Real London: Photos of New Cross, Bermondsey and the Old Kent Road

“Real London” is a short-hand, of course, for a London that is not the shiny one of glass and steel built and sold by property developers, and bought by those in the top few percent of earners — as well as by foreign investors. It is a world of workers, some of whom live in their own houses, having secured mortgages before the boom that began in the late 1990s, and often well before that, when it was still affordable for working people to take out mortgages and be able to repay them. Others live in social housing, built by local councils and run either by the councils or by housing associations, or, less frequently, owned or owned and managed by co-ops, and others have to cope with the increasingly greedy, unregulated private rental market . And amongst them, of course, are the unemployed — part of the current total of two and a half million unemployed people in the UK as a whole. According to the London Skills and Employment Observatory, 1.38 million people are currently either unemployed or “economically inactive” in London, and the unemployment rate is 8.9 percent.

These workers and homeowners were, perhaps, on salaries between the median and the average — currently £14,000 and £26,000, as I discussed in my article, The Housing Crisis and the Gulf Between the Rich and the Poor: Half of UK Workers Earn Less Than £14,000 A Year — but whereas in the past it would have been possible for a household on average or below average wages to buy a house, now it is completely impossible.

As I explained in a recent article, Unaffordable London: The Great Housing Rip-Off Continues, on a multiplier of three times earnings, which was how the housing market functioned before the Blair and Brown boom years, a couple buying a house in London for the average price — £388,000 — need a combined income of nearly £130,000, or something slightly less plus a whopping great deposit.

Not only is this changing the face of London, as the well-off and/or parentally subsidised gentrify areas that were previously solidly working class, in many cases pricing out the children of those workers able to buy their houses in the affordable past, but after a lull followed the bankers’ and governments’ self-inflicted global economic crash in 2008, the speculative housing market is more rampant than ever before, even though we are in a double-dip recession — the first time that a recession has left the rich unscathed, which ought to indicate how rigged the housing market — and the general economic picture — really is.

Almost everywhere I have travelled in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which i began three months ago, I have seen, along with the tendrils of gentrification reaching out into new neighbourhoods, glass and steel blocks continuing to rear up along shorelines, by rivers, in already established areas, but developments — large and small — are also penetrating previously unfashionable areas. It is hard to see how this bubble can continue, especially as these developments are aimed at those whose household income is over £70,000 a year. Anything less than that, and property developers think that would-be buyers are not a safe bet, even though only a relatively small percentage of Londoners have a household income that large.

In this set of photos, which I mostly took on two trips about a month ago, I continued exploring the main roads and side streets of New Cross, Bermondsey and Peckham — mostly on or around the Old Kent Road, that great artery connecting Kent to central London — where the recession is much more apparent, but also where real life continues, away from the hyperbole of the developers and the money markets.

I hope you share my interest in how real life continues under the extreme economic difficulties facing most people in Tory-led Britain, dragged into a double-dip recession, with no light at the end of the tunnel, through the government’s suicidal obsession with austerity, when what is needed is economic stimulus, and I also hope you share my interest in liminal and marginal places, and — I confess — my fascination with derelict and forgotten buildings.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.