Posts Tagged ‘small businesses’

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.


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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
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Global Civility and Stratford Marsh – 2006

Sunday, February 18th, 2024

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh – On Saturday February 18th 2006 I photographed one of the continuing protests around the world which followed the publication by a Danish magazine of cartoons featuring images of the Prophet Mohammad in Trafalgar Square, then took the underground and DLR to Pudding Mill Lane station on Stratford Marsh to take more pictures of the area which was to be demolished for the London Olympics.


Proclamation for Global Civility – Trafalgar Square

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh

Muslim protesters packed Trafalgar Square for a protest by the Muslim Action Committee over the publication of the cartoons which they regard as blasphemous, but also to publicise a ‘proclamation of global civility‘. The key points of this were the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental right, the need to good manners and etiquette in serious debate, a desire to avoid irresponsible behaviour and to underline the significance of mutual respect for a harmonious co-existence.

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh

The protest in London was kept in good order by stewards who remonstrated with some of the demonstrators who were in some way not behaving as they thought they should, and also moved photographers away from them and some other groups. But other protests around the world were much less restrained and news agencies that same day reported rioting outside the Italian consulate in Benghazi, Libya in which at least 10 people were killed as well as the storming and burning of Christian churches in northern Nigeria with at least 16 deaths.

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh

“As I pointed out in my report in 2006, human dignity was recognised as vital in “the preamble to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 217 of 10 December 1948. That declaration also contains a number of important safeguards such as ‘the right to freedom of opinion and expression‘ and states ‘in the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.'”

Global Civility and Stratford Marsh

There are still many countries around the world where the principles of human rights in that declaration are not observed, including in many in the Muslim world.

Manners and etiquette are clearly very different in different societies and different religions certainly have very different views, particularly over blasphemy and apostasy. In the west we now prioritise freedom of speech and look back in horror at the Spanish Inquisition and trails for heresy and blasphemy, although in England and Wales, the ‘blasphemy’ and ‘blasphemous libel’ laws were only abolished in 2008, and in Scotland in 2021, while they are still in force in Northern Ireland.

The last conviction for blasphemy in England and Wales was in 1977 when the editor of Gay News received a suspended prison sentence after publishing the poem ‘The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name’ by James Kirkup, and in Scotland it was more than a century earlier when a bookseller was jailed for 15 months in 1843, though until 1825 it had been punishable by death.

While we may find some of the cartoons that were published offensive, it clearly does not justify the irresponsible behaviour and criminal actions of some Muslim mobs protesting against them.

Away from the stewards as I wandered through the crowd I was generally welcomed by the protesters, with many urging me to take their pictures. I left as the speeches, most of which I could not understand as few spoke in English, were finishing and people were getting ready to march,

Scroll down the February 2006 web page for more.


Stratford Marsh – River Lea, Stratford

I’d first photographed Stratford Marsh back in the early 1980s as part of a wider project on the River Lea, once a large and important industrial area in London, but like most of British industry falling into decline, accelerated by the policies of the Thatcher government determined to transform Britain away from manufacturing and into services.

Stratford Marsh was then full of largely small businesses employing local people and many still remained in 2006, though already blighted both by government policies and the tax breaks given to the nearby Docklands area. Now Olympic blight had set in with the whole area to be remodelled, and there were also areas which would be demolished for Crossrail.

As I wrote back then and I think my pictures show:

It is still an intriguing area, where a few yards can take you from wilderness to industrial wasteland, from dereliction to busy workshops (though most were closed on a Saturday afternoon.) Parts are visibly closing down, with compulsory purchase orders hanging on lamposts, some footpaths closed and factories demolished.

There was one small sign of a kind of regeneration. the unusual lock between the Bow Back Rivers and Waterworks River at Baker Road, for many years derelict, at last seems to have been replaced.

My London Diary – Feb 2006

There are many more pictures from this walk – and others – on these pages on my River Lea site.


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