Every morning at around 7 or 7:30 a.m. for the past 10 years, I have run the 10 kilometers from my home to the London office of Hotel News Now, STR and CoStar.
The halfway mark is Peckham, an inner London suburb that whenever mentioned always brings a smile to the faces of everyone in the country. This town provided the backdrop to one of the most beloved comedy shows on British TV, “Only Fools and Horses.”
The show featured three get-rich-quick market traders, the Trotters, who never quite got the break they were hoping for as they sold all manner of things to dubious shoppers in this uncelebrated corner of the capital.
Well, it once was uncelebrated, even sketchy, to use the London slang for an area where one had to look over their shoulder if walking through it.
Last week, a Travelodge hotel opened in Peckham, the first branded hotel in the neighborhood and, by the by, the hotel firm’s 80th in London.
Peckham is a wonderfully diverse neighborhood today, retaining its ethnic composition, along with some fine restaurants, and expanding with multistory car park-rooftop cinemas, the Brick Brewery craft-beer business and taproom, markets full of antiques and retro good and even a Sake brewery, Kanpai.
Everything is five minutes from Peckham Rye Common, one of London’s largest parks and a haven for wildlife.
Everything here is also “cushty,” to use the Roma-London word for something that is satisfying or wonderful — and a word still largely used by Londoners who do not want an “outsider” to know what the conversation is.
Much of this Peckham change has come with or followed a degree of gentrification, which is no doubt not to everyone’s liking but is why Travelodge has arrived — to meet the demand for visiting friends and relatives or for those adventurous enough not to want to stay in the West End.
The hotel is marketing its hotel as being in the home of “Only Fools and Horses” — as in the London expression “only food and horses work.” In other words, everyone else takes it easy or in the characters’ cases funds themselves by operating marginally on the wrong side of commercial law.
Such was its success that a Dec. 27, 1996, episode of the 30-minute show, called “Time on Our Hands,” achieved a TV audience of 24.3 million. The entire British population at the time was 58.17 million.
Travelodge is also opening hotels in The Oval, where a stadium of the same name regularly hosts the England cricket team, and Beckenham. Both are also south of the River Thames, that central divide what also separates Londoners’ mentalities and travel plans.
Much along the lines of never the twain shall meet, but maybe the beloved nature of this comedy show, now there is a 52-room hotel celebrating it, will change that notion?
Several decades ago, I grew up in New Cross, essentially one town over, and no one from New Cross would ever go out in the evening to Peckham. Why risk it?
Now, it is one of the most spoken about neighborhoods and long may it keep its mixture of cool and cultural edge.
If for any reason I feel tired during my daily runs, I now know where to stop.
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