‘Brixton Experience’: Saturday 26 November

The Brixton Market Traders Federation is launching a month-long celebration of Brixton market with a big event on Saturday 26 November. Around 40 local businesses will set up stalls in the market, representing four categories – food, fashion, creative arts and media, and lifestyle. The businesses must be based within a 400m radius of the station and will include high-street shops as well as independent ones. Named the ‘Brixton Experience’ (bit cringe?), the month-long series of events is funded by the Mayor of London’s High Street Support Scheme Fund (a post-riots initiative to get London businesses back on their feet). It will also include business clinics run by Lambeth Enterprise and workshops with local makers from Makerhood.

VIDEO: Brixton on a sunny Saturday

Snapshots of Brixton this afternoon, inspired by the sun – a busy market and snippets of music

Another blow for Brixton Market traders

Diana Godwin with the traders' petition at her stall on Pope's Rd

Market traders have complained that the closure of the Pope’s Road Car Park has drastically cut business since Christmas, just when they thought they were emerging from the recession. The Pope’s Rd carpark was closed by Lambeth Council on December 19 for health and safety reasons.

A council press release in December said that a structural survey had found problems in the concrete walls and ceilings. It was scheduled to reopen in mid-February, but it is now uncertain how long it will have to stay closed.

The carpark served as an important facility for vehicle users coming to Brixton Market.  Diana Godwin, whose family runs a fruit and veg stall on Pope’s Rd, said, “on the weekend, trade is now probably down by about a third. Our customers are parking as far away as Shakespeare Rd and up past Tescos on Acre Lane. A lot of my customers who have signed the petition, especially my Saturday customers, are Croydon people who were probably born in Brixton and still come to shop here. They closed the carpark four days prior to Christmas with no warning to us or the general public and no alternative.”

At a meeting last week, says Godwin, the council stated it would not be able to offer help with alternative parking until mid-May. Godwin and other Brixton traders have set up a petition to protest against the closure and to ask for more immediate help. “We’re asking for them not to leave it for six months. Already two traders in this road have closed since Christmas. Whether it’s got something to do with the carpark, I couldn’t say, but I think it played a part.” The Market Trader’s Federation are proposing that the council establish an alternative carpark on the wasteland just behind the market in Codharbour Lane.

I am waiting on a comment from Lambeth Council, but you can read their statement in the South London Press here.

Brixton Village pop-up shop project

Dougald Hine in Brixton Village outside a pop-up sweet shop

On a freezing day in Brixton earlier this month, four women could be found performing an absurdist dance inside a market shop to bemused passers-by. The dance was charming. They made themselves look stupid, squashing their faces against the smudged window and then jumping back with their hands up to their chests in scared-bunny-rabbit impressions. One of them could barely keep a straight face.

They were a performance act at the Space Station gallery, part of a pop-up shop project in Brixton Village.  The Granville Arcade is going through troubled times, but its empty shops are now occupied by pop-up projects designed to breathe new life into the market. In October 2009, a group called the Spacemakers Agency reached an agreement with Lambeth Council and the owners of the market, the London & Associated Properties PLC (LAP), for the rent-free occupancy of twenty shops in Brixton Village for three months. The Spacemakers Agency put out a call for creative and community-friendly proposals for the first wave of projects in December. Now the second wave has brought new events, shops, galleries and performances.

Okido, the Brixton-based children’s comic, have set up their own space. Next door is Herd, a design space set up by a young architect, and the nearby Sweet Tooth is selling old-fashioned sweets.  The artinivan art collective created a life-size ‘Camera Obscurer’ in the opening week – it was a fun diversion, although pretty obscure in itself. Even the acclaimed supper club, the Underground Restaurant, came down from Kilburn on Saturday 16th to cook for 80 people in an old fabric shop. Ms Marmite Lover, the Underground Restaurant founder, said, “I think the idea of pop-up shops is fantastic. Why have an empty space, when you can use it temporarily for exciting projects?”

Well, a fun diversion is all very well, but will Spacemakers’ project actually bring long-term positive change to Brixton Village?The pop-up shops are imaginative, but we should also be worrying that the poorest residents in Brixton aren’t benefiting from this ‘regeneration’ and that those who espouse the virtues of  ‘community-initiatives’ come from, and draw to them, the young middle classes, not the whole community.

I am impressed, however, by Dougald Hine, the founder of Spacemakers who puts forward some genuinly convincing arguments about the long-term effects of the short-term shops. “We want to make this a place where people want to rent shops, because the LAP were struggling to find tenants.”  Several temporary tenants, such as Cornercopia, are actually looking to become permanent residents of the market. “At the same time, we’re finding that other people  have been attracted by fact that there’s now a real sense of energy here and are starting to go to the owners wanting to rent”. A vintage clothes shop, Rejuvenation (pictured below), opened yesterday as a permanent tenant.

The market traders haven’t been directly involved in the project, but they could benefit from more visitors and a supply chain that remains within the market.  Cornercopia sell chutneys made from market ingredients. Hine is keen for it not to “become an us and them thing”.Relations between LAP and market traders have been tricky of late, but the Spacemaker involvement has, says Hine, opened up new avenues for discussion. One trader, Tirence Randall of the Los Andes Butchers, was optimistic. “It’s something different that brightens the market up. I hope it does catch on and bring a lot more people down.” Like the Brixton pound, this is a bit of a ‘wait-and-see’ moment, but I’m erring on the positive side. As long as it doesn’t mean an invasion of East London trendies…

The appropriately named Rejuvenation, one of the new permanent shops in the market.