initiatives. Members have to commit at least one hour a week to volunteering in local projects.
“Growing up in Peckham as a teenager around 2008 I remember it having a bad reputation,” the painter Sani Sani said. “Friends in other areas were genuinely scared to come around. There were art galleries like the South London Gallery then, but it seemed nonaccessible.
“I think that the arts scene in Peckham has the power to completely change the perception and the narrative of what Peckham is.”