For a stretch of the early Nineties, the Coronet Cinema in Woolwich was my very own suburban dream factory. Set in the swooping, incongruous grandeur of an art deco monolith near the ferry terminal, it was there that I got what passed for a cinematic education at the time; there that, between fistfuls of stale popcorn, I marvelled at Jurassic Park, squirmed through Arachnophobia and was, weirdly, traumatised to the point of jittery sleeplessness by (ostensible comedy) Hocus Pocus.
But by the new millennium, this secular place of worship had become a literal one. Taken over by the New Wine Church in 2001, it is now home to one of the biggest and most successful black majority congregations in the area. And it is not the only outer London monument to have undergone a similar transformation in the past couple of decades. Defunct pubs on the Essex border have become African supermarkets; snooker clubs in the wilds of Zone 6 have been reborn as Nigerian-run function halls; the old Barclays Bank in my commuter-belt hometown in Kent is, perhaps inevitably, now a Pentecostal church.
These signs of the Black African diaspora’s flight to the suburbs are just one part of the world I have sought to explore and contextualise in my book, Settlers: Journeys Through the Food, Faith and Culture of Black African London. The realisation that minority presence — and, specifically, Black African presence — is altering the capital’s leafy hinterlands opened up what I hope are fascinating reflections on topics from housing to immigration. But seeing the continued convergence of the two sides of me represented in the fate of the Coronet — the African and the suburban — also brought about a more personal sense of revelation. It made me realise that, as well as the impact of Nigerian culture, it is London’s suburbs that really made me who I am. Mine was a childhood of jollof-fuelled, Yoruba hall parties, Sunday morning drives to church and grudging plantain-buying expeditions to Deptford in the company of my mum. But it was also one of leisure centres, riding improvised sledges down snowy abandoned golf courses, bunked trains to the Trocadero and Bacardi Breezers thrown up on the double-driveways of friends whose parents always seemed to be away. I am (after some convincing) a proud son of suburbia. And as more Black Brits emerge from a similar environment once thought to be incompatible with ethnic minority life — and dominate in music, art, sport and more — I think it’s time this supposed cultural wasteland was reclaimed, revered and re-evaluated.
It’s time this supposed cultural wasteland was reclaimed and revered
It makes sense to journey back to the dawn of it all. Born amid the rail transport revolution of the early 20th century, early suburbs such as the ‘Metroland’ district just north-west of the capital (immortalised in a 1973 documentary by the poet John Betjeman) were conceived as purpose-built, bucolic sanctuaries. Places where a semi-rural idyll of cricket pitches, village halls and neatly ranked mock-Tudor semis could be found less than an hour from the enervating bustle of the city. The flip side to this sense of order and cosiness was the atmosphere of stifling blandness that has been skewered in everything from JG Ballard to The Office. The point of suburbs, in art and life, is to escape them. And those who stay behind, as the writer Clive Martin put it in his own paean to suburban life, ‘are still smoking shit weed on the same park bench down the road from their mum’s house well into their 30s.’
On top of that, beyond the commuter belt’s utopian ideals there is the uncomfortable fact of from what, or whom, suburbia’s earliest residents were trying to get away. The post-war colour bar around housing — namely, landlords who wouldn’t rent to post-Windrush arrivals from the Caribbean and Africa — led to the overcrowding that fuelled intolerance and helped precipitate white flight to London’s edges. But better housing, more space and good schools are universal motivators. And so, just like other more established ethnic minority groups, by the late-1980s my own family (shaped by my mother’s Hyacinth Bucket-level middle-class ideals and general bullishness) settled in suburban border towns that had been implicitly established to exclude us.
What did that upbringing look like? Well, fittingly, growing up in the grey area between rural and urban, between economic privilege and social disadvantage, made for a life of sharp contrasts. I remember both trips to the South Bank to skate board and the sound of people clip-clopping horses down our street; I remember a schoolmate who had a birthday party in the family’s pool (!) and also sprinting down piss-scented council estate walkways to evade potential muggers. In my memory, we were swimming in the lake beside a Kentish chalk pit one minute, and the next it had been turned into Bluewater: the biggest shopping complex in Europe and site of my first Saturday job at a branch of Ted Baker where every member of the commission-oriented sales force seemed to think they were in Glengarry Glen Ross. My wife describes her countryside adolescence as the joyful ennui of drinking cider at an ill-served, tumble-down bus stop. Though my teenage years were decidedly more The Inbetweeners than Euphoria, proximity to inner-city London, to that world of Brixton and Peckham and two-bus odysseys to Black barbershops in Plumstead, made for a more mixed picture.
This picture is, increasingly, one I feel other prominent Black Brits can probably relate to. Dina Asher-Smith hails from Orpington. Bernardine Evaristo grew up in Woolwich. George the Poet was raised in the legitimate Metroland of Neasden and Warsan Shire has spoken about the Nineties Wembley of ‘Nokia bricks, baby hairs… More Fire Crew [and] Only Fools and Horses’ that shaped her. Though it is normally the likes of David Bowie and Kate Bush that people reach for when trying to make a case for out-of-towner creativity, these names show that suburbia really is changing. Yes, this has led to some Black suburbanites encountering prejudice (that the BNP’s former HQ was on my bus ride to school hints at some of the grimmer realities of the mostly very accepting, multicultural place I grew up in).
But the statistics show that, undeterred, Black families are continuing to settle in the suburbs (from 2001 to 2011, the Black African population in Thurrock grew by more than 1,000 per cent). And, having almost accidentally moved to a corner of Zone 3 south-east London that may have once been described as a suburb, I find that I love it more than ever. There is access to sun-dappled woodland and a strip-lit Turkish supermarket that never shuts; there are pelotons of Lycra-clad cyclists gliding out to Surrey and Ghanaian churchgoers shuffling in for a post-service Nando’s; there are the retail parks and cinemas and swirly-carpeted bowling alleys of my youth. What once might have resembled boring conformity looks, instead, like the contradictory and quintessentially London beauty of being more than one thing at once.
