I found myself cycling through The Frontline on Saturday afternoon. This is usually a great cut through from Brixton through to Herne Hill and beyond. The LTN really works.

But not on Saturday.

There was another Reimagining Atlantic Road taking place, organised by the ever energetic Brixton BID.

You have to spend all that compulsory local taxation on something.

I kinda get the idea. Local businesses are forced to pay the BID a tax. In return, the BID needs to do the business.

Reimagining - which is a piss poor name btw - is about thinking the impossible: what if there were no cars?

But it’s not that impossible. Reclaim the Streets was shutting down Brixton three decades ago. No taxation on local businesses was collected either.

Instead we have Reimagining, which closes a stretch of the LTN, and an attempt is made to put on a street party.

Any enforced attempt to PARTY or have FUN usually leads to the opposite in my experience.

The local bars and restaurants benefitted. But not much. The space was a little sparse when I passed through at the peak period.

There was the usual kids face paining, which is hard to criticise. Plus some very lively and friendly DJ’s.

Shutting down an LTN though is a most strange decision to help celebrate the possibilities of what can take place on our streets.

Cycling from the town centre, and through the Frontline. A few random snaps as I pondered how early or late I was for ParkRun. I never can tell.

The Dogstar is a sad story. It’s gone from being London’t first Mega DJ Boozer to boarded up. I hear that the building work required to reopen it is putting businesses off.

Cheese London always makes me smile.

Brixton misses Sam the Wheels. I hope his own personal parklet [URGH] survives.

Chapeau!

To Lion Vibes on Thursday evening. For Selecter [erm] Thursday!

If it’s the first Thursday of the month, then it must mean that the Brixton Village space has another open deck session. It’s for anyone who wants their fifteen minutes of reggae love and appreciation.

The basic premise is that you book in a slot ahead of the session, and are then allocated fifteen minutes to play some of your fave tunes.

There’s no rules about which reggae style is acceptable. This is not a muso noodling session for people who really should listen to music alone at home.

It’s almost impossible not to SMILE when pretty much any reggae genre is blasted out of the Lion Vibes PA in a small space of appreciative people.

I made my way down Stockwell Road. Pendulum were playing at The Academy.

Oh - interesting, I thought. I paused for a few seconds and thought of cutting a deal with a tout.

Magnificent though Pendulum are, I would much rather prefer an intimate music experience up close.

Selecter Thursday it is then.

The room was already rammed when I arrived. I lurked a little outside the front of the shop for a few tracks, waiting for others to leave and free up some space.

Even outside I could feel the bass trembling me from foot to toe. I’ll have a bit of that - especially on a school night.

Soon I was inside. The Sisters of Reggae were on the decks. Rocksteady got the crowd dancing.

A change of Selecter and soon we were deep into roots territory. Smiles were everywhere in this most informal and accepting of environments. Love only please, YEAH.

Shout out to Ben and all at Lion Vibes who also organised a collection on the night for the Caribbean Disaster Appeal. People were generous in donating on what is an otherwise free night.

It’s quite a leap in trust to open up your shop once a month and allow a customer takeover. It’s helped to build Lion Vibes into something much more than a record shop in Brixton.

The space has become a focal point for an ever shifting reggae community in Brixton. And it’s not just old school, either. Mixing with some familiar faces was a largely young crowd.

It reminds me a lot of my own youth club days - not so much in terms of the style of music, but more about the desire to simply have fun through music with others.

Selecter Thursday has become the best Thursday night out in Brixton.

Sometimes the best recommendations to satisfy your cultural thirst come from right on your own local doorstep.

OH HAI Brixton Buzz.

And so with a spare half hour in Clap’ham, I swerved the brunching Wankerville hordes and headed to the local library to look at the work of Brixton street photographer Christopher iCha.

The X-Factor exhibition is low key, but lovely all the same, It features many recognisable Brixton faces. The enthusiasm for the subject matter comes across clearly.

A mixture of black & white and colour snaps are on display as you make your way down the spiralling - and bloody awful - structure of Clapham Library.

There’s no great fanfare telling you about the exhibition. The photos blend in with what is already quite a busy interior landscape.

Framed behind glass in a very bright building, they’re also impossible to snap yourself, with endless lens glare.

That’s no bad thing. It’s a little cheeky to take photos of photos, often leading to a poor secondhand reproduction.

It’s clear from the first frame on show that iCha has the complete trust of his subject matter. He’s not capturing Brixton scenes - he is PART of the Brixton street life.

If you can manage this then you’re halfway there to capturing some decent portrait photography.

It’s an incredibly positive, and very playful exhibition. It will serve as a wonderamful historical archive of the Brixton scene in ten, twenty years time.

Clapham Library itself is very odd. It was built on the back of a developer, wanting to flog on luxury apartments up above. The library looks and feels like an afterthought.

The spiralling nature of the building means that you make your way down to the basement on basically a giant helter skelter walking ramp. It has aged badly over the past fifteen years or so.

Never trust round buildings - and yep, I’ve worked in one.

I’ll miss the Veteran Car Run chugging along South Lambeth Road, if future personal plans ever come to something. Every November, for a quarter of a Century (!) I’ve been woken by the sound of the classic cars slowly making their way towards Brixton.

It’s Destination Brighton for the relics as part of the annual coastal run. It must be a challenge for some of them to make it even as far as St Reatham up the road.

You can hear them coming at the Stockwell end of South Lambeth Road all the way from the Little Porto end. Those old engines aren’t exactly cutting edge EV technology. It’s the one exception I can make without going ape shit over petrol polluters.

Sunday morning was very similar to the previous twenty four years of observing the grand old spectacle. It always seems to rain on this one weekend of the year. The dampness combined with the petrol led to a very intoxicating smell.

The drivers and passengers looked dapper. I was more in awe with some of the wardrobe decisions than the old bangers themselves.

This may - or may not - be my final year of observing this tradition. I like to think that the Veteran Car Run will still be taking place in twenty five years time.

I love turning a corner around my S Ldn patch, and then OH MY DAYS, another new mural has appeared.

Create without permission, as we use to say back in the day.

But I suspect that Spanish artist Sebas Velasco did seek permission before he painted his beautiful new piece of work on the side of Broadstone House along Cobbett Street, SW8.

It’s titled ‘Yves’ - a local young fella from Brixton, standing on the Brixton mainline platform.

The art may - or may not - be long for this world. It’s right at the heart of the failed South Lambeth Estate ‘regeneration.’

If Lambeth can be arsed to get its act together after more than a decade of stalling, then we may soon have another soulless, uniform development springing up soon.

Then again.

When regeneration stalls, the streets speak.

Or something.