SOUTH LONDON SCENE

Imagine if one of Richard Curtis’s films had been transposed to south London, now add a sprinkling of Linklater’s walking and talking and limited time frame from the Before trilogy, and a touch of Amelie-esque surrealism and you have Raine Allen Miller’s summer hit Rye Lane. Allen Miller has lived in south London since she was 12 and her love of this particular part of London is evident in her films. Her first, Jerk, was a short about an elderly Jamaican man with depression. It premiered at the BFI London Film Festival, this brought her to the attention of BBC Film who approached her to direct an untitled rom-com that would become Rye Lane. Allen Miller definitely put her stamp on the script. She relocated the action from Camden to Peckham and Brixton, made the woman the funny one, and brought a heightened palette and lens to everyday London. Allen Miller is currently developing her own screenplay with BBC Films and is working on a comedy-drama series, but in the meantime you can watch Rye Lane on repeat on Disney+.

raineallenmiller.com

Once the enfant terrible of the London food scene, Tom Sellers is now part of the establishment. His story (pun intended) is legendary – left school at 15, went to work for René Redzepi at Noma then Thomas Keller at both Per Se in New York and The French Laundry in the Napa Valley. Her returned to London and, at 26, opened Restaurant Story on Tooley Street near London Bridge. Just five months after opening, his 10-course tasting menu with a narrative thread inspired by his life and family, and using seasonal British ingredients, earned him his first Michelin star, with the second following in 2021. He now has two other restaurants. The first is Story Cellar, which opened in April 2023 in Neal’s Yard, is a Parisian-style brasserie with the rotisserie chicken being the star of the show, alongside other French classics such as steak with Bernaise sauce, and crème bruleé.

The most recent opening is Dovetale, located within 1 Hotel Mayfair, an enterprise that fuses luxury with sustainability opposite The Ritz and The Wolseley. Again, British seasonal ingredients and the finest UK suppliers dictate the menu. The Raw bar boasts Orkney scallops, Cornish crab and Carlingford oysters from the Republic of Ireland. The starters feature a tomato tart made with tomatoes from the Isle of Wight and English burrata, while mains bring Herdwick lamb from the Lake District and salmon from Loch Duart, a small, independent Scottish salmon farming company in Scourie, Sutherland in north-west. There is also an impressive “From the Grill” selection of meat and fish. And if all that wasn’t enough he is also an ambassador for Audemars Piguet.

tomsellers.co.uk

Anyone who watched the second glorious season of White Lotus set in the Sicilian town of Taormina will be familiar with Graste – the Moor’s head statues that silently watch as the debauchery unfolds. Now transpose those to South London and give them an afrofuturistic twist and you have something close to the sculptures produced by south London visual artist Dulcie Davy. Drawing inspiration from the beauty and diversity within the female black community, her heads, which also double as incense holders, are bold and dramatic. Rather than emphasising the difficult side of the black experience, Davy, in her own words, “aims to encapsulate the elegance and beauty of blackness as opposed to reducing it to trauma and hardship”. She also creates large-scale paintings that celebrate the essence of the divine feminine. Dulcie has showcased her works in various solo exhibitions at a number of Soho House Studios produced sold out “Paint & Sip” events at Battersea Arts Centre, featured her art in an Oxford Street pop-up, collaborated with music artists and brands such as Apple Battersea and Tommy Jeans. Through the Battersea Arts Centre, Davy holds free creative workshops for teenage girls in London. Aimed at black and minority ethnic groups, Davy set these up to provide young girls of colour with an opportunity to engage with the art world and find their creativity.

dulciedavy.com

Described by the NME as “the underground star rewriting the rules of UK drum ‘n’ bass” Charlotte Plank is doing well for a 21-year-old. Her music which fuses indie with drum ‘n’ bass beats, as well as grunge and pop – think Billie Eilish with a banging donk on it – is a product of her upbringing. Her parents met in Australia on the ’90s rave scene where her father was a DJ and a friend of DJ-ing legend (and Zenith ambassador and friend of ROX) Carl Cox. Her mother’s musical tastes was more indie with Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged and The Cure being staples on camping trips. Plank herself discovered the likes of Grime and Four Tet growing up and all this is in the mix. She is also a member of Loud LDN, an all-female, non-binary group working towards making the world of drum ‘n’ bass more inclusive. Two of its members – Willow Kayne and Venbee – have won an Ivor Novello Rising Star awards and broke into the UK Top Five respectively. This year Plank has being touring the festival circuit, playing the likes of Reading on the BBC Introducing stage, Glastonbury, and Secret Garden. Her EP should be out in October with an album planned for 2024.

@charlotteplankmusic

Set up in 2009 after some of its members graduated from the University of Cambridge, this 22-strong multidisciplinary architectural collective brings together creators, researchers, designers and artists. They first made headlines when they turned an old petrol station in Clerkenwell into a pop-up cinema, then by winning the Turner Prize in 2015 for its work regenerating the Granby Four Streets, an area in Toxteth, Liverpool, comprising four streets at the tip of a triangle near Princes Park that had been largely abandoned during the 1990s. After its rather tongue-in-cheek start, Assemble has matured and is now in the business of changing for the better the way people live in a place. That could mean devising creative play spaces for children, making skateable works of art, devising workspaces as it did in Walthamstow with the Blackhorse Workshop – an open-access community workshop in London, which specialises in wood and metal processes, with affordable access to tools, space, and on-site technical expertise. It’s most recent project called Pitch for a Pitch is an initiative to improve the provision for girls football in the UK by either finding land to build new pitches on or finding spaces and building that can be adapted. They are currently looking for investors, landowners, councils with existing underused spaces that could be converted, so if you’re interested head to assemblestudio.co.uk, click on “Pitch for a Pitch” in Projects and download a proposal.

To request a copy the old-fashioned way, call 020 7237 0000.