Christina in Lambeth is 21-30 and is a campaigner.
Christina Dixon (aka Brat Worst) is an animal welfare activist, bass player and London Rollergirl living in Brixton. She is passionate about the DIY punk scene. Her friends tease her about coming from a posh private school but this doesn’t stop her drive for living life to the fullest.
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Film Maker: Mark Currie, Rachel Wang
Questions & Answers
- What's your first memory of London? Sitting in my parents' office near Baker Street annoying their colleagues by playing with the internal phone system with my big brother.
- What do you miss when you're away from London? I miss the diversity. I spent two years living in a small city in Austria, which I loved for a whole host of other reasons, but it was pretty conservative and very white. After a time I missed the melting pot of London, as well as the ability to order a soya flat white with ease. I hate myself a little bit for writing that last part.
- What's your favourite neighbourhood? I've been living in Herne Hill for 5 years and for me it's the best neighbourhood. Although it's changing fast, it currently has just the right mix of lush green in Brockwell Park, a 'village atmosphere' but also proximity to the madness of Brixton. It has a great market on Sundays and a community group who do things like plant wildflower meadows and arrange bluegrass gigs in the park. All very quaint, but y'know, quite nice.
- What's your favourite building? The Brixton windmill - I love that there's a windmill in Brixton! I once brought a postcard of Brixton depicting what it looked like when the windmill was active and it's surrounded by lush green fields. I don't know how accurate it is but for me the building is fascinating because it represents times gone past and how much London has changed.
- What's your ideal night out in London? Going to a DIY punk gig featuring bands I love and people I haven't seen for ages popping out of the woodwork to drink a pint of cider with me and get weird. This ideal night involves no night buses, no street harassment and has no adverse consequences the following day in terms of hangover.
- What's your most hated building? We have our skate training in Stonebridge Park every Thursday and Sunday. It's really tricky to get to, there's always engineering works and I feel like a bit of my soul dies every time I go there. On the way to the venue there's an abandoned high-rise building with smashed in windows surrounded by a dual carriage way and a completely unnavigable junction. All you can see is concrete, litter and cars. When I see that building twice a week, every week, I never fail to be a bit depressed.
- What's the best view in London? I cycle to work every day and my old route used to take me across Westminster Bridge. Coming over the bridge at sunrise or sunset, I'm always stirred by how beautiful London can be, although perhaps it's the euphoria of having just survived cycling across Elephant and Castle.
- What's been your most memorable night out in London? I really don't like New Years Eve and one year I went to meet some friends thinking this time it could be different. We had some drinks before setting out to try and find a warehouse party we'd heard about in East London. We realised we were going to spend midnight stuck on a bus after multiple organisational failures so we jumped the fence at Victoria Park to watch the fireworks. They were great, but my friend fell in the lake while trying to take a photo. Not to be deterred we spent the next few hours walking wet-footed around industrial estates in Stratford before joining a party which was essentially a fire in a bin outside a disused warehouse with all manner of shady characters about. It was a terrible night, but for some reason I haven't forgotten it and I consider it to be quintessentially London experience.
- How would you like to spend your ideal day off in London? A ride along Regents Canal, followed by a skate in the sun in Victoria Park. I'd drink some tins with friends before heading to a gig featuring multiple inspirational women playing instruments and a distro selling hot sauce and or patches. I would probably stroke a happy dog at some point.
- What's the worst journey you've had to make in London? I had recently acquired a beautiful new bike thanks a generous discount from a friend. Genuinely the most beautiful bike I have ever seen, let alone ridden. I locked it up for 2 hours in the early evening at a busy junction in Shoreditch. I came back at 8pm and someone had stolen my entire headset, handlebars and shifters and cut my brake cables. I didn't even know that was a thing that people did, but it is, and it cost me several hundred pounds to fix. I didn't have enough money for a taxi so I walked with my bike in two parts (depressing unicycle-esque front bit and the whole back section) all the way to London bridge to catch a train home, shoulders burning. It started raining, the police were completely unhelpful and there was a really confused tourist in the police station who had had all his belongings stolen but couldn't speak English having a worse day than I was and I felt utterly demoralised sitting there listening to the exchange he was having.
- What's your personal London landmark? All the places I loved growing up are being knocked down and replaced with bland, soulless slabs of concrete and glass. My landmark would inevitably have been the Astoria or Mean Fiddler. All my formative years were spent there going to gigs, interviewing bands, blagging backstage and generally causing mayhem. Some of the greatest punk bands of the 90s/2000s era graced the stages there and it breaks my heart to think they no longer exist. It's a story repeated all across this city.
- Who's your favourite fictional Londoner? Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. I once saw a top 10 worst cockney accents ever created and it was top of the list, with good reason. Whenever I hear it I totally crease up. I just don't know how it ever got past the director.
- What's your favourite London film, book or documentary? Having spent a lot of time at Parliament and studying journalism, I think nothing quite captures the essence of the interaction between Westminster politics and London media than the Thick of It. Sometimes almost too close to the bone to be funny.
- For you, who is the ultimate Londoner? My housemate and friend, Jeremy. He recently got described in Brixton Blog as being a 'cultural leader' in the area, which naturally we terrorise him about relentlessly, but actually he's doing a huge amount for young people and grassroots music in London, which I really admire. There are hundreds of unsung community leaders slogging away in independent music and for their local communities in the face of countless cuts and a plethora of challenges like closing venues, lack of safe space, rising costs and accessibility. It is absolutely essential to engage young people in music and community arts to ensure London continues to be a hub of radical creativity and diversity.