ITV London News item on gentrification

12-16 Blenheim Grove

http://www.itv.com/news/london/update/2014-02-03/peckham-redevelopment-could-destroy-area/ – “Residents in Peckham say the capital’s growing need for housing could soon destroy their local area. Currently there are plans for a multi-million pound redevelopment project around Peckham Rye Station, which will include blocks of flats. But locals are worried the regeneration could have a huge impact on the creative communities who live there.”

18th Feb – Latest News: Harriet Harman MP backs local community and Southwark Council in call for extension of time for real engagement with local people to design station area development that benefits Peckham. http://www.peckhamvision.org/wiki/Peckham_Rye_Station_Gateway

BBC TV London News 24 September 2013

Warren Nettleford BBC reporter in Rye Lane talking with Eileen Conn from Peckham Vision

“Gentrification ‘distorting’ Peckham” : Effects of rising property prices on Peckham were reported on BBC TV London News on 24 September 2013  Http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24229352 The news item raised the questions whether this was gentrification and was it good or bad for Peckham. Peckham Vision was amongst those interviewed.

Royal Court at the Bussey building, Peckham


From Sep to Nov 2011 the Royal Court theatre, based in Sloane Sq, brought its Theatre Local to the Bussey building in Peckham with two plays Truth and Reconciliation and The Westbridge . The two month run was so successful it caught the BBC News on 15th Nov 2011:

* BBC1 6.30pm TV News

* BBC Breakfast Show – Radio with Paul Ross + Gabby Roslin

See also Guardian.co.uk

The plays were very topical, and thought provoking. Advance tickets were sold out: the 30 tickets kept back for local sale at the door from 5.30pm each evening were in great demand. The Westbridge which premiered at the Bussey has now transferred to Sloane Square.

It is wonderful to see our very own Bussey building showing how adaptable it is. A great place for theatre as we always knew it could be. The space was provided by the CLF Art Café in the Bussey working in partnership with Peckham Vision to encourage the Royal Court to come. We hope it will lead to continued work in the future with the Royal Court.

Introducing the new Montmartre: it’s Delboys manor, Peckham SE15

It’s not as odd as it sounds – the deprived south London area is rebranding itself as the capital’s contemporary art hub, much like the Parisian district during the 19th and 20th centuries  By Simon Tait   27 March 2011

Scarred by tragedies like the murder of Damilola Taylor, and laughed at as the home of the Trotter family of TV’s Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, Peckham, Southwark, is defying its image to become London’s new Montmartre.

Artists are the fulcrum of a ten-to-15-year plan to be launched in May for Peckham’s rebirth as the capital’s cultural heartbeat, perhaps an embodiment of the Big Society in which residents, businesses and the local authority have come together. “Peckham is the place” says gallerist Hannah Barry. “It’s where people are coming to find the best in international contemporary art”.  read more Continue reading “Introducing the new Montmartre: it’s Delboys manor, Peckham SE15”

Building with communities: the case of Peckham (UK)

From Cityness blog –  What Makes the Urban Tick?

Old Waiting Room – restoration.
Picture by Benedict O’Looney

It is an understatement to say that quite a few urban planners and architects would like to keep local communities at bay during the process of developing the urban. Main reasons? Fear of NIMBY-behavior, fear of delays, fear of less-than-progressive ideas about what should be done and, in some cases, fear of people who are not part of the cozy inner-circle of architects, planners and designers. … Sometimes a dialogue of the deaf is the only result. … The Peckham Vision (UK) is an example where things went differently but with favorable results, as even architects in the Architects’ Journal acknowledge. Peckham Vision is a communal gathering in order to generate new ideas about the future of the Peckham town centre and its buildings. Read more at cityness.wordpress.com.

Peckham Vision – “an important force for change’ – August 2010, Architects Journal

celebration of station Old Waiting Room restoration
celebration of station Old Waiting Room restoration

The AJ article “…juxtaposes a top-down development in Elephant and Castle with ground-up localism in Peckham”. It says: Localism can, and does, improve the quality of the built environment by enabling professional skills and community ideas to coalesce. For example, Peckham Vision, a consortium of residents, artists, businesses and The Peckham Society, campaigns for a renewed Peckham town centre. The consortium is an important force for change… Read More

Celebrating the restoration of the Old Waiting Room, Peckham Rye Station

By Roger Williams | In Dulwich on View Photo: Benedict O’Looney

The Old Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station

The Peckham Society and Southwark Council recently celebrated the beginning of the restoration of the Grand Waiting Room at Peckham Rye Station. Peckham Rye’s handsome Victorian station has been struggling to be seen since buildings were thrown up in the square in front of it in the 1930s. Stand and look at the station now, and you will see two extruding blocks, one on each side of the main entrance. The one on the south side contains a stone and iron spiral staircase, the timbers of its floors rotten, the plaster walls crumbling in chunks, and an arrow pointing upwards, graffitied in black, with the words “To the Billiard Hall”. The billiard hall operated here for 60 years until it closed in 1960, after which all was silence.

On Friday, July 16, after half a century in the dark, the “billiard hall” opened its doors to reveal the station’s Old Waiting Room, a magnificent space with a high vaulted ceiling and four open fire places that stretches the length of the building above the ticket office and is today accessed from Platform 3, on the Victoria line. Read more …

Secret hall beyond Platform 3 holds key to Peckham’s future?

SECRET HALL BEYOND PLATFORM 3 HOLDS KEY TO PECKHAM'S FUTURE?

From Southwark News by Kevin Quinn

A waiting room left hidden on platform three of Rye Lane Station could be the key to unlocking future investment in Peckham.

Like something out of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, this enormous space opened as a waiting room in 1865 and was turned into a billiards hall in 1890 until it closed in 1960.  Forgotten, over the years this space was left to fall into disrepair. It has only recently been opened to the public (albeit briefly), but for those wanting to attract future investment into Peckham town centre the space represents a way forward.

For over a decade the planners and officers at the council’s regeneration department have toyed with a multitude of ideas on how to improve Peckham as commercial hub.

In 2001 radical proposals to transform Peckham into ‘the Notting Hill’ of south London were being considered by Southwark Council’s Peckham Partnership. The head of this regeneration body, Russell Profitt, was looking at recommendations which would mean knocking down huge parts of the high street, pedestrianising large parts of Rye Lane, demolishing the dank and dark buildings around Peckham Rye train station and expanding the Aylesham shopping centre.

Years before in the 1990s, Peckham had undergone a huge regeneration programme, when £64 million (and £150 million in other funding) was given to the area, predominantly to transform housing in the north. As well as removing the notorious estates, some of the legacy from that money was the new Peckham Square and the iconic library within its boundaries.

Last year the council officers were back on the hunt for a way forward, producing a document entitled ‘Future Peckham’ in a bid to garner people’s opinions on what they wanted to see. This hefty 54 page document again suggested a myriad of radical changes in the area, including relocation of the cinema, the creation of three fifteen storey buildings for new homes and once more the redevelopment of the Aylesham centre and Rye Lane to produce a vibrant shopping environment.

But since the initial proposals from Russell Profitt for a ‘Notting Hill’ of the south much has changed on the ground in Peckham. Mr Profitt left the renamed Peckham Programme in 2008 and the subsequent abolition of a town centre management has left a vacuum in the council’s daily coordination on the ground.

In its place is a grassroots group, ‘Peckham Vision’, made up of local stakeholders including residents, community groups and business owners. It is becoming the driving force behind change and importantly they understand that in light of the present economic climate Peckham’s future relies on private investment. Read more…

Peckham’s art scene

by LAUREN HOUSSIN formerly on laurenetcaetera.blogspot.com  22 December 2009

From New York’s Meatpacking district to Berlin’s Mitte or Paris’ Montmartre, dirty corners of cities all face the same destiny: they are pioneered by young artists, and later colonized by the trendy bourgeoisie. The rents soar, and the starving bohemia has yet to migrate again.  Take the case of London. After Ladbroke Grove in the 1970s and Camden in the 1980s, the East End was conquered in the late 90s. By the early noughties, Brick Lane, Shoreditch, even Dalston were out of price. Artists soon decided to move south of the river, to Peckham. Known to most people for its gang warfare and knife crime rates rather than its culture, Peckham is home to a burgeoning art scene. Because of its empty industrial spaces and proximity to art schools, the bloody district is now an area of choice for young up and coming artists.

“An advantage of working as an artist in Peckham is that there is an audience for art in the area,” said 26-year-old Bobby Dowler, whose paintings are currently showcased at the Hannah Barry Gallery, one of the great pioneers of the area’s scene and one of the most dynamic new art galleries in Britain. “There’s an extremely good dialogue between people,” the young artist added, “and a seriousness about what they’re doing, a kind of belief that it’s important.”

Located in a former cricket bat factory at the end of an industrial road populated by factories, the Hannah Barry Gallery was invited at this year’s Venice Biennale to stage the first Peckham Pavilion. Ms. Barry founded her eponymous gallery in 2008 with Sven Mündner, and works with 32 artists, all aged between 21 and 35. Whether they are showing paintings, installations or photographies, their aim is to always show the work in-depth, in order to best represent the progress of the artist.

“Peckham is the land of freedom and opportunity,” said Ms. Barry. A hallmark of the area’s art scene is its large-scale and high-reaching projects: the spaces available can accommodate shows and works that could not take place in typical West End or East End galleries.

“Everbody has their own possibilities,” she explained, “and for us the space that we have here allowed us to do the shows that we wanted to do. It would have been a different price in the West End, and perhaps not the kind of price that a young gallery can afford. Being in Peckham has enabled us to do things on a scale that we wouldn’t have been able to do over there.”

Although East London is an established part of the city’s gallery circuit and houses the highest population of artists in Europe, it is no longer what it used to be. Its charm and character seem to be lost since property developers have taken advantage of its popularity. As rents have rocketed, many younger artists have in fact headed south of the river in areas like Peckham, where rents are more affordable.

Situated inbetween two of London’s leading art colleges, Goldsmiths School of Arts and Camberwell College, plenty of young, artistic and imaginative people are challenging the negative stereotype that is still all too-often applied to the area. “A lot of students live in the area and continue living in the area after they graduate. I have done so and I graduated in 1998,” said Emily Druiff, Director of the arts initiative Peckham Space.

Through annual commissions, workshops and public events, Peckham Space supports art practice that forges sustainable links between the arts and the local community in south east London, and aims to provide professional development opportunities for artists. The organisation is also plans to open an art venue in a raw space in Spring 2010, showcasing artworks made in conjunction with and in response to the locals of Peckham.

Peckham is home to 25,000 people from all over the world, and has the highest proportion of people born elsewhere compared to the rest of Southwark. One of the best metaphors of Peckham is the Bussey building, that from the outside looks like a run-down factory in a dodgy back alley. But penetrating the almost historic monument -it was built in the early 20th century- and looking closer, it is occupied by an aggregate of over 60 artists, faith groups, exhibition spaces  and small businesses, all existing and working happily alongside each other.

Turner Prize winner Antony Gormley and his fellow Royal Academician Tom Phillips, who both have their studios in Peckham, decided a few years ago with a clutch of others to do an artistic makeover of the run-down neighbourhood’s landscape. With this street art initiative, residents now enjoy some of the most original street murals, barcode-patterned pavements in the city and twisted or heart-shaped lampposts by the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes.

Just a step out of Peckham Rye station is a wooden sculpture of a phoenix with splatters of paint on it. According to legend, the Phoenix is reduced to ashes at the end of its life, from which a new, young phoenix is reborn to live again. Using the metaphor of destruction and creation, the sculpture aims to communicate a message of rebirth among the community and the role played by the young art scene in this rejuvenation.

Most people will hear the word ”Peckham” and they will just picture graffiti, dirty pavements and urinated phone boxes. But aside from the drama that the South London area evokes, a few pioneers have managed to raise up the profile and status of the place for everyone, bringing new audiences to the area, creating people of different ages and backgrounds mixing in the same place and causing the area to now easily betray people’s expectations.




Emerging Artists Find a New ‘Blank Canvas’ in London

Special Report: Contemporary Art New York Times  By Alice Pfeiffer: October 14, 2009
Peckham, a run-down district of London, south of the Thames, is said to have the capital’s highest concentration of knife crime, hairdressers and gospel churches.
Now, add up-and-coming artists: in easy reach of some of the capital’s leading art schools, the area’s low prices and vast, empty industrial spaces are attracting experimental avant-garde collectives, studios and galleries — a countercultural challenge to the established North-of-the-river world of the Frieze art fair and the gentrified East End.
“Peckham is the land of the free. It’s like a blank canvas,” said Hannah Barry, an enterprising 26-year-old who founded her eponymous gallery last year in a warehouse of a former cricket bat factory.  At the end of an industrial road populated by factories and faith groups, Ms. Barry and her co-director Sven Mündner, 31 — both graduates of Cambridge — put on 15 to 20 shows a year, showcasing young emerging artists. Ms. Barry and Mr. Mündner have also put on an annual sculpture show since 2006, on the roof of an abandoned parking garage nearby. “We felt there was room for an ambitious sculpture park in London,” Ms. Barry said. In June, she and Mr. Mündner took Peckham to a global audience, with a show, the “Peckham Pavilion,” on the fringes of the Venice Biennale.  read more …