Brixton: maintaining a community presence

1981 onwards; local currency documented from 2009 to 2016

Black British residents organised around housing, archives and local economic life while displacement pressure continued.

The pressure

Pushed out

Lambeth's Kerslake Review found estate rebuilding too slow and called for resident engagement to be fundamentally reset. The sources here did not quantify displacement from those estates.

Lambeth Council, Kerslake Review background information (Cabinet discussion, 5 December 2022).

Written out

Archives, oral history and cultural events maintained a record of Black British community life.

Black Cultural Archives collection (2024).

Squeezed out

The Brixton Pound launched in September 2009; more than 300 independent businesses accepted it in April 2016. Brixton Green was a resident-founded community benefit society, not a community land trust. It co-led plans for council-owned land at Somerleyton Road, approved in August 2015.

Greater London Authority, Make a dash for Brixton cash (20 April 2016); Clare Melhuish, UCL Urban Laboratory, Case Study 5 (September 2015).

What people did

  • Save Brixton Arches launched a legal challenge in June 2015 against Network Rail's plans to end traders' leases.
  • Residents established the Brixton Pound and Brixton Green. The available sources did not establish the currency's current status or a closure date.

What held

Archives and cultural activity maintained community memory and a public presence.

What didn't

The last three Arches tenants traded on 7 April 2018. The campaign's final statement said it had not succeeded, though nine tenants would return, a 300% rent rise would be phased over seven years, and some traders received compensation. These were the campaign's figures, not an independently checked Network Rail account.

What you can borrow

Sources

Sources: Lambeth Council (2022), Leigh Day (20 June 2015), Save Brixton Arches' statement reproduced by Brixton Buzz (April 2018), GLA (2016) and UCL Urban Laboratory (2015). The 300% figure concerned Network Rail arches, not Brixton Village. Unverified house-price and rent-rise claims are not used.