How the protests against the new gentrification are going…
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MBSA might have been a one-off valedictory howl, but in an act of synchronicity, other “Shit Again” activity arrived.
In Peckham, the southeast London district previously known for being the location of Only Fools and Horses and latterly for being a hipster hotspot, a “Make Peckham Shit Again” landed in March, as did a Twitter account called “Make Frome Shit Again” along with a few MFSA hashtags of the same vintage. (In an odd circularity, much of Only Fools and Horses, although set in Peckham, was actually filmed in Bristol.)
Then, this spring an international brigade of “Shit Again” warriors in Los Angeles in the form of “Make Venice Shit Again” (Venice the hippyish LA district, to be clear, not the Birmingham of Italy).
Such was its clout that Hollywood actor Josh Brolin sported a MVSA baseball cap, part of a local atmosphere so heightened that a recent LA Weekly story found cause to lament that in Venice, “You’ll sooner find a $200 (£150) wool poncho than a $12 pair of flip-flops.”
So the “Shit Again” tag somehow hit the mark, both as a lament to the new and deracinated world of overpriced and socially exclusive development, and as a great merchandise idea in its own right. So there’s a MBSA hat, T-shirt and even “laptop skins”, while MVSA baseball caps retail at $30 and MPSA baseball caps a snip at a tenner.
As Tumbleweed Parker puts it (not his real name) his Make Peckham Shit Again hats were a response to Trump’s MAGA cap as well as a way to protest the gentrification of Peckham, which has deep roots but has gathered pace in the last five years as a domino in what you might call the “de-shitting” of London.
“Before Trump I’d been thinking about doing some merchandise to kick back against all the happy-clappy local pride movements that seemed to spring up after the London riots in 2011,” says Parker.
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