Bermondsey, Peckham, and Clapton: Fiona’s Guide to London Beyond the Postcard
By Fiona MacLeod | UK London Info
The most common feedback I receive from visitors who have followed good advice is that the part of London they liked best was not the part they expected to like best: not Westminster or the South Bank or Covent Garden, though all of those have genuine merit, but a neighbourhood they wandered into for a single meal or a single gallery visit and found to be the version of London that actually existed rather than the version they had seen in photographs. I am going to describe three such neighbourhoods, and I want to note that by the time this is printed they will have changed slightly, because London neighbourhoods always are, and that this is a feature rather than a problem.
Bermondsey
Bermondsey sits south of the Thames, east of Borough Market, and has accumulated over the past decade one of London’s better concentrations of independent food, drink, and culture enterprises in a neighbourhood that manages to be genuinely interesting without being self-consciously interesting, which is the achievement that distinguishes a neighbourhood that has found itself from one that is performing finding itself. The Maltby Street Market on Saturday mornings is the version of a London food market that has not yet acquired the prices that success produces in Borough Market. The White Cube gallery has a Bermondsey space that regularly hosts major contemporary art exhibitions in a building whose scale allows work that the smaller gallery spaces cannot accommodate. The pubs are good.
Peckham
Peckham is the South London neighbourhood that has been described as “up and coming” for approximately fifteen years and which has arrived at a state that “up and coming” never quite captured: it is a genuinely mixed community with a long-established African and Caribbean presence, a significant creative and artistic community, an excellent restaurant scene that is not primarily facing visitors, and the Bussey Building, which is a former cricket bat factory that now hosts a rooftop bar, cinema, music venue, and event space and which is one of the better arguments for adaptive reuse of industrial buildings in London.
Clapton
Clapton, in the London Borough of Hackney in East London, contains the Clapton Hart pub, which is one of the best pub gardens in London. It also contains the Springfield Park pergola, which is a genuine architectural treasure that almost nobody visits, a canal walking route that connects to the broader Lee Valley park network, and a housing estate that produced more significant British musicians in the 1980s and 1990s than seems statistically plausible. It is not a destination neighbourhood for most visitors, which is exactly why it is an excellent destination for visitors who want to see what London is like when it is not performing for visitors.
Fiona MacLeod writes about London for visitors who want to see what the city actually is rather than what the postcards say it is. That means the Royal Mews and the Tate and the Borough Market and the things in the guidebooks, yes, but also the things around those things: the cafe on the back street that is better than the tourist cafe on the front street, the museum that is not the British Museum but is excellent and has no queue, the neighbourhood that is twenty minutes from the centre and is genuinely what London feels like when people live in it rather than visit it. She is here to help visitors have a better time than they would have without her, which is the most practical form of journalism available. For London visitor information, see Visit London. For London events, visit Time Out London. For London travel tips, see Evening Standard.
Fiona MacLeod has been writing about London for visitors since she arrived from Edinburgh fifteen years ago and found that the best London guide she could find was written by someone who had visited London twice and photographed Buckingham Palace from a distance both times. She has been trying to do better since, and the measure of success is visitors who write to her to say that the restaurant she recommended was actually good and the neighbourhood she described was actually worth an afternoon and the museum she said to skip was correctly assessed. London is too large and too interesting to waste time on the wrong things, and she is here to help you avoid wasting it.
Fiona MacLeod has been writing about London for visitors since she arrived from Edinburgh fifteen years ago and found that the best London guide she could find was written by someone who had visited London twice and photographed Buckingham Palace from a distance both times. She has been trying to do better since, and the measure of success is visitors who write to her to say that the restaurant she recommended was actually good and the neighbourhood she described was actually worth an afternoon and the museum she said to skip was correctly assessed. London is too large and too interesting to waste time on the wrong things, and she is here to help you avoid wasting it.
