Posts Tagged ‘Save Brixton Arches’

Save Brixton Arches: 3rd Anniversary – 2018

Tuesday, February 4th, 2025

Save Brixton Arches: 3rd Anniversary Action. On Sunday 4th February 2018 campaigners marked the third anniversary of the announcement by Network Rail of their plans to redevelop the Brixton Arches with a rally and a three minute silence.

Save Brixton Arches: 3rd Anniversary

Railway Arches are an incredibly important part of our towns and cities. When the railways were being built in the 19th century putting the lines on viaducts was a cheaper option for the railway developers than laying tracks at ground level, so we got long viaducts coming into the centre of London and elsewhere.

Save Brixton Arches: 3rd Anniversary
Andrew Cooper’s banner for the event and his sculpture of the 4-headed monster that is Lambeth Labour Council

These arches became both an important feature of the city landscape but also a dynamic boost to the economy, providing low-cost premises for small businesses to start and grow until they needed to move out to larger premises and new generations of businesses would take over these spaces. In particular they provided premises for various car repair companies and in more recent years small breweries. And in Brixton in particular a large range of low-cost shops.

Save Brixton Arches: 3rd Anniversary

The arches used to belong to the railway companies, and on privatisation passed to Network Rail. But around a dozen years ago Network Rail saw the potential of selling them off to the private sector. The arches were a relatively small earner for them, bringing in a little over £80 million a year in rents.

Save Brixton Arches: 3rd Anniversary

They offered 150 year leases to the private sector, at first without any consultation with the businesses and communities served by them, something the sale for £1.46 billion was criticised for in a 2019 report from the National Audit Office. Network Rail retained the freehold so they can continue to have access to the arches if they need. The rents for the arches were expected to increase by 54% over the next 3 or 4 years, making them too expensive for many tenants.

Also in 2019, the House of Commons public accounts committee criticised both Network Rail and the Dept of Transport for the sale which means “future tenants have fewer rights – and existing tenants no longer have an option to extend their leases.”

Committee Chair Meg Hillier is quoted in The Guardian as saying “Ultimately, government took a short-term decision to sell a profitable asset to plug a funding gap. We remain unconvinced that the sale represents the best value for the public and the public-sector finances in the long term.

Brixton has been particularly hard hit by Network Rail’s plans to make more cash from the arches as those along Atlantic Road and Brixton Station Road were an important shopping area in the centre of the town – often described as the ‘heart of Brixton‘.

Network Rail ganged up with Lambeth Council to tear this heart out from the town by refurbishing thes arches which would enable them to “triple the rents, insert shiny new businesses and provide Brixton with even more over-priced bars and restaurants than the town’s citizens can shake a stick at.”

Spoken Word artist Potent Whisper – hear his #OurBrixton

The Council ignored a long campaign to keep the arches, and failed to do anything to protect the interests of the tenants or of nearby market traders who feel they will be adversely effected while the refurbishment is taking place – and with possible dangers to the general public from potentially dangerous airborne particles during the removal of asbestos.

The work was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2016, but was only started the day after this protest in February 2018. The Save Brixton Arches campaign were calling for it to be abandoned as the plans for the work fail to include proper fire safety precautions and will severely restrict access by emergency services to local businesses and the railway and station.

Protesters form a human chain in front of the arches

They also called for an investigation into local Labour MP Helen Hayes. Until shortly before she was elected in 2015 she had been a senior partner in the firm Allies & Morrison which had made the recommendation for the ‘improvement’ of the arches in 2013, though she has denied any personal involvement. A&M have been involved in many contentious ‘regeneration’ schemes with developers and councils across London which opponents describe as social cleansing.

The boards behind used to be thriving businesses – forced out

Network Rail sold its arches to ‘The Arch Company’. 50% owned by US-based private equity firm Blackstone and TT Group, one of the UK’s largest, privately owned property investment firms who since then as well as raising rents have refurbished 1,400 arches. They have also made some efforts to reduce the impacts of the rent rises and negotiated a tenant charter. Blackstone are now said to be ‘on track’ to buy out TT and take full control of the arches.

More about the protest and many more pictures at Save Brixton Arches: 3rd Anniversary Action.


FlickrFacebookMy London DiaryHull PhotosLea ValleyParis
London’s Industrial HeritageLondon Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.


Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock – 2016

Tuesday, September 19th, 2023

Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock: Three very different protests in London on Monday 19th September 2016


Save Brixton Railway Arches

Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock - 2016

Network Rail and Lambeth Council want to evict the small local businesses from the Railway arches, some of which have been serving the community for as long as anyone can remember. The sites will be refurbished and the rents trebled, so the new Atlantic Road ‘Village’ will be home to “loads of bland, overpriced, soulless branded shops that nobody wants“. This is clearly another disturbing step in the ongoing gentrification of Brixton being pursued by Lambeth Council.

Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock - 2016

When railways where built in London in the nineteenth century much of the land they ran across was already occupied by houses, shops and other businesses. Putting the rails on top of long viaducts was a cheaper and much less disruptive way of bringing the railways into the city then putting the lines at or below ground level.

Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock - 2016

This created long runs of arches below the viaducts as well as bridges over existing roads, and these arches were soon filled largely by small local businesses for which they provided relatively low rent premises. Many of them later became garages and other businesses connected with cars, lorries and taxis, but those in the centre of Brixton where the arches had frontages on Atlantic Road and Brixton Station Road were occupied by a whole range of shops.

Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock - 2016

Almost all of these were small businesses serving the local community – selling food, clothing, furniture, carpets, general stores, cafes, bars. Some well-known shops had been in the same arch since the 1930s.

Gentrification, Life Jackets & Standing Rock - 2016

Network Rail wanted to evict all these tenants so the arches could be refurbished and then re-let at hugely increased rents to increase their profits by replacing valued local businesses by the kind of bland high-price chains and franchises that have blighted high streets across the country. And Lambeth Council were backing them against a strong local ‘Save Brixton Arches’ campaign.

Few if any of the existing businesses could survive the long gap in trading for the revamping on the arches, and none would be viable at the increased rents. Many of them had decided to fight the evictions despite being threatened that if they legally challenged them they would not be offered leases after refurbishment.

On this Monday Network Rail had been intending to evict another of the traders, Budget Carpets, and people including from the local Green Party and the party’s co-leader Jonathan Bartlett, local Labour councillor Rachel Heywood and Simon Elmer from ASH had come to oppose the eviction. Rachel Heywood, a Labour councillor since 2006, was opposed to this and other policies such as library closures and council estate demolitions being pursued by the right-wing Labour cabinet and in 2018 was banned from the Labour Party for 5 years after it was announced she would stand as an independent.

The protest led to Network Rail postponing the eviction. The protesters then went into Brixton Market for a meeting where traders talked about how they have been bullied and their decision to fight the evictions.

More pictures at Brixton Railway Arches.


Life Jacket ‘graveyard’ – Parliament Square

The International Rescue Commission laid out 2,500 life jackets previously worn by adults and children refugees to cross from Turkey to Greece in Parliament Square as a reminder of the continuing deaths by drowning there.

The protest urged the UK to do more to welcome refugees to the UK and to meet the promises already made, and was criticised by a few bigots on the extreme right. Unfortunately instead the UK government has listened increasingly to the bigots and brought in even more repressive anti-migrant laws while failing to provide safe passages for migrants except for some very limited special cases.

Everyone wearing this lifejackets and those who have arrived in Europe since then in similar circumstances is now a criminal under UK law should they manage to get to this country.

At the protest I met again Green Party co-leader Jonathan Bartley who I had photographed earlier in Brixton. He told me his tweet about refugees and this life-jacket protest had attracted many extremely racist comments.

Life Jacket ‘graveyard’


London Stands with Standing Rock – US Embassy

Later in the day I went to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square where people attended a non-violent, prayerful act of solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe threatened by the construction of a huge oil pipeline close to their reservation in North Dakota and the Missouri River.

A protest at the pipeline which threatens the water supply of the tribe and 8 million people who live downstream has attracted several thousands from around 120 Native American tribes and their allies around the world and 70 have been arrested at gunpoint.

Although the protest has attracted many journalists who like the protesters have been harassed by police (and some protested) there has been very little press coverage. The pipeline had already resulted in the destruction of several sacred sites.

You can read more about the pipeline on Wikipedia. Legal injunctions on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe were denied. The Obama administration attempted to get some re-routing of the pipeline but one of the first things Trump did on coming to power was to approve its construction. It was completed later in 2017 and put into service. Despite various court rulings since that there had not been proper environmental reviews it remains in operation.

More pictures at London Stands with Standing Rock.