It must be very hard indeed to do business in Camberwell if even Cash Converters has closed down. To be honest I don’t know if the whole chain went under, or if it was just this branch. That whole row of shops at the top of Camberwell Road looks closed (or maybe it was just when I passed); they are all owned by a firm of property speculators, so I wonder if the owners are getting ready to knock it down and build new houses there, to capitalise on the new Mary Datchelor development. This could be absolute rubbish, of course; the invention of my fertile imagination.
Across the road, Redstar is getting ready to open again. It will have two bars and is requesting shows for its first-floor art gallery. According to its Myspace page:
Redstar is about to provide a major jolt to wake the South London club scene with a shudder.
Which is nice. They have a website too, but I won’t link to it as the code offends my web developer elitist tendencies (and there’s nothing on it anyway).
The former Cube bar is reopening as a bar/diner called NIA (I think; I should have written it down), with the downstairs area Club Couture. Quite the clubbing mecca we are becoming.
As you may be aware due to Mark Dodds’ spamming enthusiastic promotion, a 30-day season of live arts performances begin at the Sun and Doves tonight. I might go along to see what kind of people have formed a Lloyd Cole tribute act.
I had a bit of an existential crisis as I got on the 436 bus yesterday; it was like one of local boy William Blake’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno. The 436 outside of commuter hours is the unfortunates shuttle. My misery ended when I arrived in Lewisham, as a drunken teenage girl vomiting on the pavement outside McDonalds at lunchtime reminded me that Camberwell’s not so bad.
Although having said that… a story in the SLP says that junkies’ discarded needles have been found in Lucas Gardens. I confess to being surprised by that; I’ve seen one or two drunks in there, but never any smackheads. Dagmar probably knows better than I (due to the amount of time spent in the park; I’m not making any implications of drug use).
But it’s not all bad news, as I found out this week that Camberwell has its own Cockney royalty, in the form of East Street-born Pearly King Jim. God bless ya, and all the best of Cockney luck.
After writing all this, I realise I’ve forgotten to mention the results of the local shopping poll have been released. In a nutshell: people want more varied shops, and shop owners have an unrealistic idea of how many customers travel by car. This deserves a post of its own, but I’m not going to write it now.