 “Peckham … one of London’s best kept secrets with tremendous value waiting to be unlocked… a zone 2 town centre within easy reach of London’s main employment centres. … there are frequent services into Victoria, Blackfriars and London Bridge – the journey from Peckham Rye to London Bridge takes just 10 minutes. And from 2012 … Peckham will be on the Tube map when the second phase of the East London Line extension is completed…” Cllr Fiona Colley, Cabinet member for Regeneration, said on 7 October, at Tate Modern. “Our vision for regeneration in Peckham is … to build on the best of what we have. For imaginative developments which bring fine historic buildings back to life and alongside this exciting high quality new buildings…” Â
She was speaking at the NLA conference ‘Investing in Southwark’ and went on to say: “… we’ll be introducing a conservation area for central Peckham, not to prevent development, which is something the community and the council really wants, but to ensure that the quality of design we call for in Peckham is no less than we demand in other parts of the borough…
Of course regeneration isn’t just about buildings, it’s also about communities and perceptions… we have active community groups like the … Peckham Society and Peckham Vision – groups of residents and businesses who actively want to work in partnership with the council and developers to improve their areas, to protect the historic qualities of the area and to see high quality new developments. I know we have some representatives from those groups here today. They are helping us to change the perception of … Peckham…
Peckham [is] emerging as [a] go-to cultural destination… There are many opportunities for investment and development in … Peckham.” Â
Click here for full speech, and here for the presentation slides.
Talk about spin and pipe dreams. Peckham’s Rye lane is a dump. The only reason to visit Peckham is for Black beauty products, hair styling and nail bars, accompanied by used phone shops, countless dodgy churches and scores of very nasty butchers with appalling sanitation ferrying their meat around in old shopping trollies. The place stinks like a sewer and on a walk along Rye Lane on a warm afternoon it is hard not to wretch. Peckham is an immigration ghetto hamstrung by poverty and where there is a breakdown of planning and environmental legislation that the rest of the country is subject to.
Until the council changes its overall policies it will never improve. But then no one really wants it to because to improve it would cut off some of the funding streams the council receives for providing low cost housing and maintaining deprived neighbourhoods. Thus the ghetto is perpetuated MPs don’t live there or school their kids there or even visit the place until election time, meanwhile, they are quite content to let it fester.
Do it up by all means but the politics of poverty will ensure it is only a ‘whited sepuchre’.