An Incompetent’s Guide to…Peckham Erin Lake Originally from Cambridge, via Norfolk and Peterborough, now settled in the suburban nest of Ealing, I am currently finishing my final year of part-time MA at Westminster. Outside of writing and thinking about writing and being anxious about writing and weeping over writing, I enjoy long walks, attempts to watch TV online, 19th-Century female - and some male - novelists and chicken wraps. Special skill: being able to articulate in 61 words pretty comprehensively who I am as a human woman.
Peckham, despite those rumours, and the looks people give when you mention you are moving there, is a pleasant district in the South-East of London. The South, in general, has the reputation of a slightly embarrassing and violently eccentric family member who you stopped sending Christmas cards to years ago. Best just avoided. But buried beneath Old Father Thames’s Underskirts, where traditionally vice and various degrees of licentiousness have been permitted and encouraged throughout the years, are many delights equal to that in the hoity and sometimes toity villages of the North. This permissiveness was not the only reason I moved there in 2011, and in fact, in the few months I stayed there I failed to do anything remotely illegal or frowned upon, or had anything of that ilk done to me (aside from getting pick-pocketed in Brixton, but I adamantly deny the miscreancy there, maintaining it was an honest mistake and the sticky-fingered reveller assumed they were rummaging in their own purse as they danced to Whitesnake. Easily done). Of old times Peckham was a famed market town, and still retains that trope of young men flogging their fruits and fishes to the good public, even if the produce may be a tad more exotic than the days of yore. There are very likely more yams than in the days of yore. And probably more mooli - that giant white radish so full of yummy Folate. Vegetables aside, arriving at Queen’s Road Peckham, you might be forgiven (depending on the nature of the forgiver) for thinking, “gah, I meant to get off at Dulwich, yikes!” and swallow all your valuables. But no, fear not (or less) and stay a while in the new hip postcode of London. SE15 coming at you. Not with a gun, necessarily. In fact, the only phallic shaped weapon you might get assaulted with is a good old plantain. And they are very tasty.
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