Let's move to New Cross

The Guardian's 'Let's move to' column today focuses on New Cross. Back in 2010, the column covered Brockley in a piece that lumped us in with East Dulwich and Nunhead. This time, New Cross gets dedicated treatment and the description is a little harsh, but reasonably fair, helped by a couple of "words on the street" comments from BC regulars. The introduction says:

New Cross: only for the intrepid. Initial impressions are not encouraging. A road runs through it. A great, stinking, droning road: the A2. But if you do as the locals do and ignore it, New Cross opens up like an oyster with a pearl. For what's that I hear over the clamour of traffic? Buzz. There's a definite buzz around the Peckham-Camberwell-Deptford triangle these days, and New Cross is at its centre. You don't have to be an art student at Goldsmiths to enjoy it, though it does help. Step away from New Cross's great knot of infrastructure – roads, viaducts, railways, Sainsbury's car park – and you come across little microclimates of hardy souls ignoring the roar by making their own noise, be that the sound of cool kidz playing guitar at the Amersham Arms, the swish of knitting needles at Café Crema or the sound of feverish community gardening. Nope, can't hear a thing.

The Guardian is obsessed by negative impact of the A2 on New Cross, much to the annoyance of its New Cross readers who point out that the illustrative photo is actually Deptford Broadway. As the readers say, New Cross is not the only part of London to be blighted by an arterial road, but it is true to say that the road system is a real problem for the area. It's not simply that the road is large and busy, it's that the one-way system effectively cuts New Cross in half, dividing the clusters of businesses around New Cross and New Cross Gate stations, which hampers its potential to form a coherent town centre.