How to find great art in South London

This week sees the launch of a new gallery guide and regular night of exhibition openings - in the mold of Time Out's ongoing First Thursdays - this time for south London on the final Friday of every month. Arguably, though, the south side of the river doesn't have the most impressive geographical pedigree in the history of art. William Blake visited Peckham Rye as a boy and freaked out, Camille Pissarro painted the rather deserted streets of Norwood and Vincent van Gogh once visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery (although he didn't leave a comment in the visitor's book). None of which rivals the Parisian Left Bank, say, or downtown Manhattan.

Except that artists do, increasingly, live south of the river. They come to study at the art colleges of Goldsmiths or Camberwell, to inhabit cheaper studios than their colleagues out east and to escape the pressures of living in that designated artists' quarter. If something more like real life pervades the experience of your average south Londoner, then the art scene here is also refreshingly unpretentious and gritty.

An early example of the ingenuity and resourcefulness of its denizens came in 1988 when a group of friends took over an old betting shop behind the Oval cricket ground to form City Racing. It quickly became a testbed for new art and hosted early shows for Gillian Wearing's signs series, including the famous 'I'm Desperate', and Sarah Lucas, whose 1992 debut was entitled 'Penis Nailed to a Board'.

It was also one of the first venues listed in Time Out under the heading 'Alternative', befitting its off-West End experimentalism. 'We didn't know what we were supposed to be the alternative to,' recalls one of City Racing's founders, Matt Hale, 'because we weren't that radical. We were trying to get West End dealers like Anthony Reynolds and Karsten Schubert to come down and see us.'

City Racing, then, 'wasn't a local gallery, but a meeting place for the art world,' continues Hale. But, with more than one member using the upstairs as a crashpad, the ramshackle nature of the endeavour was also its eventual undoing: 'The place was held together by Polyfilla,' says Hale. Yet, despite these cracks, City Racing endured for a whole decade until 1998.

Still in Vauxhall are other artist-run stalwarts such as Beaconsfield and Gasworks. Alessio Antoniolli, the current director of studio and exhibition complex Gasworks, stresses the reputation of these organisations beyond their immediate surroundings: 'We try to connect the international to the local,' he says, 'and being small means we can develop one-to-one relationships with artists - we're not so institutionalised.' Indeed, until Tate Modern landed in 2000, the only museum-style presence dedicated to exhibiting modern art was the South London Gallery, founded in 1891.

One former Gasworks resident, the artist Hew Locke, has fond memories from there, as well as from his early days squatting in Stockwell with a young Yinka Shonibare. 'In those days south London was like Berlin is today - with cheap, or even free accommodation and studios - but now it feels less like the poor cousin of north London'. He also says it was a place to hide from the '90s Young British Art phenomenon, but Damien Hirst's first studio was actually in Brixton and key YBA shows of the time, such as 'Modern Medicine' and 'Minky Manky', were both south of the divide.

In addition to working on a coat of arms for Brixton, Locke has designed the official emblem of the new South London Art Map initiative (shortened to SLAM) in the shape of a pair of colourful parakeets. Locke first encountered this feathery new populace in Brockwell Park, 'It reminded me of growing up in Guyana, but I didn't realise that these birds were all over Richmond Park and Norwood Cemetery too. As well as being sexy, exotic imports, I thought, these guys are obviously hardy - they ain't going nowhere'. Which is a nice metaphor for those staying put, but perhaps, given rumours that Hirst will finally convert the properties he owns down here and that White Cube's next emporium will open in Bermondsey, the case could be reversed: it's everyone else who is coming here.