See now, I’ve been living in London for a little more than ten years and always within a 4 mile radius of the mildly maligned SE postcode.

I’d quite fancied moving to the chi-chi east, or closer to the southbank but circumstances conspired to set me right back down in Deptford. Famous for the murder of playwrite Christopher Marlowe in 1593 and more recently for not much else its one of those bits of southeast London thats suffered from not having a tube station and having a kind of off-putting name.

Plus its a little bit ghetto. Yeah, its noisy and kind of smelly sometimes, and you can’t move for double-parked, bashed-up, early nineties mercs; theres mostly horrible architecture, sectarian pubs, high-volume, social housing and pie and mash shops with unfathomable opening hours.
A new house just a few streets away from mine was just up for a big architectural prize and the publicity blurb for the project opens with…”in an area where it must have been tempting to turn one’s back on the outside world”. See, I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit - the notion that someone’s going to spend all that money on a swanky pad, designed by a top notch architect in Deptford while they’re scared of living there is ridiculous.

Sure SE8’s got a bad rep, and yes, theres some horrible gun related gang shit going down at the moment too, but living there, and not making an effort to actually engage with the place you live only serves to further ghettoise all levels of society and will inevitably pull us further and deeper into into some monstrous quagmire. So come on down to the ghetto. It ain’t so bad afterall.

The Superlatives - Come On Down To The Ghetto