Brixton

Electric Avenue, two covered market arcades and the national archive of Black Britain.

Brixton was fields until Vauxhall Bridge opened in 1816 and put a road across them, and the railway arrived in 1862; after that it filled in fast. Bon Marché went up on Brixton Road in 1877, built by a printer who had won on the horses and thought London should have a shop like the one in Paris, and it is usually called the first purpose-built department store in Britain. Electric Avenue was laid out in 1888 under a glass canopy and lit by electric light, which is how it got its name. Eddy Grant borrowed it in 1982. Two covered arcades open off the same few yards of pavement: Market Row from 1928 and Granville Arcade, now Brixton Village, from 1937. Both were built to hold market stalls and both now run on small kitchens. From 1948 people arriving from the Caribbean were put up in the deep shelter at Clapham South and sent to the labour exchange on Coldharbour Lane, and a great many stayed in the streets around it. Most of what Brixton is now came out of that. Three days of disorder in April 1981, and Lord Scarman's report on them, changed policing across the country. The Black Cultural Archives opened on Windrush Square in 2014 and holds the national collection of Black British history. The Astoria of 1929 is now the Academy, the Electric Pavilion of 1911 is now the Ritzy, and David Bowie was born on Stansfield Road in 1947.

Photo by Matt Brown, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons