The Economist looks at the demographic and social changes underway in Brixton:
A good deal has changed in Brixton, a south London district, since Eta Rodney bought her Victorian terraced house in 1980. Then many of her neighbours were, like her, Jamaican. West Indians had settled in Brixton since 1948, when some arrived on the Empire Windrush. Today many of Mrs Rodney’s black neighbours are selling up and moving out of the area, making way for predominantly white newcomers. Britain’s historic black centre is being transformed — but in an odd way.
The Afro-Caribbean population of Lambeth, the borough where Brixton is located, is estimated to have fallen by 8% since 2001 even as the borough’s overall population has risen by 9%. Interracial mixing explains only part of this: the main reason is black flight. Afro-Caribbeans have dispersed from other parts of central London too, such as Hackney and Hammersmith and Fulham. They move to escape crime, buy bigger houses and get their children into better schools — the familiar reasons people of all races head for suburbia. In the South East outside London, Afro-Caribbean numbers have jumped, albeit from a low base.
[. . .]
Mrs Rodney feels both pressures. Her husband would like to retire to Jamaica. She prefers Streatham, further south in London, where she could buy a palace for the money gentrifiers are keen to pay for her house, with its original cornicing and marble fireplaces. The former council house she bought under the Conservative Party’s right-to-buy scheme—“I love Mrs Thatcher, God bless her soul”—would today fetch at least 20 times what she paid.
Of course, for many of us, the name Brixton has a very Clash-y context:
