Saturday Shopping: Peckham
Muriel Spark’s 1960 novel, the Ballad of Peckham Rye, describes a very different Peckham to the one we see today. The world depicted by this Grande Dame of literature - one of post-war spartan lodgings, smoky pubs and noisy garment factories - is an insular one: a community wary of outsiders; it is a south London populated with blousy busy-bodies and dangerous gossip mongers. Although times have changed, this remarkable literary legacy lifts our lovely locality from the prosaic and parochial and bestows upon it an uncertain glamour and a suggestion of mythical mysticism; ‘the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.' At the end of this fatalistic fable the devil-may-care, satanic-pretender protagonist leaves behind a Peckham that is changed forever, but this is the very thing about Peckham; its ability to meet change with reinvention and optimism. The Rye Hotel, now known as...