It’s always fun to see an area you know in a movie, so as a Peckham local, the new romcom Rye Lane is literally up my street. It is named after the bustling main thoroughfare of our south London neighbourhood, which is in the early stages of gentrification. African groceries and pound shops jostle up against new cocktail bars and art galleries. Go back 20 years and all Peckham was known for was working-class wheeler-dealing – largely thanks to Only Fools and Horses – and violent crime. Even our MP, Harriet Harman, wore a stab vest when she visited in 2008. Today, Peckham is a hip, popular destination, described by the New York Times as “the beating heart of London’s most dynamic art scene”. And now we’ve got our own romcom, too.
Rye Lane the movie is a very likable variation on a very familiar formula, making Rye Lane the place look somehow better and brighter on screen than in real life. Everything pops with colour as if it’s had a new coat of paint. There’s an absence of homeless people, drunk people, noisy schoolkids, traffic jams. Instead, there are quirky characters, like a grey-haired rhinestone cowboy who body-pops surreally across Rye Lane market as our lovestruck couple (David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah) stroll through it. When I walked through the same market the other day, the local colour took the form of a shouting match between rival stallholders.
Is the romcom a cause for celebration, though, or more of a warning sign? Director Raine Allen-Miller describes her film as “a love letter to south London”, but a love letter can also be a marketing brochure. From London to Paris to New York, edgy, up-and-coming neighbourhoods form the perfect setting for movies about young people falling in love, but by drawing attention to these areas, these films risk accelerating the commercialisation that so often ends up destroying them.
A cautionary precedent is Notting Hill, released in 1999, and the gentrification romcom of its day. The west London neighbourhood, historically populated by immigrants, mainly from the Caribbean, has long been at the heart of black British identity. But by the time of the film, it had become a fashionable, pricey destination, popular with post-Cool Britannia types such as Madonna, Damon Albarn and David Cameron (and the screenwriter of the film, Richard Curtis). The kind of place where a foppish independent bookstore-owner (played by Hugh Grant, let’s say) might conceivably bump into an American film star (like Julia Roberts) and spill his juice over her.
The film was shot on location in Notting Hill, but observers noticed how its streets were suspiciously free of black people, and instead “wholly populated with mindless, twittering, wittering, lily-white rich”, as writer China Miéville put it. Miéville, who was an extra in the movie (and is white), described it as “a dystopian image of contemporary London after the triumphant rise of some unseen fascist authority”.
This is how gentrification operates: a relatively cheap area attracts immigrants and artists who bring it to life, which in turn attracts wealthier people looking to live in a lively area. This serves to raise rents and property values, pricing out the very people who made the area so lively in the first place. Before you know it, the artists’ studios are being converted into flats, the nail salon has become a craft sake brewery, and film crews are scouting locations for a movie that attracts even more people, making the area even less affordable.
It has happened before in London: Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones lived in Borough – once a covered food market and little else; now a gastronomic hotspot and home to the Shard’s multimillion-pound apartments. It happened in Berlin, where Keinohrhasen (Rabbit Without Ears) became a huge domestic hit in 2007, just as the city was throwing off its post-Wall edginess and property prices were starting to rocket.
And it happened in Montmartre – formerly a rundown but proudly bohemian area of Paris favoured by artists and jazz musicians. In 2001, along came Amélie, with Audrey Tautou flitting delightfully through a vie en rose-tinted version of the neighbourhood, backed by accordion music. Again, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet tarted the place up somewhat, removing graffiti and parked cars, and wringing as much retro colour out of his images as film stocks would permit. And again, the film was criticised for the lack of ethnic diversity seen around the area.
“It was already changing, but the success of this movie accelerated it,” says Albain, a writer who has lived in Montmartre since the 90s. “I wouldn’t say it was a shitty area before, but it wasn’t all clean and tidy like it is now. In the 70s and 80s, it was so cheap, even the broke artists could buy places here. But the prices have multiplied by 10 times since then, so those people either sold up or couldn’t afford to live here. A new generation has brought new kinds of shops – clothes boutiques and food shops.” Plus expat foreigners seeking to live out the Amélie fantasy and hordes of tourists, who can now take Amélie-themed walking tours.
The place where gentrification and the romcom really hit it off was New York City in the 1980s. After the urban decay and white flight of the 1970s, the city was back on the up, a new demographic moving in. As always, it seems, it started with the artists. Cheap rents on the Lower East Side attracted the Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat generation, plus a coterie of new wave musicians, punks, students, queer people, bohemians.
That drew the curiosity of outsiders, and movie studios. For most of the 1980s, New York seemed to be the only place in America where anyone fell in love, judging by the likes of Splash, Working Girl, Moonstruck, Something Wild, Desperately Seeking Susan (an intriguing semi-queer variation), and When Harry Met Sally. Not to mention Woody Allen, whose 1979 movie Manhattan begins with a self-aware voiceover: “He adored New York City … he romanticised it out of all proportion, a town that existed in black and white, and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.”
In step with gentrification, these movies often processed edgy urban culture into mainstream commodity. Academic Johan Andersson calls it “gentrification by genre”. In his essay of the same name, he notes how the romantic comedy “can bring the frequently downplayed libidinous aspect of gentrification to the fore”. No longer a place of fear and anxiety, downtown New York became a place of youth, sex and alternative culture, of potential adventure, upward mobility, social intermixing, random encounters – romance.
It goes without saying that in almost all these films, the central characters are all white. And as with Notting Hill or Amélie, people of colour are generally reduced to the status of background set dressing. Only a few film-makers addressed gentrification from the opposite end of the telescope, including John Singleton (Laurence Fishburne gives a forceful lecture on the gentrification of Los Angeles in Boyz N the Hood) and Spike Lee, whose films of the late 80s and early 90s effectively chronicle the gentrification of his beloved Brooklyn. It’s there in Do the Right Thing: “Who told you to buy a brownstone on my block, in my neighbourhood, on my side of the street?” Giancarlo Esposito demands of the white proto-hipster who has just run over his brand new Air Jordans. “What do you want to live in a black neighbourhood for anyway? Motherfuck gentrification!” (The white hipster turns out to have been born in Brooklyn.) Ironically, despite its grim conclusion, Do the Right Thing still made Brooklyn look like an attractive place to live. Other young, white hipsters would follow.
Rye Lane shares something with Lee’s work, in that it is centred on two people of colour who have grown up in the area (which, according to 2017 data, is 71% black, Asian and minority ethnic). There are few white characters in the film at all and, for a change, it’s their turn to be the window-dressing, like the body-popping cowboy in Rye Lane market. There is also a double take-inducing cameo by a certain romcom A-lister (no spoilers).
And once again in Rye Lane, it’s the artists who are in the vanguard. The obligatory “meet cute” takes place at an exhibition opening at Peckham Levels, a former multi-storey car park that now houses a gallery. It could be seen as the ground zero of the district’s gentrification. The car park was built in the 1980s to serve the Sainsbury’s supermarket next door, which later closed (it is now the beloved Peckham Plex cinema). It was about to be knocked down, but in 2007 a non-profit group named Bold Tendencies campaigned to turn the top floors of the disused structure into an art space, plus a rooftop bar – Frank’s – with a spectacular view over London. The lower floors are now studios, workspaces, bars and a food court. Combined with the neighbouring Bussey Building, a converted 19th-century factory housing a similar mix, it has become an appropriately gritty cultural and leisure hub.
“When we first started working in Peckham, everybody who came talked about Only Fools and Horses,” says Sven Mündner, regeneration expert and lecturer in spatial practices at Central Saint Martins school of art, who co-founded Bold Tendencies. “There wasn’t a single journalist that didn’t make the reference.” Peckham’s renaissance didn’t quite come out of nowhere, he says. “The car park changed something, absolutely, but it also coincided with the opening of the overground [a new rail line connecting south and central London, which opened in 2012]. And there was an underlying artistic community anyway. Peckham was never not a place where things happened.” Situated between two major art schools, Camberwell and Goldsmiths, the area has always been home to students and artists, including Antony Gormley, who designed the distinctive bollards (local people call them the butt plugs).
What do Peckham residents think of all this? When I asked around on the streets, most were delighted to see their area celebrated on film, and were happy that it had changed for the better.
“In the 80s, it wasn’t like this,” says Denise, a market stallholder in her 60s, originally from Guyana. “You used to get a lot of killing and stabbing. At certain times you never used to want to be on the street. Now you can walk free.”
Obi, an education worker in his 30s who grew up there, agrees: “We had friends from other areas whose parents wouldn’t allow them to come to Peckham. It has changed for the better. Some people would call it gentrification, but gentrification is everywhere now. It would be nice to get some property or something, though. I don’t want to move out of the area but I can’t afford to buy a house.” Property prices have been rising precipitously. In 2019, Peckham had the fastest house price growth in the UK, having risen more than 1,000% since 1995 – and more than doubled in the previous 10 years. Long-term residents, and artists, are already selling up or being priced out.
It is possible to have regeneration without gentrification, says Mündner, who points out that local groups have successfully organised to preserve historic structures, fight off intrusive developments (although there are still plans for 27-storey apartment towers at one end of Rye Lane) and retain civic spaces such as Peckham Levels. “What makes places different is the level of emotional investment; how people invest themselves in the place other than by money,” he says. “Do they engage or do they just consume? I know lots of people who live here who really have their heart in Peckham.”
It is difficult to imagine Peckham turning into the new Notting Hill any time soon, but if it does, how much could we blame a movie like Rye Lane? Is it possible to celebrate a place on film without selling it at the same time? “There’s a responsibility in the film-makers’ court to be careful and to be aware of what they’re doing,” says Mündner. “But if they are really showing their love for a place, I think it’s one of the best things a film can do.”
In a perfect world, the people who brought the area through the bad times would benefit, the sterilising effects of gentrification would be mitigated and everyone would live happily ever after in sensibly priced homes – but life doesn’t always turn out like the movies.
• Rye Lane is in cinemas from 17 March.
