My Neighborhood

I love London. I am "in love" with London. It is a living, breathing place. There are people here from all over the world. People of every race, religion, culture and economic status. They all live together (not always in harmony, but together) in this over crowded, expensive, noisy, dirty wonderful beautiful place.
My neighborhood is in South London. Camberwell to be exact. One night at a club a young posh, drunk London woman asked me where I lived. When I told her that it was Camberwell, she called it a "proper shit hole". Well sister, it stopped being a shit hole the second you left.
Camberwell is a working class area full of immigrants. Myself included. The number 12 bus is a mini United Nations. Get on that bus in the morning and you will hear languages from all over the world. African dialects, Polish, Hindi, Urdu, Italian, Chinese dialects, Jamaican Pigeon, Spanish and English. All of these folks pack the number 12 bus to go into central London for work. The majority of these folks don't look like the are going into offices in Whitehall or Parliament.
Camberwell's streets are packed with an assortment of shops. At first glance, every other shop appears to be either a dodgy chicken and kebab place or a hair dresser. But look closer. The main road, Walworth Road, is full of clothing stores, cleaners, small markets, appliance stores, health food stores, butcher shops and any other type of business that a small town needs to survive. Most of these store are independent, locally owned family affairs. The shop keepers represent the wide number variety of cultures and cater to their specific tastes and needs. This helps make Camberwell a diverse and exciting place to live and explore. You can get Turkish groceries, Thai food, Chinese herbal medicine and African food here.
The one thing that I can say that I actually hate about my neighborhood is the amount of gambling halls and betting parlors. Between my street and the Elephant and Castle tube station there are no less than seven of these places. This is in a distance of about one half mile. I had mentioned that most business on Walworth road were locally owned family establishments, these gambling halls are not. They have no real stake in the community. If they fail, they just lock their doors, fire the staff and chalk it all up to a business loss.
I am a fan of free enterprise and I believe in free choice. But these gambling halls sole reason for saturating a working class neighborhood is to separate the poor and working class of my neighborhood from their money. They offer bright and shiny false hope to poor men (yes usually men inhabit these places). These black holes take money out of the community and repay its citizens with husbands and fathers who's non-disposable income is quickly disposed of. These places need to be zoned out of existence.
There is an area of Camberwell called East Street where, for six days a week, vendors set up stalls selling anything from fresh vegetables and Halal meat to blue jeans and knock off Gucci purses. East Street is alive with all kinds of people crammed into a small area hawking products, buying products, haggling, arguing, laughing and living. People of many races, religions and cultures all work together on East Street. You have to see it to believe it.
If you were to give Camberwell a quick glance you may come to the conclusion that it is a dirty, poor place, full of hard people. It is an easy mistake to make. Camberwell is packed. There are many people here who have just arrived from other countries and are in different stages of culture shock. I think a lot of people go into defense mode. It has to be quite a shock to be in a village in Nigeria one week and then in a city of eight million people (most of which don't speak your language) the next week.
People aren't always going to smile at you as you pass them on the street. This ain't Mayberry. But behind the stoic veneer of foreign faces there are people. People with families and children, parents and grandparents who they love. People who brought their families here for a better life.
Camberwell is full of people who just want to live their lives as best as they can. It is an active community with theatres, libraries, volunteer opportunities and places of worship. It is a place where, women from the African Methodist Church walk down the street dressed in their brightly colored head dresses along side women in hijabs. It is a place alive with dreams and aspirations. A place where people, above all, try.
Is Camberwell posh? Is it on the cover of any glossy European travel brochures? No. But Camberwell is real, it is alive and now it's home.