Cartoon by John Sadler www.johnsadlerillustration.com

• CULTURAL appropriation is a slippery thing. In the case of the proposed music venue taking the name “Somers Town”, by someone with no known connection to Somers Town, to be located in a shiny new development which most don’t consider to be Somers Town, (Mumford and Sons, OK, but this raises questions, April 11).

Boundaries are a slippery thing, too, where this location once fell into Somers Town, proposed new ward boundaries may also jettison this poorer scrap from its glossier neighbour. But denotation is different from connotation and herein lies the rub. Musicians’ reputations live and die by their perceived association with “credibility”.

So I’d hazard a guess here and suppose that Ben, of Mumford and Sons, a folk band, a genre predicated on reviving what is supposed to be an authentic form of music, is, through the choice of the name “Somers Town”, complimenting us, through attempting to appeal to that same sense of authenticity, possibly vastly preferable to that evoked by “St Pancras Square” or King’s Cross, a glass-fronted behemoth, demanding its own shiny new postcode, with private space masquerading as public, with all the credibility of a overpriced plastic-wrapped primped fusion samosa at a corporate shindig in an “apartment” fashioned from a recently-renovated gas-holder, or a visioning summit taking place in an office space in a reinvented housing block, once home to social tenants.

Residents recently decanted to the outer regions of Luton or Potters Bar, so losing their authenticity overnight, and, oh, before we forget, their community.

Change is inevitable: though sometimes not as organic as supposed: the coup of the siting of CSM arts school as the jewel in the crown of the Granary Square development attempts to confer “cool”, a new restaurant is called “Coal Office” in Coal Drops Yard.

Connotations change: a barometer is the reaction now to the words “I live near King’s Cross”, as opposed to the 1980s (used as shorthand to circumvent the blank faces that “I live in Somers Town” inevitably provoked).

So now duly “named” Somers Town (by a pop star! no less), attracted perhaps by its rich historical connections, are we to suppose we’re on the slippery slope to gentrification, artists always being the ones who confer that “cool” to what were rundown working class neighbourhoods (those same art students “slumming it” in a pub that locals might eschew) and thus inadvertently, perhaps, grease the wheels of the juggernaut ahead of the ride?

Are we to expect Wollstonecraft cocktails? The fetishisation of chip butties and beer-stained pub carpets? Perhaps better to stay undiscovered.

Authenticity is a slippery thing, but there are the rather stark economic facts, unspoken of: the yawning chasm between the wealth of King’s Cross, and its poorer neighbour, with predominantly social housing (not by the way, from the 1700s) sitting, like a time bomb, on land values of mind-boggling amounts.

It’s interesting to consider what forms of appropriation will occur, not just the cultural, your newspaper has covered, already taking place, with bits of park intended for those “authentic” social tenants going to developers for luxury towers; its heritage (“art for the people sold at auctions”) has been picked off, sold for profit, neglected.

Does any of this ever benefit the people who live there? There’s no copyright on “Somers Town”, or ownership.

We are doing something locally, though, and we hope this will benefit the area, trying to locate that sense of pride in place, in Somers Town, by opening a museum in the heart of the community, in the hope that this does benefit Somers Town – called “Somers Town Space”. If he wants that history lesson, he’s warmly invited.

DIANA FOSTER
www.aspaceforus.club
Ossulston estate
Somers Town