Harper-Thames Documents the City at Dusk from an Unexpected Vantage Point and Makes the Case for Finding London’s Beauty Off the Tourist Map
The Best View of London Is from the Roof of a Car Park in Peckham
The best view of London is from the roof of the Rye Lane car park in Peckham. I am aware this is a contestable claim and I am making it anyway, because the contestability is part of the point. The view from the roof of the Shard is magnificent and also costs approximately £32 per person and requires advance booking and produces a relationship to the city that is spectacular and vertical and ultimately tourist-shaped the city as a thing to look at rather than a thing to be in. The Peckham car park roof is free, is accessed by a staircase that requires mild determination to find, and produces a view that is horizontal rather than vertical, encompassing the city at eye level rather than above it, in a direction that takes in the skyline of South London from the Shard to Crystal Palace with the specific light that South London gets at dusk that I have been trying to describe for three years and that I will attempt here: it is orange and grey simultaneously, which sounds terrible and is remarkable.
What the View Contains
From the Peckham car park roof at 6:30 p.m. on a clear evening you can see: the Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie-Talkie, the Cheesegrater, and Canary Wharf in the distance, which is the London that postcards show, but small, in the context of the city that surrounds it rather than as the subject of an image. In the foreground: the rooftops of Peckham and Brixton and Camberwell, which are different from the City of London rooftops in the specific way that the south of the river is different from everything north of it the same city, a different relationship to space and money and what buildings are for. And between them: the Thames, visible in fragments between buildings, silver at dusk, which is the city’s actual centre in ways that the financial district doesn’t quite capture.
London perspectives at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. South London at MyLondon. Further at santaclaus.top and Shoreditch UK Bluesky. London life at The Daily Mash.
The Responsibility
The responsibility that comes with this position writing about a neighbourhood while being part of the forces that are changing it is one I have been thinking about for as long as I have been writing this column. There is no clean resolution. I am here. I pay rent here. The rent I pay contributes to the economic pressure that the original residents feel. I write about the neighbourhood in ways that increase its visibility, which contributes to the interest that drives further change. These are the unavoidable mechanics of my presence here, and the fact that I am aware of them and think about them regularly does not change them. What changes them, or at least what might eventually change them, is the combination of attention and advocacy writing about what the change costs as clearly as writing about what it offers, supporting the things that serve everyone rather than only the people who arrived recently, and being honest about my own position in the process rather than narrating it from a comfortable distance that I don’t actually occupy. This is what I am trying to do. The neighbourhood will tell me, eventually, whether I have managed it.
Shoreditch continues. I continue. The fourteen-pound cocktail is still a problem. The ceramicist is giving a talk on Thursday. The Bangladeshi restaurant on the corner is still excellent and still there. The car park roof at sunset is still the best view I have found in this part of the city. The argument about what all of this means is still ongoing, in bars and on rooftops and in planning offices and in columns like this one, and the argument is important and the neighbourhood is changing and some of what changes is worth grieving and some of it is worth celebrating and the job is to hold all of it at once, which is harder than it sounds and is also exactly what London asks of anyone who takes it seriously.
East London’s story is not finished. The buildings that are being replaced were themselves replacements for something that preceded them. The community that is being displaced displaced someone before it. The neighbourhood that is currently performing its former self will eventually settle into what it actually is, which will be something new that the people currently performing the old version will be nostalgic for. This is how cities work, and knowing it doesn’t prevent the loss of the things that are lost in the process. It contextualises them. The Victorian warehouses that define Shoreditch’s aesthetic replaced the market gardens that preceded them. The market gardens replaced the fields. Something will replace the warehouses. What I am arguing for is not preservation as a principle but as a choice a deliberate decision to protect the collective urban quality that makes a place worth being in, rather than accepting its gradual replacement by buildings that look like the quality and cost more and produce less of it. That argument is worth making. I am making it, on this column and in planning consultations and in conversations with the ceramicist, who also has opinions about it that are more technically informed than mine. Between us, we are covering the argument from multiple angles. I am not sure anyone with decision-making authority is listening. I am going to keep making the argument anyway.
