With rampant gentrification devastating Brixton’s famous character and community, local activists, artists, musicians, residents and campaigners are gathering together for a ‘Reclaim Brixton’ protest to be held in Windrush Square on April 25th from 12 noon.
Over 5,700 people have said they will be attending the event, which has been organised to celebrate Brixton’s “community, its diversity, culture, life and resistance”.
The event page reads:
Social diversity is driven out by lack of truly affordable housing. Local businesses are driven out by increasing rents and redevelopment schemes that benefit national & multinational businesses, siphoning money out of the area.
Local spaces for people to meet, celebrate, get support or education are being decimated as community groups, long-standing pubs, music venues, libraries & colleges are being relocated, down-sized, repurposed, disappeared.
Brixton’s vibrancy now has a question mark on it. Will Brixton turn into a living museum or will it live?
A press release by the Lambeth Housing Activists gives more detail to this important protest, and includes the times that the various estates will be assembling to march on to Windrush Square.
Also included below is information about the Black Blockade and Latin Brixton protests – which will take place before the main rally- and an action by Brixton traders threatened by evictions.
As the Tories announce plans to sell another slice of our dwindling social housing stock , Lambeth Housing Activists are calling on people to support the #ReclaimBrixton protest in Windrush Square on April 25th from 12 noon.
The protest will celebrate our community, its diversity, culture, life and resistance.
Our estates are being demolished, our social housing sold off and our services shut down. The poorest tenants and ethnic minority communities are first in the firing line as the property speculators drive up prices and drive us out.
The majority of us whether in social housing, private rental or wanting to buy a house are losing out as the property speculators and private landlords make massive profits underwritten by the tax payer.
Now a grand coalition of housing campaigners in the borough have come together with small shops being priced out of Brixton Arches, and trade unions and residents trying to defend libraries and other local services, to create an anti-gentrification movement to Reclaim Brixton.
Estates where tenants are under threat, or dealing with the fall out, from ‘regeneration’ are meeting to go to the protest at the following assembly points:
- 11am at the Guinness estate in Loughborough Park where dozens of families are threatened with imminent eviction to make way for new build flats which none of them could ever afford to buy.
- 11am from Cressingham Gardens
- 11.30 Myatts Field North Community Centre
- 11.30 Loughborough Centre (anti-road closure protesters)
- There will also be tenants from Dorchester Court, Leigham Court Sheltered Housing, Central Hill estate, private renters groups and other local campaign groups organising delegations to Windrush square.
Brixton Rec Brixton Rec User Group (Brug) will be linking hands in solidarity from midday
The #ReclaimBrixton protest will take place in Windrush Square on April 25th from 12 noon.
Affiliated/other actions on the day
The Save Brixton Arches campaign – which is fighting to stop businesses being evicted by Network Rail’s regeneration proposals – plans to close down all the affected shops in Atlantic Road and Station Road between noon and 2pm on the day.
12-12:30: shutting shops & gathering with banners on Altantic Rd
12:30-1:00: march to square
1:00-4:00: Live interactive art at arches, petitions, meet the traders
3:00-5:00: Join other campaigners and take signatures to council
More: Reclaim Brixton event on Sat 25th April – times, places and meet up point
Read more here: Save Brixton Arches: shops to close between noon and 2pm on Sat, 25th April
As part of the day of action, there will also be a Black Blockade protest against social cleansing and gentrification.
We call a protest throughout Brixton Village to take back a market which was once owned and used by local Brixton residents.
Today, on any given evening it is swamped by a young middle class that these businesses cater towards. The black community and residents have been socially cleansed from the market, and on any given weekday or weekend, there is hardly a black local to be seen.
We call a peaceful protest through Brixton Village, where we will sing, chant, and remember
We will be marching in rows of three, arms linked in recognition of the struggle for civil rights, throughout the village.Afterwards we will march towards Windrush square to meet the Reclaim Brixton congregation.
This assembles at 11.30am outside Brixton station.
There will also be a Latin Brixton protest, meeting by the Brixton Village, main entrance, next to the ” Rancho de Lalo”
at 11:30 a.m.
Links and background info:
Reclaim Brixton Event – https://www.facebook.com/events/410855589085974/
Reclaim Brixton: important legal information on your rights
Discuss Reclaim Brixton on the urban75 forums (over 320 responses so far).
Twitter: #ReclaimBrixton
About the Save Brixton Arches campaign:
Save Brixton Arches official website
Save Brixton Arches: online petition
Facebook: Brixton Community United
Twitter: #savebrixtonarches
Read the latest news and join the big discussion on the urban75 forums (over 670 posts)
Read more on Brixton Buzz
Reclaim Brixton event: 25th April at noon
Reclaim Brixton Facebook
This is so stupid. When businesses come and invest in Brixton, creating jobs and making it a nicer place for people to live, visit and spend their money: IT’S A GOOD THING!
Since when was the eviction of local communities, massively inflated rent hikes and the pricing out of long standing businesses a good thing to the community?
As ever, this sort of thing is good for a mostly-white, mostly middle class demographic. It can often be taken as read that those who think this sort of thing is “good”, are part of that demographic, and therefore less likely to be as severely affected as we proletarian types.
What do you mean by “investing in Brixton”, though? So far we’ve seen businesses that don’t employ locally, don’t source supplies locally and very obviously only wish to appeal to a particular demographic within Brixton. That’s not “a good thing”, that’s exploitation of a cultural resource in order to profit from it.
The only “stupid” thing here is your poorly thought-out attempt at a comment. I’m just surprised you didn’t throw something about “the politics of envy” in there.
As a life long resident of Brixton I can honestly say the area has never been better.It is 100 times better and safer than it used to be.The whole point of this argument in the first place was the shopkeepers being evicted from the the arches.The argument should therefore be directed and The rail company who own the arches.It has nothing to do with Black people being pushed out of the area.Yes the house prices have risen dramatically as they have in other parts of London but it has nothing to do with colour its natural change.As for the market area it was dilapidated and going nowhere for many years until they decided to let businesses rent units at a very low rates to start reviving the place a few years ago.There wasn’t a colour bar! Anyone could of had a business in there it was open to everyone! If the market was full of predominantly black middle class customers nobody would be saying a word.Brixton used to be a very affluent area and its natural change that it’s going back to that way.I’m sure that many of the afro Caribbean community and white community who have lived here for years and purchased their houses in the 70’s would be the last to complain at how valuable they now are.The argument is completely flawed and no doubt the protest will end in violence on the 25th which is what all the activists are hoping for.This is just an excuse for trouble,Its a very sad state of affairs
Let me guess: you own a house yourself, right? So do you have any opinion on the long term residents of Brixton who are now being priced out or should they just roll over and accept being forced out of their community? What do you think Paul?
Brixton has become like many other areas of London where house prices have soared.Im sure that local residents in all these areas are being priced out as you call it,it’s not exclusive to Brixton,this whole argument was originally about the shopkeepers in the arches and it has now escalated to colour.What about all the white people who have lived in Brixton all their lives,do they not count? Why has it suddenly become a Black issue? Why don’t people go and demonstrate in other areas of London where the house prices have soared and rents have increased?
“Natural change” – what the historian of London Jerry White calls “natural change” is the age-old circulation of Londoners between the ‘burbs and the inner city. It’s been going on for over 200 years, and is a consequence of the dilapidation and subsequent renewal of areas.
What we’ve seen in Brixton over the last 10 years ISN’T “natural change”, it’s an unnaturally-accelerated form of gentrification induced by the commodification of “the Brixton experience” – a commodification that works to make new Brixtonites feel comfortable in the culture they’ve bought their way into, even if that means economically-excluding many “life long residents”/old Brixtonites.
As ever, far too often money speaks loudly enough to drown out other voices.
typical masochistic “common sense” argument. u seem to think that in “reviving” an area there are only 2 options: leaving an area to rot away or the complete unconscientious, unethical social cleansing we have now.
you’re happy to ignore the fact that people are being told to leave an area in order for a preferred type of person to replace them. why is that? why dont you see it as the onus of lambeth council to rehouse people they turf out for personal gain? this is a democracy
Why don’t you come and have a cup of tea with me and then we can chat about ‘it’s a good thing’….
The weekly vomit in my doorway is just an added bonus
“Vomit? Don’t get me started about vomit! Back in the day we’d have given our eye-teeth to only have booze-stinking chunder to clear up! People nowadays don’t know they’re born!!!”
🙂
its worrying that you can ignore the fact that people like yourself being displaced against their will. a gourmet food market and other minimum wage paying establishments dont give back to the community anywhere near as much as they reap. im sure if you sat and thought about it for 5 minutes rather than knee-jerk jumping to the defense of the status quo you’d see the stupidity in your comment
Bet it’s not peaceful as a handful will get carried away.
I get the sentiment of this but it’s the council that should be getting lobbied, not people who come to enjoy what Brixton has to offer.
The council have been lobbied until the metaphorical cows have come home. They’re not interested in such democratic niceties as listening to “the people”, just in having their way, and not having us bother them about such pedestrian things as our concerns about and objections to their policies.
You really think this is a case of people protesting as a first rather than a last resort? have your eyes been closed for the last decade?
Since when has the principal – as seen in the knocking down and regeneration of St Matthews Estate and Angel Town – some 10 or more years ago, seen as a bad thing. Back then it was seen as a badly needed thing to bring up conditions, although people were displaced in the process. The end results were better conditions, better environment, safer properties an lower crime. Now this regeneration – fueled by some feverish last day mentality that it dawns the end of Brixton time, is seen as a bad thing.
The “regeneration” being promised for arches on Atlantic & Brixton Station Rds doesn’t “regenerate”. It renovates arches so that higher rents can be charged (with the “collateral damage” of higher rents being that the current shops disappear, and get replaced by outlets that a) don’t serve the majority of the local demographic, b) don’t employ locals or source locally, and c) don’t contribute to the local cultural scene, but rather parasitise it for personal gain.
As for estate regeneration, take a look at the plans. These plans are mostly for full demolition and rebuild – on estates where between 60 and 70% of the homes meet or exceed the “decent homes” standard. You talk about “safer properties” and a “better environment” were brought to St. Matthews and Angell Town, but it would have been difficult not to have remedied some of their problems,given how appallingly LBL had let them deteriorate. Yet 2 of the 6 estates being threatened with “regeneration”, as well as having far fewer structural and dilapidation issues than those mentioned above,also have markedly-lower rates of crime than either of the two estates you name, even post-regeneration. So why the threat of “regeneration” that equates to demolition of decent homes? Put simply, politics. Ask Matthew Bennett “why regeneration?” and he’s unable to give an intellectually-coherent answer – he instead relies on generalities about needing new homes for Lambeth residents, and the length of the housing list – something that hasn’t particularly stirred our “cabinet” until recently, when they realised that they could partially-refill their deflated coffers with the proceeds of “co-developing” our estates into rows of high-density barrack blocks.
What makes estates “safe” and secure for the people who live on them isn’t so much the design (situational crime prevention being a minor though important part of the process) as the COMMUNITY. Bennett’s fever dreams will destroy at least 6 existing local communities.
If that’s not a “bad thing” in your books, then you’re either naive or amoral.
Just a follow up.If you were the owner of the rail company and had arches that had risen dramatically in rental value would you still take lower rent from the occupiers already there?? Of course you wouldn’t!.The argument is not exclusive to these arches?Rent on .Railway property has risen across London but nobody is interested in that because there’s nothing to throw into the mix in other areas as there is in Brixton to make this a wider argument than it is.
Network Rail is a publicly-owned company. Therefore, while it has an internal commitment to seek best value, it is not legally-bound to have to consider shareholders in the way that private companies are – there is no legal DUTY to seek best value.
This means that Network Rail, as with British Rail of old, can take a long view on matters like rental income, rather than a short-term profitability view, IF THEY WISH. What’s better – to have stable tenants and tenancies over years, or to see an ever-changing roster of short-term rentals where the businesses crash due to high rental costs?
Anyone who believes that the latter should take precedence over the former, should look to history, and specifically the history of economics over the last 130 years – it shows us exactly where an over-dependence on short-term profit over long-term stability takes us.
Brixton Village serves up cheap enough food to not make it exclusive. At many of the places, you can get a meal for £6 or £8, and take in a couple of cheap BYO beers. Most businesses are independent, and run by someone who had a dream, and had enough motivation to turn the dream to reality.
I could understand the protest against Brixton Village if it was full of very expensive restaurants or chain-shops, but it’s not.
I understand that £8 on a meal is a lot of money, but for most people (me included) it’s a treat to go there. Personally, I would rather treat myself to a cheap-eat in Brixton Village, than going to the pub and having a few beers followed by a kebab of questionable quality.
Correction
**I understand that £8 on a meal is a lot of money if you are spending this everyday, but for most people (me included) it’s a treat to go there.
the protest isnt about brixton village alone, its about the various initiatives taking place around brixton simultaneously that look to be taking the area in the direction of the very expensive and chain shop variety. not least the brixton central redevelopment that really does seem like exactly the setup youd be opposed to
Why does this always have to go to colour of skin? White, Black, we’re all being priced out. It’s up to us to work to afford living here or move out. Trashing brixton and causing riots is not a productive way to this. If i cant afford to live here, i will move, im not gonna go smash town up! People need to get over themselves and sense of self entitlement!