South London is everything to me. It’s a combination of swanky, flat-white cafés, musty spice shops and Jamaican places that serve up rice and peas. It’s a hodgepodge that smells of all these things. It’s weird and surreal but it’s my home. I’ve spent most of my life in Brixton. I moved there with my dad from Moss Side in Manchester when I was 12, then lived in Peckham when I went to uni. I miss it — I live on a barge now, but if I could drag my boat to Brixton I would.
One of the biggest things for me when I first read the script for Rye Lane was that the setting was a third character in itself. It was originally set in Camden, but I know Peckham and Brixton so well that I had to shoot it there. I wanted to elevate these places and put them on a plinth. They have so much soul and depth. When we were filming, so many people came over and asked, ‘You shooting EastEnders?’ They were so excited that we were there. That is one of the things I love about south London. You can be walking down Rye Lane and see someone carrying a trolley full of tins of beans with a dog just sitting there. It’s that spirit.
