When I moved to London, I was a 22 year old shot girl working in a tequilaria. I had no money, no idea of who I was or what I was going to do, and no idea where I would be living. My flatmates assured me that they had found us a place ‘in Peckham’ - which, from the little I knew about London, was meant to be a very cool area.
Turns out the place was actually on the Old Kent Road, a half an hour walk from Peckham, and only known to me from Monopoly as the brown square with the lowest value on the board. When I told one of my brand-new colleagues that I lived on Old Kent Road, he laughed until there were tears in his eyes, slapping his leg. “It’s just that no-one lives there. Why would you live there?”. And he wasn't the only one - over the two years I lived there, my neighbourhood was met derisive snorts, and London locals told me I was living in "ends". My Old Kent Road - the arse of every joke.
Green to other people's preconceptions at the time, I moved into my Old Kent Road flat in September 2022 with a small suitcase of bedding and a rolled up Turkish rug. My flatmate and I spent our first day there Googling our new area.
The results were dire. A TikTokker had circled our borough of Southwark and entitled it ‘Real Life GTA’. Reddit threads asking, ‘Opinion on the Old Kent Road?’ received the answers of “bandit country”, “it’s an absolute shithole”, and “I lived there for 6 months, learnt a lot about chavs and living on the dol(e).” We researched the large building obscuring the sky at the bottom of our road, the Aylesbury Estate. Turns out the council had run the residents out a few years ago, and it sits uninhabited and ghostly, only kept alive by callous media portrayals of it: enshrined in The Times as “one of the most notorious estates in the United Kingdom” and “the estate from Hell”. It’s become the cliché of sink estates in the UK, used by everyone from film and TV crews looking to depict deprivation, to Tony Blair. Blair chose it as the backdrop for his first ever speech as PM in 1997, where he claimed that there cannot be anymore “no-hope areas” in New Labour’s Britain - meaning my area. From social media to journalists to my pals to the PM, everyone had made their case clear: the Old Kent Road is no place to live.
I’ll admit, it wasn’t the glittering central London area I had imagined myself living in when I moved to the big smoke. And no, there isn't anywhere you can get matcha or orange wine, and no, there isn’t a tube stop. And yes, the bus stop is called Old Kent Road Tesco. And our initial impressions of it weren’t great, if I’m being perfectly honest. On the night of our house-warming, the only pub open within walking distance was The Good Intent. When we walked in, everyone (smoking cigarettes indoors) stopped talking and pointed at us like we were all in an old Western film. The landlady - infamously nicknamed Bendy Wendy and who allegedly gave ‘customer care’ for 50 pence - sat us down at a sticky booth and we were horrified to find the booth full to the brim with loose change. And it also wasn't brilliant when I required an emergency trip to the dentist, and the Old Kent Road dental clinic conducted the entire appointment with the door open and counted all my teeth in front of the whole waiting room.
I can’t lie and say that it’s a place of glamour. But it’s been the backdrop to my first two years in London, my first big girl job, my first real proper heartbreak, my first bills with my name on it, my first jump into adulthood. It also gave me my first flat, infested with rodents, which our Buddhist landlord refused to kill on religious grounds and suggested we pick the rats up by the tail and put them in the park, two streets away. It’s had its hot water turned off more times than I can count, forcing one flatmate to shower at the house of a boy she had met at a sex party the week before, and another to shower with a stewpot full of hot water borrowed from a neighbour. It’s been the site of epic romance and questionable one night stands, as ex-boyfriends and new boyfriends, men wearing chastity belts and well-endowed musicians have been shagged between its walls. It has been the roof under which many of our friends returning to the UK after living abroad in far flung places like Canada and Australia have slept in before going home to their families.
It has been adorned with a 2 metre by 2 metre pop art portrait of the Chuckle Brothers, a collage of Jehovah’s Witness ‘God is Watching’ posters posted through our door, unflattering portraits of one-night stands pinned to the walls, and my flatmate’s rattail Blu-Tacked to the fridge. We knew that when we moved into our next place, we'd be more grownup and we won’t decorate our flat that way anymore.
But it’s not just the memories which made me love our flat on the Old Kent Road. I loved it for being the Old Kent Road, and not just because sometimes I had loose stories to share with colleagues. I desperately loved our neighbours and cried when they knocked our door to hug us and say goodbye on move-out day. The men in the corner shops who always let me confess whatever was on my mind. The dads who sat outside playing cards on the street everyday and kept an eye out for creeps. The lady in Tesco who always said hello like you were the only person she wanted to talk to. The tiny Latin and Ethiopian restaurants, the school kids pissing themselves with laughter, the reliable old bus stop.
And I loved its history. It’s a place where the most pivotal time of my life has converged with the lives of so many others. After all, the Old Kent Road is ancient and immortal. It has been enshrined in music, from Kwengface’s 2023 track Freedom (“met a sweet one from down the Old Kent - Ay come here”), back to the 2005 hit by Girls Aloud, Long Hot Summer (“running down that Old Kent Road”). It has been loved and left by the residents of the Aylesbury Estate, who lived in their flats for thirty years, before they were forcibly evicted by Southwark council in an effort to create regeneration - and in doing so, ripped out the heart of the area, giving the place it’s limbo land feeling. It was bombed to shit during the Blitz, where 12 died on September 6th, 1940 - but Annie Leary survived. Though paralysed, she “embodied the famous Blitz spirit” as evidenced by her iconic quote in the Daily Express where she said,
“Hitler can’t break a
Cockney’s heart.”
In a few years, when the Old Kent Road becomes like Hackney or Walthamstow, people in tiny beanies and Carhartt jeans will start to visit the OKR, coming for small plates and natural wine bars. Many people will think its transformation will be an improvement. Some of it might be - I like small plates and natural wine bars, and when I first moved here, I would’ve thought that very good indeed. I’m not so sure anymore. All I can picture is my lovely neighbours, the butchers in Adam Halalway, the community who welcomed us with open arms, being swept out to make way for people who’ve always written the whole place and its people off as bandit country and sinkhole estates, and never thought for a second it had anything worth keeping before.
Look, you don’t have to race off to the Old Kent Road after this. There isn’t much to do there, after all. It is a bit rundown, and there is a bit of crime and the odd flasher, and yeah, the OKR dentist wouldn’t be my first port of call in a crisis. It’s not paradise. But it’s important. And I want you to respect it - all that it was and all that it is, before all it will be. I love that alongside the history of the Old Kent Road, is my history, forever entwined into its fabric long after I leave it. It’s been my community. It gave me my life in London. When I think of the OKR, I don’t think of a “no-hope area”. I think of being in my early twenties, having the most fun of my life doing just as Girls Aloud did in 2005 - “running down that Old Kent Road.”
Sophie Parke, 2024. Originally published in Sunstroke Magazine.
2025 Note: Much has happened since I wrote this article. I actually do live in Peckham, now. We gave away the Chuckle Brothers portrait at our flat leaving party, and my flatmate's rattail has been relegated to his room in our new flat. The Old Kent Road has become the subject of 'major investment' and there is an enormous block of new builds that have popped up on the street opposite our old flat. Change comes for us all. But some things remain the same. I still get my prescriptions sent to the pharmacy in Old Kent Road big Tesco. Just so I can say hello.
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