Zed Nelson's The Street (2019)

This is Zed Nelson's first feature film, about just one street close to central London, Hoxton Street. Nelson says it's about gentrification, austerity, Brexit. It's a wake-up call, not intended as a poke at the new people moving into the street, just a reflection of a moment taken over three years.

All the same, it's a picture of a dying community forced out by rising prices, of increasing pressure being put on the original working-class people to move out of the area not only in which they may well have been born but their parents too before them, and so on. There's the pie and mash shop now opposite a craft beer shop, a 'Buzz Shop' for building web sites, advertising, copy writing, numerous other things, there's even a gallery. The older people can't understand, or can only understand that they're on the way out: even the priest has to move out of the church at the age of seventy, and he can no longer afford to live in London.

There's a feeling by the older residents that they've been conned by Brexit: some have voted for it as they thought too much money was spent being in the EU, but now maybe too much is being spent on leaving it? There's confusion everywhere. We see a bunch of youths waving flags around, demanding 'their' country back, but what country?

There's racist talk that wouldn't be seen by the locals as racist: the blacks have been there for decades, but they're not happy with the fact that they used to know everyone but now don't, some people can't speak English, and one reckons that they're being given priority over the locals in the council flat queues.

Certainly flats are around, but they belong to private companies and we all know about their breaking rules: the Grenfell Tower tragedy broke out during the filming, and 72 people were killed due to combustible cladding: the ensuing mess continues. Aviva, the insurance company, has bought most of Hoxton Square. Where can these people go now they've been forced out of their homes? Errol sold his garage and the demolition squad are moving in, but at least he's accepted the offer. For those who rent, well there's always the street of course.

I found it most enlightening that the guy who sleeps rough under a bridge and who was the victim of mindless yobs burning what little property he had had an East European accent. Most significant of all though, he was much more cultured than any of the others we see on the street: he quotes from Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black), and we see a charred copy of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightnesss of Being. The books were written in different centuries, but both from writers living in France, although Kundera is a now nationalised Czech immigrant.

I think Nelson's right in suggesting that this film could serve as a witness to a particular historical period in British history.