Looking out at you smugly from the pages of Get a Lifestyle, You Sad, Unstylish Person are lofters Rajiv and Zoe. The fashionable pair inhabit a loft-style apartment (please don’t call it a ‘flat’), which is probably in Bermondsey — the new Hoxton or the new Clerkenwell, depending on which property supplement you pore over with a pang of guilt-tinged longing.
Once the province of spivs, gangsters and noxious tanneries, this tangle of warehouses, wharves and printworks, Victorian railway arches and council housing has, since the mid-Nineties, emerged as a hip and thriving artists’ quarter. The past decade has seen a stampede of arty urbanites moving in, seduced by the cavernous live/work spaces offered by converted industrial buildings, the proximity of the river and vibrant Borough Market, and transport links vastly improved since the arrival of the Jubilee line.
Space is being made for plenty more: the £35 million Spa regeneration scheme is well under way, while Bermondsey Square, shabby site of the weekly New Caledonian Antiques Market and the ruins of a 10th-century abbey, is the object of a £36 million redevelopment scheme, courtesy of Southwark Council, due to start at the end of this year.
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