Our legal working group has been busy preparing loads of written representations in response to Taylor's plans, debunking Hondo’s greenwashing of the development, laying out the harm it would cause to the heritage of the area, and outlining community concerns.
Needless to say this work has taken almost all of our capacity, so we’ve had to let the communications side of things slide for a bit while we wait for developments.
But don't worry, we’re still here, we’re still fighting, and we’re not going anywhere.✊
As soon as the Mayor’s office announces the date for the hearing, we’ll be back on here with next steps for the campaign, and ways we can all get involved to #FightTheTower
Stay tuned for news on another proposed ‘redevelopment’, in Brixton Station Road, and the PR madness Lambeth Council are churning out to disguise it. The fight to defend our public spaces and our community resources from money-hungry developers continues!
"If Brixton has maintained some of its convivial vibe despite massive capital-led gentrification, social cleansing and general ‘cleaning up’, it's because various communities have resisted it, stayed put, found new ways in a tightening urban landscape. Communities of resistance come together, link with others, fade and reconverge.
We offer this timeline as a journey into collective memory and an invitation to take inspiration from places, campaigns and actions of Brixton’s radical past and the corporate and council policies we are up against. The timeline charts sixty events in the Brixton gentrification struggles in chronological order. It starts with the 1993 Brixton City Challenge, to the merciless implementation of Lambeth's Future Brixton Masterplan in the 2010s, along with the enforcement of austerity measures following the 2008 financial crisis. It ends in 2021, with the beginnings of redevelopment of the Pope's Road area, and the birth of #FightTheTower.
This is a timeline based on our collective experience, backed up by Brixtonbuzz, Past Tense, Urban75 and other resources. Our experience can only cover a fraction of Brixton's gentrification struggles – the things we saw from our vantage point of grassroots and autonomous practice, estates, and EU-migration, since we washed up in Brixton in the 1990s."
Jordi Blanchar works in the arts sector, Marion Hamm is an anthropologist. They engage in grassroots organising, art/activism and sometimes in radical media.