Giles Morris

"Are you married, or do you live in Streatham?"

This sly old tease was relayed to me at a drinks party last year by a squirrelly woman in late middle age. It was after I had answered that most loaded London question: "Where do you live?"

Streatham, the woman explained, had always had that reputation. It made me wonder: where does this equation between Streatham and sin come from?

The neighbourhood had an aura of impropriety long before Cynthia Payne, AKA Madam Cyn, the legendary Streatham-based procuress, was busted in the 1980s for holding sex parties for the pre-Blair elite in her rambling Victorian house on Ambleside Avenue.

By locating herself in Streatham, Madam Cyn was following an ancient precedent. Streatham's reputation for naughtiness is the soft underbelly of a much older status: that of the entertainment capital of South London.

Both reputations are a little faded now. The association with vice floats free of contemporary emanations of the sex industry, which are limited to a few day-glo cards in newsagents' windows, offering "massage" from "gorgeous bubbly blonde", and the crack-whores down on Tooting Common, engaged in their silent, money-hungry ballet of solicitation with furtive, passing men.

Meanwhile, the wreckage of Streatham's historic status as an entertainment destination strews the High Road, like oddments from the Titanic washed up on some Arctic shore. Take La Pergola restaurant, advertising a nightly routine from an Elvis impersonator. Above the entrance, the infinitely faded profile of the King of Rock and Roll, garlanded with Hawaiian flowers, looks out, mystical and aloof, in the direction of Brixton Hill.

Inside the restaurant's cavernous vaults some ersatz Elvis or other relives the Vegas years. His nightly audience will be howling, spangly-bloused hen-nighters, fuelled with chicken cordon bleu, spaghetti bolognaise, and rough wine by the vat.

Two doors down is a Mexican restaurant, urging: "Don't Siesta - Come and Fiesta!" Until recently, this too was also an Elvis restaurant. There was a deadly rivalry between the two establishments. The two Elvises (Elvi? Elvae?) once duelled nightly, refereed by the Zen calm of a Thai restaurant occupying the building between. Then one Elvis blinked, doffed his cape, and slunk off to the great Graceland in the sky.

Chic it ain't. Living in sin may have come into fashion. Living in Streatham has not.

But somehow Streatham rises above fashion. It may lack the cardboard trendiness of Clapham or the anodyne embourgeoisment of Balham, but Streatham has twice as much character as either of its two closest neighbours.

Although oddly, Streatham was once decidedly genteel. It was the home of Henry Tate, Victorian sugar baron, and the Rookery gardens at the top of the Common were beloved of Queen Mary. In the 1920s they widened the High Street and built the Locarno Dance Hall, the Gaumont Palace Cinema and the Streatham Hill Theatre. This was to be London's second West End.

Now these three Meccas of art and sophistication are, respectively, Caesar's Nightclub, the Megabowl thirty-six-lane bowling alley, and the Riva Bingo Hall.

Let us take each of these three megaliths of entertainment in turn.

First there is Caesar's. Ardently, astonishingly vulgar, the nightclub is Streatham's most noticeable landmark. Its frontage gleams with neon, and above the gaudy porch is a statue of a four-horsed laurel-wreathed charioteer, his spear raised phallically into the dull London sky. Programmes on each side of the brothel-red, Dante-esque entry advertise such nightly turns as "Lap Attack", a troupe of male lap-dancers, and something of much less obvious import called "Cage Rage".

One stop up, the Megabowl teems with adolescence and the clatter of skittles. Refuge, of a sort, is available at a bar named McCluski's. Who was McCluski, one wonders? Some Russo-Irish patron saint of harassed parents, perhaps? So it would seem from the clientele, a bunch of hollow-eyed thirty-somethings, clinging to precious respite, in the form of a tankard of ice cold Carling and a cigarette, from their wailing, clattering, ten-pin bowling teens.

Further up, the Streatham Hill Theatre, with its unchanged baroque interior of lambent turquoise and gold, has maintained a sort of dignity, in spite of the plangent cultural descent from Shakespeare and Shaw to the mindless excitements of bingo.

Gentility, then, has gone. It has been replaced, alongside the megaliths, by a rough-edged cosmopolitanism. The compacted consonants and lush sibilations of Polish are everywhere. The down-at-heel pubs, thirsty for drinkers, advertise Polish discos and bands on a Friday night. And that peculiarly Polish activity - standing in the street on a Sunday afternoon drinking beer, swells in popularity.

More abstemious pleasures are to be had in the Moroccan tea rooms. A purlieu off the High Road, leading, oddly enough, to the avenue where Cynthia Payne still lives, is known as Little Somalia. It has a cluster of African cafes outside which Somalis stand from dawn to dusk, talking, smoking, mulling over the unassimilatable events which fetched them from Mogadishu to SW16.

A few years ago, the American presence in Streatham suffered its own, infinitely gentle, Nine-Eleven. The local McDonalds, mustard yellow and tomato red icon of US cultural hegemony, quietly closed. It has been replaced by a Sikh-run pound store.

Streatham High Road was recently nominated the worst high street in Britain. A little harsh, perhaps, but you can see what they mean. Especially further south, towards the Common, where a row of dingy barber's shops and chicken-and-rib joints face the gum-spattered ice rink, the stinking swimming baths, the nephitic go-cart track. But to carp at this is to miss the point. Come 2007, this ruinous streetscape will be transmogrified into a soulless, glistening Tesco's.

Enjoy Streatham before it changes. It is London. It is life. It is beautiful.

This piece first appeared in Smoke: a London Peculiar no 8