By George Berger.
THE ORPINGTON-VICTORIA LINE
#11 / BRIXTON
Being the eleventh in a series of psychogeographical memories of the trainline that took me from nowhere & nothing to somewhere and… something.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
Brixton is the outlier on the Orpington – London Victoria line.
The idea behind this series of writings is to shine a light on the areas that are always ignored, and yet are home to the majority of Londoners. The terminally unhip places, where the terminally unhip live.
But Brixton isn’t like that. It stands alone on this train line as a place you’d actually want to live, as a teenager back in the 1980s. A place you could feel comfortable about living in when introduced at parties. Indeed, it breaks the spirit of these pieces completely – feels like including a Premiership team in a list of Championship sides. The earnest young long macs of Orpington knew instinctively that ‘life was elsewhere’, and Brixton was one of those ‘elsewhere’ places. The nearest, in fact. Benignly dropped onto the Orpington-Victoria line like a lucky oversight.
The other day I was listening to some north London knob on the radio, talking about something that happened ‘all over London’. He actually dipped south of the river on the one occasion to mention Brixton, and it occurred to me that Brixton, for many years, was the one place deemed acceptable to the kind of people who hang around in Camden.
Something’s happened, you see. Invisible on the train line, but we’ve moved into south-west London since the last station. SW2. And, as I pointed out at the start of this journey, south-west London is basically a part of north London in all but geography.
That said, Brixton was great in the 80s. There was the Brixton Ace, for a start, one of the better concert venues in London at the time. Originally built as the Palladium Cinema in 1914, and a damn site quicker to get home from than Hammersmith – two hours quicker to be precise – the difference between midnight and 2, man. Those extra two hours were generally spent dodging south-east London’s finest in the danger hours.
So, points for Brixton Ace! Southern Death Cult and The Mob stick out as memorable gigs there. It was a pretty good period for music and I’m sure many other acts have slipped from memory. There were also televised gigs on a programme called Whatever You Want, introduced by Keith Allen and skirting on the edge of an unusual synthesis between TV and real life.
We’d go to the Prince of Wales beforehand, on the corner of Coldharbour Lane. A few years later, it became a pub that prided itself on mediocrity, but back in the early 80s, it was a rundown, often empty place, with a few locals playing dominoes. I miss pubs like that – they seem symbolic of a Britain where there was more space generally; before the arteries had hardened. I dread to think what it’s like now, if it’s even there at all. Either way, the place where we whetted our lips is long gone.
* * *
I also spent a lot of time in Brixton later on in the 90s, with my friend Robin Gibson. Robin shared a housing co-op flat with a journalist called Johnny Waller, in Clifton Mansions in Coldharbour Lane. Right opposite the Prince Albert pub, just a few doors down from the Prince of Wales. It was the kind of place where squatters rubbed shoulders with between-jobs actors and musicians, varying Venn diagrams going on therein. Only two stops up from Dulwich, you could be reassured and comfortable that you were in the heart of, and part of, ‘the enemy within’. Full of people who would be denounced as ‘woke’ today, for the simple crime of not being racist or pursuing the nasty habit of othering.
This was such a breath of fresh air after years spent arguing in the pubs of Orpington, with (often nakedly racist) Tory boys. Being surrounded by needling young old people with no experience of the outside world and no desire to get any, lest it may threaten their comfortably numb cultural insularity. Frustrated to exhaustion by suburbanites who thought Thatcher was great and voted for her at every election, incrementally increasing the damage done each time. Don’t you worry, I’m alright jack, we’ve never had it so good. They were always in the majority – in the election results and in the pub. Some admired my obstinance and some clearly thought I was scum.
To hang around in Brixton was akin to escaping an abusive relationship, albeit temporarily. Two ends of a train line that showed just how divided England was in the 1980s. Culture was also slowly shifting to a more progressive set of attitudes on racism, homophobia and the like and those on board were far more prevalent at the Brixton end of the line. Not metropolitan, nor elite; just decent people. The only way is ethics.
I often ended up crashing in Brixton after wild nights out with Robin – we could, and did, drink Soho dry, before retiring to various late-night Brixton pubs for a nightcap or two. Always seemed to be Irish pubs, before the word ‘theme’ forced itself in there. Old guys, quiet guys, drunk guys in dead men’s suits. Dressed, blessed and cursed with the melancholy of the exiled, as my own family had been some generations before. I projected an affinity there; it helped that I knew the songs perhaps.
Every time I came up from nowhere, it broke my heart to go back there, heavy hangover in hand, the next morning. Head banging on the Brixton platform, with the compensation that – for one night only – I’d been somewhere that felt like I belonged. Or at least didn’t not belong.
* * *
So, way back when, there was this Saxon dude called Brixi who put a big stone down as a marker for a meeting place in the area. This led to people referring to Brixistane — oh oh, the stone of Brixi. Both Acre Lane and Coldharbour Lane date back to times when they were medieval country lanes, which is a weird thought to anyone who’s spent any time in either.
Back in the modern world of the 1980s, there was a lot of squatting going down in Brixton. When Chas and I hatched a plan to leave our parental abodes, Brixton was the first place we looked. I longed to live there and gain some breathing space. We ended up, however, in the less salubrious surroundings of Croydon, where we were illegally evicted by the police after a week or so. I secretly recorded a cop admitting this (‘You a law student then, are you son?’) but alas the tape is long gone.
Brixton is the only song on the train line that has inspired popular songs (unless you count ‘Penge’ by PiL, weirdly released since I wrote the Penge article, and surely taking the piss). Eddy Grant’s ‘Electric Avenue’ is a glorious celebration of the road with the market in. You can feel the life reflected in that song – the hustle and bustle of Brixton market. The bounce in the streets. The joy of life.
Indeed, a report in 2018 had Brixton in spot no. 3 as the most sung about place in Britain:
‘Coldharbour Lane’ itself was the title of a Tom Robinson song and an Alabama 3 album was similarly called Exile On Coldharbour Lane. Then there’s ‘Guns of Brixton’ by the Clash. I guess we have Vera Lynn to thank for Dover, but it’s still a weird place to pop up at no.4!
As I was growing up, Brixton was a byword for multiculturalism. The large Afro-Caribbean community lent a sensational vibe to the area. The whole area was a world apart from the rest of the train line, almost as if it had been built on the wrong line.
My personal thread of connection to Brixton stretches back to the mid-1950s, when a relative worked in the Effra pub. She was murdered one night on the way home from work. Not one for the tourist board, admittedly. After Clifton Mansions, my friend Robin moved next door to the very same pub, in the same road as John Cooper-Clarke and Nico. Which sounds like a premise for a modern sitcom.
But sitcom it wasn’t. Of course, I project to an almost embarrassing level on Brixton. I ignore, or at least tolerate, the whole empires of naughtiness and parallel tragedy going on. Perhaps a part of me back then sensed some kind of pathetic glamour in all that: that, for all its faults, it was still preferable to the stifling silent conformity of the suburbs. That the early deaths could be part-justified by the argument that they at least lived first. Like wild Kerouac kids as a preference to tamed Thatcher children. They would die with their boots on.
In hindsight it’s clumsy, hopelessly over-romantic and not a little squirmy. But Brixton in the early 80s held the ultimate trump card for me. Whatever its faults, Brixton was always alive. And when you’re young, you have a spiritual duty to savour being alive, to suck the marrow from the bone, to make all your glorious mistakes and magnify every emotion until it feels like your heart will burst. To revel in your own genius and that of others — to experience as much inspiration as your heart can handle. Otherwise, why bother at all?
The final station approaches next: London Victoria. Hub to the rest of elsewhere. A terminus that brings new beginnings and forces you to choose the next tangent of your journey. Which kind of gives you the feeling that you’re in charge. Destination elsewhere — please make sure you have all your luggage with you.
An archive of all the articles in this series can be found here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger has resumed this 3:AM column after a 15 year hiatus. He’s written the official biographies of Crass and The Levellers, a book on mindfulness and various other books that can be found here. He’s also the singer in Flowers in the Dustbin. He’s recently finished his memoirs In Case Of Dementia, Break Glass.
