Qualla: Brixton https://qualla.com/brixton en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:14 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/brixton-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Brixton https://qualla.com/brixton Brixton: Introduction https://qualla.com/brixton/ Photo credit Megalit, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 22 June 1948 the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury and 492 passengers from Jamaica filed down the gangplank into a country that had asked them to come and was about to forget it had. They were temporarily housed in the Clapham South deep shelter, and the nearest Labour Exchange was on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton. So that is where they walked first, looking for work. The Caribbean community that has shaped Brixton for nearly eighty years was not chosen for the neighbourhood by accident or by some demographic algorithm. It was chosen by a bureaucratic decision about where the nearest job centre happened to be.

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Image: Megalit | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/brixton-wp/gcpu-brixton-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Brixton: Brixi's Stone https://qualla.com/brixton/ Photo credit Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before any of this, before the market or the underground station or the murals, a Saxon lord named Brixi set a boundary stone somewhere on what is now Brixton Hill, marking the meeting place of his hundred court of Surrey. The road past the stone was called Bristow Causeway....

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Image: Jwslubbock | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/brixton-wp/gcpu-brixton-brixis-stone.mp3 0:06 2 full Brixton: Electric Avenue https://qualla.com/brixton/ Photo credit Public domain. Brixton Market began on Atlantic Road in the 1880s. In 1877 the Bon Marche department store opened on Brixton Road — the first purpose-built department store in Britain. And Electric Avenue, that street whose name Eddy Grant turned into a 1983 hit, became one of the first shoppin...

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]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/brixton-wp/gcpu-brixton-electric-avenue.mp3 0:06 3 full Brixton: 8 January 1947 https://qualla.com/brixton/ Photo credit JRennocks, CC BY-SA 4.0. David Robert Jones was born in a terraced house at 40 Stansfield Road, on the boundary between Brixton and Stockwell. He would later take the name Bowie. He spent his early childhood here before the family moved to Bromley, but Brixton claims him, and rightly. The mural on Tunsta...

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Image: JRennocks | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/brixton-wp/gcpu-brixton-8-january-1947.mp3 0:06 4 full Brixton: April 1981 https://qualla.com/brixton/ Photo credit Cnbrb, CC BY-SA 3.0. The trigger was Operation Swamp 81. Plainclothes officers were sent into Brixton to use the so-called 'sus law', which permitted stops on the mere suspicion of intent to commit a crime. Within five days they had stopped almost a thousand people, most of them young Black men. The ...

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Image: Cnbrb | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/brixton-wp/gcpu-brixton-april-1981.mp3 0:06 5 full Brixton: Cherry Groce https://qualla.com/brixton/ Photo credit Secretlondon, CC BY-SA 3.0. Just after seven on the morning of 28 September 1985, Metropolitan Police officers raided the home of Dorothy 'Cherry' Groce on Normandy Road. They were looking for her 21-year-old son Michael. He was not there. Detective Inspector Douglas Lovelock shot Cherry Groce as she lay in...

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]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/brixton-wp/gcpu-brixton-cherry-groce.mp3 0:06 6 full Brixton: The Pound and the Place https://qualla.com/brixton/ Photo credit User:Maksim, CC BY-SA 3.0. Brixton has refused, repeatedly, to be only a place where things happen to it. In 2009 Transition Town Brixton launched the Brixton Pound, one of the first inner-city local currencies in Britain, designed to keep money circulating among independent shops. The notes featured Len G...

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Image: User:Maksim | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/p/u/brixton-wp/gcpu-brixton-the-pound-and-the-place.mp3 0:06 7 full