Picture if you will a large house smothered in what looks like brightly coloured frosting on a cake. Well, that’s rather what Brenton Samuel Pink’s house looked like when I first saw it in the mid 1980s. Little did I know then that I would meet the owner of this phantasmagoria.
The article was originally written in 2016. I have updated it since then. More has come to light about the history of the house and its enigmatic owner.
The house belonged to Brenton Samuel Pink a retired refuse collector. He bought it for £4800 in the 1960s. Then, he spent many years lovingly painting it to evoke the light and colours of his birthplace, Jamaica.
Brenton Samuel Pink came to Britain aged 31 or 32 in 1957. Mr Pink was very much part of ‘the Windrush generation’. He often referred to how he and his generation were brought up to believe that England was “our mother country”. He described this in Helena Appio’s documentary which you can see here.
A Prince among Men
Mr Pink was born and raised with a strong work ethic. He got a job and worked hard. “No scrounge,” as he put it.
Within a few years, he had saved enough to buy the house. This was a significant achievement. At that time, people like Mr Pink were denied mortgages.
Mr Pink set to work, painting the house and planting gardens to evoke the coffee plantations of his childhood. Often, as he worked, or sat on his rocking chair in the Porch, he wore a hat decorated with flowers, leaves, tinsel and twigs. Local children referred to these as ‘crowns.’ To them, his house was a fairy tale castle, and Mr Pink was a prince among men. And in a way, he was.
Racism
Mr Pink created his dream of Jamaica against a backdrop of racism towards Black and Brown people.
In 1977, the racist National Front (NF) march from Lewisham High Street went past his house. It was then confronted by the Anti-Nazi League and several hundred local people at Clifton Rise, New Cross: The Battle of Lewisham.
In 1978, Mr Pink returned from a “fantastic” holiday in Jamaica. He was detained for some hours at Heathrow airport. As he says in the film:
“It made me feel very sick, very dirty, very nasty, very ugly, not a pretty, happy person at the time at all … ”
He never went abroad again.
Much has changed, in Lewisham and across the UK. A lot of it for the better.
Yet for people of the Windrush generation like Mr Pink, much seems to have stayed the same. For many of their descendants, it seems that much is, perhaps more ominously, returning to those troubled times.
Lewisham’s evolution
Mr Pink’s story is his own, but also one which encapsulates so much of the area and the city’s history and its continued evolution.
Lewisham was once a suburb with villas set in their own grounds, much like Mr Pink’s home is.
Following WW1, decline and de-population took hold. People moved to the fringes of the capital to new suburbs. There, the houses were larger and came with all the modern conveniences. This movement hollowed out areas in what we now think of as Zone 2 on the tube map. These former suburbs of London became an abandoned inner city.
From the 1980s Lewisham and areas like it once again become popular places to live. A wealth of cheap housing attracted students, artists, squatters and migrant populations through the post-war period; each putting down roots.
Brenton Samuel Pink’s story is an intrinsic part of the rich history of the area that’s too often overlooked. Today, his house is, literally, overlooked by the advance of tall tower blocks taking over the centre of Lewisham.
Meeting Mr Pink
I had the honour to meet Mr Pink in around 1995/96. At that time, I had returned to education. I was studying for a degree at Goldsmiths, which was just down the road from his home. We had tea and chatted. He was warm, a treasure trove of stories and reminiscence about the area, and gently but defiantly his unique self.
Brenton Samuel Pink died 8 June 2017.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the National Trust was to save and restore Mr Pink’s house? His aesthetic was introduced to this country. Yet, it stands still as a joyful resistance to conformity. It is unique.
Further Reading:
A colourful Life, Lewisham Ledger, September 2018
Exploring ‘community’, April 2016
London, the evolving city, April 2016
Sanjit Chudha 