Fintan

Yeah, Miguel's. It's a proper gym with proper boxers. Intimidating for a kid until (a couple of minutes in) it becomes clear it's really friendly.

Apparently. That's what it says on the Facebook page.

The Ritzy workers have rejected the proposed deal (I think because it didn't offer the London Living Wage). So I suppose the boycott continues. For the people on here saying they should be grateful for work or should work elsewhere or shouldn't chose to live in a high-rent area: The high rent area in question is called London. Campaigning for change and organising to bring it about is part of democracy. 'Choice' is the language of the market. The two don't always go together. These are (I presume) young people who instead of rolling over or looking elsewhere organised to address an injustice. They didn't act as self-serving individuals, they acted together. They took on a stone-walling management and exposed a brand that had depicted itself as home-spun and neighbourly. I worked at the Ritzy in the nineties and the pay was rubbish then but we never got it together to do anything meaningful about it. These guys did. I won't be Picturehousing any time soon.

Went there last night. Really nice and actually really cheap. Staff were friendly. But damn the customers were an uptight bunch (with the obvious exception of me and my party). Lots of uncommunicative couples. It's creeping in on Bellenden Road now. These disapproving looks cos you're out with kids. Or because you have kids with you. I presume that's the problem. Or it might just be that being well-off has turned out to be less fun than they'd envisaged. I'm all love and peace and hands across the ocean and all that but I was here first and so were my (not especially noisy or badly behaved) brats. I mean I'm happy for these people that they can get a deposit together to be able to afford to move to Peckham but you can't come to a neighbourhood and sulk about the people who already live there.

Wait a minute. I passed through Bellenden Road about twenty years ago. It was a Saturday afternoon. Went to get some beer at Payless before the FA Cup final. And I thought 'This place is nice'. So I don't the locals had made 'a shithole' of the place. That's a terrible thing to say about people. Equally, I'm not sure new businesses opening are the enemy. There were a lot of empty shops, they're not empty any more. Can't see the problem. And the place isn't choked by outsiders in 4x4s. What's an outsider? It's London, not the Bayou. I think the enemy is chains. When you see a Tesco Local on Bellenden Road, that's when to worry.