Venice, glorious city of Titian, Casanova and Vivaldi, has welcomed a new artistic powerhouse into the international fold at the Biennale this week.

Enter Peckham, downtrodden South London neighbourhood made famous as the setting of Only Fools and Horses.

The Peckham Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is a whitewashed studio the size of a small newsagent’s shop. Although it is outside the official competition it is already attracting appreciative visits from some of the art world’s most influential tastemakers.

The Biennale, which opens formally to the public on Sunday, is the most important and glamorous event in the art calendar. Shows organised by 77 nations are jostling for attention while the world’s leading critics, dealers, artists and collectors are in town over the next few days.

The most prestigious pitches are in the Giardini, the municipal gardens laid out by Napoleon, where 30 countries’ offerings are exhibited in permanent national pavilions for the next six months. The next best site is the Arsenale, a collection of former military warehouses a short walk to the north.

The Peckham Pavilion, a temporary outpost of the emerging Hannah Barry gallery in Peckham, has a plum location between the two, beside a canal on the untouristy Via Garibaldi, beneath window boxes bursting with geraniums among fishmongers, delicatessens, trattorias and a floating greengrocer’s. The location is just like Del Boy and Rodney Trotter’s stamping ground, according to the pavilion director. “It feels very much like where we are in Peckham,” Hannah Barry said yesterday, with a straight face. “The busyness of the place, the selling of food on the streets, the fish — these are all big things in Peckham.”

Ms Barry, 25, founded her eponymous London gallery last year with Sven Münder, 30, a Bavarian who had just completed a degree in cultural history. Before that she spent four years working in arts PR after completing a degree in history of art from the University of Cambridge.

Taking part-time jobs to make ends meet and with no financial backing, the pair have put on more than 30 shows, including a recent exhibition of eight painters in the West End. The gallery is now on the radar of some of the most important people in the art world. This despite Peckham’s undeniable, and they believe undeserved, reputation for crime and urban decay.

“Peckham’s got a really bad name but we are really grateful to the area for allowing us to do what we do. More people should know that it’s a place where things are really possible.”

Their ultimate goal is to redraw the map of the London art scene, currently dominated by Mayfair and St James’s in the west and the scruffier but not necessarily cheaper galleries in the East End. “There has to be some way of creating a new big gallery and we are trying to do it by growing a group of young artists whose work we think will stand the test of time,” Ms Barry said. Because of its cheap rents and proximity to Camberwell and Goldsmiths schools of art, Peckham is home to hundreds of young artists, giving Ms Barry and Mr Münder’s gallery and their Venice pavilion a strong local identity. The work on show here includes painting, sculpture and video art priced between £500 and £5,000.

Coming to the Biennale is part of a “year two” strategy of testing their artists’ work away from the comfort zone of South London. Later this year they are taking a show to New York.

So far the plan seems to be working. The Peckham Pavilion opened only yesterday but it has already hosted a lunch for one of London’s most high-profile galleries and sucked in visitors from around the world. None of them understands the name, Ms Barry said. “They all ask, ‘Where is Peckham?’” Maurizio Fare, an art collector and the former owner of the Yves Saint Laurent franchise for Italy, was one of the first visitors yesterday morning. Although he was oblivious to the show’s geographical links to England footballers and Reliant-Regal driving market traders, he was intrigued by the work. “I think it’s very interesting what they are doing,” he said. “This kind of thing gives the biennale energy.”

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