By Zoe Jewell, Editor
We have exciting news – almost two years after it began, Brixton Blog is moving to a new website, www.brixtonblog.com, and combining forces with Tim Dickens, the man behind the Brixton Bugle. The website will cover news, culture, features and local history on a daily basis and will, we hope, be a trusted source for all who live in – or want to find out about – Brixton. We want to report on and foster debate in a place we are passionate about.
This is one of the first posts for the Brixton Blog I have written in the first person and credited to my own name. I have always strived not to be an overbearing personality on the site, to remain truthful to the subjects I have covered and give others a place to write about where they live. Yet the Brixton Blog has also been a very personal project to create an online space for news and views about the area I grew up in and love very much.
If there is one regret I have, it is not having looked the fast-moving change in Brixton squarely in the eye and reported on the full effects of gentrification here, both positive and negative.
And my, Brixton has changed since I set up the Brixton Blog two years ago in 2010. My first article was about the Spacemaker project in its first few months. Little did I know what was to come. There are a feast of new, wonderful restaurants to choose from in the town centre now, but there are also many who feel excluded by this new Brixton or who do not even register it in their lives. Will the change continue at this pace? How will it affect the old traders and what will happen to the surrounding areas in Brixton? We plan to report on all of this at the new Brixton Blog.
Running Brixton Blog alone with a full-time job has meant that the blog hasn’t yet fulfilled all its potential. This will all change as we move to a new site. We want to be a proper, considered, fun online newspaper about Brixton. We plan to keep the council to account, report on crime and look at the effects of the cuts in Lambeth, as well as write features, profile brilliant Brixtonites and tell some of our local history.
We are soft launching tomorrow, so bear with us as we get everything up and running. It might be a month or so before all systems are running smoothly but we hope you stay with us – and above all send all your comments, questions, criticisms to info@brixtonblog.com, because we’d love to hear them.
Brixton Blog 