Goodbye Southbank, hello Northbank

On his whistlestop book tour of the capital, Jonathan Franzen last week found time not only for the traditional Royal Festival Hall on the Southbank but also Kings Place, at the heart of the new cultural "Northbank". When American art dealer Larry Gagosian opened his vast King's Cross outpost on Britannia Street several years ago, the choice of location was considered an oddity. Today, at the oyster bar at St Pancras where Gagosian's sales executives conduct their breakfast meetings, they suddenly have an awful lot of company.

Pangolin, which casts bronze for everyone from Damien Hirst to Angus Fairhurst and Lyn Chadwick, has its London gallery in Kings Place while Cubitt, in Angel Mews, has quietly become a launchpad for both artists and curators.

Its 30-strong list of artists includes numerous Turner Prize nominees, like Dexter Dalwood this year. From the Museum of Everything on the northernmost tip of Regent's Park, galleries are changing the face of an area that has remained unaltered by development.

Galleries tend to spread gregariously — dealers know that company is good for business because collectors are like shoppers, they enjoy being able to wander between venues. Art dealer Joe La Placa's new gallery, 2 Omega Place, is a major fixture on the map. It is a spectacularly simple gallery, built out of the remnants of an old bus depot. When the Almeida Theatre used this same space as a residency, one critic sniffed at going to see King Lear "down a rat's alley".

2 Omega Place is now the permanent home of All Visual Arts (AVA), the dealership run by La Placa and hedge-fund king Mike Platt. These days it will be less rats than Charles Saatchi, François Pinault and co scuttling down the cobbles.

Nearby restaurants and bars have appeared, a sure sign of this new creative community. At Drink, Shop & Do, a design boutique, bar and café, the paint has only just dried on what was once Victorian baths. Run by two design and photography graduates, Coralie Sleap and Kristie Bishop, it sources and sells the work of emerging artists plus vintage furniture, as well as being a venue for lunch and a bar. They cater for a different budget to AVA but have become the local haunt of La Placa and his cohorts. When Coralie and Kristie first tried out Eat Drink Do as a pop-up venue in December, it was clear it was a great business proposition. As well as people who work in the area, they were surprised by the amount of passing traffic.

Coralie first lived in the area seven years ago and says that, back then, the Northbank had missed out on cultural regeneration. In contrast with Hoxton, Shoreditch and Dalston, she says: "It didn't seem like it had developed as an artistic community."

Yet today, even with the presence of developments by the Manhattan Loft Company and Eurostar, the Northbank remains euphemistically "bohemian". It's still London's red-light district — so some cheap rents are to be found.

Areas such as Judd Street, tucked behind the British Library, once the stomping ground of Virginia Woolf and her cohorts, are today full of student digs, despite the proximity of swanky new developments. That said, Rough Luxe — a boutique hotel on Birkenhead Street — and a vegetarian supermarket are slowly changing the tone.

"We see a lot of women who are happy to come in here during the day to work or hang out and feel comfortable at 11 o'clock at night. There aren't many places in London where you could feel comfortable on your own," says Kristie sagely, "albeit you're next to a sex shop."