brondesbury and kensal green (and the shifting of hip areas)

Obviously this will mean that a lot of the artists etc won't be able to afford to live there (Hoxton's big advantage is its proximity to the City and West End while once relative cheapness). Kensall Green is a little further out (I don't know, I've never been).

The next area of cool is more likely to be Peckham/Elephant and Castle or possibly Tottenham.

(peckham for example is quite complicated to get to from hackney and vice versa — except by car, which i think post-dates potential gentrification)

Good call on E&C though Matt, you could be right there.

Borough market is rapidly becoming tourist hell, which pains me no end, I couldn't shop properly there last weekend for people walking round gawping at the food and eating burgers and not buying owt.

all the areas suggested above are east/south, as i suspected

Mark S's mutual accessbility thing is interesting (although Peckham much harder to get to than Brixton, which is obviously trendy as hell, tube line notwithstanding?)

I think Southwark and parts of Lambeth are where it's at. The current plan (Oh no! Work talk! Oh no!) is to basically demolish a lot of Elephant and Castle including one or two of the nasty estates, extend the Walworth Road straight through it and turn that big roundabout into a public square. So that whole stretch from Elephant to Camberwell (which is already full of art students) is up for a big change of image.

(three buses vs two = harder to get to)

Steve,, I think this may have happened round Kensal/Queens park, it's grotty , but it's near Notting Hill/Ladbroke Grove, so the people wanting ghetto chic love it.

*or more to the point, not by prospective movers-into-a-new-area: the changes are made as responses to demand, surely, not as social engineering projects

anyway i said this bcz as it happens i have several very good friends in peckham but would not consider moving there bcz i associate it with the trek to get there

I'm not really sure this is the case... reading some of the things said about that nothern bit of Southwark (none of which I have to hand at the moment, annoyingly) is that they specifically WANT to attract lots of trendy people in order to turn it into a nice place for all the tourists who are going to the Globe, Tate Modern, War Museum, Waterloo etc, so that they'll stay there and spend lots of money in bars and restaurants.

(but eg the docks line shuts at 3 on sundays so it's still a lottery)

I wanted that to be something rude like groin-thrusting.

i suppose they could trendify Acton a bit more, its got peaks (Acton Park eh jel? ;) and troughs (north is ugly) and a heady mix of industry, residential, suburban tendencies, cosmopolitan populous including long established Afro-Caribbean and East Asian communities, that all essential 'ghetto chic'. so come to Acton, its a town on the move!

Well, duh!

Like Hoxton, King's Cross is just on the border of the congestion charge and right by a BIG station. There used to be a splendid café, Gattopardo, opposite the Scala, but remember in '94 there was only the one place to get a decent cuppa in Hoxton, rongWrong.

"oh yah well I just bought a flat in Dagenham, it's this year's Ilford don't you know"

yeah well a bull ran amok in a china shop not so long ago so anything's possible

I have no idea whether this will happen, but if so, it will automatically make it the coolest place in London.

(Actually, I think King's Cross in general will become too dominated by offices and luxury flats to be the next Hoxton, but that will take a fair while. If anything, it's probably the next Angel.)

If the scale models I saw in the Elephant the other day (part of the consultation process) are to be believed, then that area is going to be a contstruction site for a long time.

the paradise is but seconds from my yard