Nobody in Peckham Wants More Luxury Flats

At the mouth of Peckham’s iconic Rye Lane sits the Aylesham Centre. It’s an architectural footprint of 1980s American mall fever: elegant Victorian red brickwork fused with blue plastic and glass panelling, dulled by age. Once bustling, nowadays footfall through its domed central arcade is low, as are trader occupancy rates. It could be any retail complex in an English town centre that’s seen better days. This one just happens to be in south London.

Everyone in Peckham agrees: the Aylesham needs redevelopment. The question, however, is how.

After a six-year battle between residents and successive property developers, current site owners Berkeley Group finally submitted a planning application to Southwark council in July. Exact details of the application are a mystery until it’s opened up for public scrutiny, but the company’s most recent design brief included a skyline-blocking cluster of 850 high-rise flats, a refreshed Morrisons supermarket location, and a range of retail, leisure and working spaces.

Despite Berkeley’s best spin efforts, these proposals have not gone down well with locals, who say the developers are not listening to community needs. And they’re determined to change that. 

For decades, luxury developers have steamrolled councils and communities across London, promising affordable housing and trickle-down benefits that usually fail to materialise. Yet the fight over the Aylesham’s regeneration has allied not just long-term Peckham residents, but new generations of ‘gentrifiers’. And if they manage to beat Berkeley – and Southwark council – into compromise, the precedent set could resonate far beyond SE15.

Unaffordable housing.

“There’s a lot of problems [in Peckham] … a lot of poverty, a lot of social issues” says Chris Allchin, a spokesperson for Aylesham Community Action (ACA) group. “But they’re not going to be addressed by a property developer building £3m worth of luxury flats.”  

Since 2021, when previous landowner BlackRock sold the Aylesham site to Berkeley, the ACA has been a thorn in its side. Members are determined to buck the typical outcome of David vs property developer matchups, and ensure the complex is redeveloped according to the needs of the community. But given Peckham’s diverse population, discerning what those needs are isn’t easy. 

Residents of East Central Southwark – the multi-ward area where the Aylesham is located – are some of the most disadvantaged in the borough, with high levels of unemployment and lower than average incomes. Elsewhere, pockets of wealth proliferate due to gentrification. In Peckham Rye and Rye Lane wards, those most impacted by the proposed development, there’s less social housing, less ethnic diversity and a younger population than in other parts of Southwark, with the average terraced house setting owners back by nearly £900,000. 

When it comes to Berkeley’s vision for the Aylesham, however, even those who fit the mould of the typical Peckham gentrifier are skittish.

Will Liddle, a 28-year-old entrepreneur and recent first-time buyer in the area, believes there’s a “complete lack” of community benefit to the current redevelopment proposals. 

“I don’t want to live in a soulless, corporate place that looks more like downtown Portland than Peckham,” he told Novara Media.

Of particular concern are the high-rise apartments which are central to Berkeley’s plan. An image mocked up by the ACA shows Peckham’s horizon choked with flats where there were once uninterrupted views all the way into central London. 

Only 35% of these new flats are earmarked as ‘affordable’ housing – the minimum required by the council. The figure accounts for 25% of units set aside for social rent, whereas the final 10% would be a mix of controversial shared ownership properties and flats overseen by a potential Community Land Trust.

“Berkeley are telling us they are going to build a small Canary Wharf in the middle of the area, changing the feel of it forever, and what do we get out of it?,” Liddle – who became involved with the ACA after hearing chat in his Peckham co-working space – scoffs. 

“They meet their minimum requirement to build affordable housing … There’s nearly 20,000 people on the housing waiting list in the borough. It’s a complete joke.” 

Affordable housing is high on the list of campaigners’ demands of Berkeley, with the ACA requiring that 50% of the properties fall into this category. But housing need isn’t the ACA’s only concern.

Tough trade.

Josephine Francis and her beauty salon aren’t new to Peckham: Francis has weathered 25 years on Rye Lane. As I admire her recently refurbished interiors, she tells me that local business owners have been kept in the dark about Berkeley’s plans. 

“I’ve never received any notification, newsletter, email, anything in regards to that project,” she says.

Francis says that few of her friends within Peckham’s wider Afro-Caribbean community have heard anything about the plans either. But after getting wind of the proposals, Francis joined the ACA, whose membership is otherwise overrepresented by those at the whiter, wealthier end of the socio-economic spectrum. 

Berkeley’s failure to reach out to Black Peckham is a huge misstep, Francis believes. 

“We are Peckham,” she says. “The people coming [here] now, you’re coming because we’ve sustained Peckham. We want to keep the community spirit.

“Peckham is a place where you walk and somebody will greet you. There’s places in London you can fall down and people don’t even look at you.” 

Francis stresses that she thinks Berkeley’s investment is “welcome”, but fears that business rates will skyrocket for existing traders. A cap on those rates and unit rents could help ease traders into whatever iteration of the Aylesham comes next, she suggests, while any related profits could be continually reinvested into the ward.

“We’re here to make money,” she says, frankly. “We’re here to run businesses, and we’re already finding it difficult. 

“Covid-19 changed a lot of things. Anything [Berkeley] is doing, they need to make sure that the money is circulating in the area, not going out of the area.”

A PR exercise.

Francis’ recommendations sound sensible – but they’re a long shot given locals are yet to be convinced Berkeley is even listening to their feedback. Allchin is derisive about the legally mandated ‘consultation’ process Berkeley has run, calling it a “PR exercise”.

He has a point. By April 2024 – a year after supposedly beginning to consult the public – Berkeley’s dedicated webpage for community feedback showed fewer than 40 responses. 

Liddle chalks this up to an attempt to dodge robust community engagement. “300,000 people live in Southwark,” he says, scathingly. “Do they honestly think 38 people are the only ones who care?”

After pressure from the ACA, a proper open forum between Berkeley and members of the public was finally held in May this year. To say the meeting went badly is an understatement. 

Buckling under questioning, a senior Berkeley manager admitted that the new market-rate flats were to be targeted at buyers who “might want a second home”. Attendees were up in arms, Allchin included. 

“If the council turned up and said, ‘Right, we’re going to build 800 council homes and it’s going to be dense and a bit high rise, but we think it’s worth it to make a big dent in the housing waiting list here’, we could have a good discussion about whether that is the right thing to do,” he says. 

Second homes, however, are a different story. “To put in that kind of development and density for them to sit there half empty because they’re … investment properties for people from all over the world, it’s just…” Allchin breaks off, his face twisting. 

Councils in crisis.

The elephant in the open-plan kitchen is the gap between the power the council holds in theory and what it holds in practice. 

Technically, Southwark should be able to reject applications that would negatively impact the local community. The trick is finding the right legal or policy context, to protect the council’s decision from being appealed by developers or overturned by the mayor. There are legal requirements to consider and minimise potential negative socioeconomic and equalities impacts of the development.

Southwark council has gone even further, requiring developers to prepare detailed demographic analyses and show how early consultation with the local community has actually resulted in changes to the scheme.

In addition, Southwark’s affordable housing policy goes beyond national and London standards, making it harder for developers to reduce affordable housing below the 35% minimum on the grounds of “viability” (i.e. the developer claims they can’t afford it).

The issue, says Jed Holloway – a baby-faced planning solicitor at Southwark Law Centre – is that Southwark allows developers to get away with surface level analysis of the negative impacts and no mitigation. “They’ve given themselves the tools to ensure better protection for local residents and businesses, particularly working class and ethnic minority groups, but they just aren’t using them,” Holloway adds.

Holloway’s role is a rare one. Law centres are charities, providing free legal support to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it. But austerity has decimated the budgets and capacity of these services. In London, Holloway is one of scant dedicated planning experts left.

Meanwhile, private developers have only consolidated their power. Councils are desperate for investment – and developers know it. The short-term cash injections provided by projects like the Aylesham’s redevelopment are hard to resist, even if the long-term impact often fails to result in the community wealth initially promised.

Developers have a number of advantages when it comes to navigating England’s planning system. They’re able to produce their own ‘viability assessments’ to determine if building a certain amount of affordable housing will be profitable. If not, they can say they won’t bother with the project unless the allocation of affordable housing is reduced, or they’re scrapping it full stop. Councils tend to be prepared to negotiate if they see a much needed million pounds or so slipping away. Developers are also allowed infinite appeals against council decisions on planning applications that don’t go their way (campaigners, meanwhile, are not). 

Councils often get worn down by developers with endless time and money, one housing activist tells me. Just over ten years ago, Southwark oversaw the controversial clearance and redevelopment of the nearby Heygate Estate. Thousands of families were forced to leave the Heygate, which was replaced by blocks of luxury flats, with only 74 out of 2,500 available for social rent. Viability assessments were identified as a key factor in allowing Heygate site owner, Lendlease, to circumvent social housing provision. 

But in 2024, some councils are starting to realise short-term cash injections from developers don’t lead to long-term area regeneration. And in Peckham, campaigners are hopeful, with Holloway’s presence giving them more confidence in their ability to influence the council’s decision.  

“The system is rigged in favour of developers,” Holloway says. “But I want to offer some hope in terms of legal action.”

Community pressure.

For now, Peckham residents are waiting to see if the council believes Berkeley’s application meets the legal requirements to be considered for the next step: planning permission. The decision is scheduled for the next few weeks, and campaigners expect the proposals will be validated. After that, the ACA will assess how satisfied it is with the plans, and decide whether to start lodging objections or not.

But whatever the developer’s proposals, residents have made themselves heard. Dropping into Berkeley’s ‘Consultation Hub’ in June, I poked around the miniature mock-ups of the revamped complex. A smiling Berkeley rep came over to check that I was a) part of the community and b) feeling sufficiently engaged. I gently quizzed her on the consultation. She assured me it had been thorough. 

“They’re never usually this long. We usually do one evening in a church hall and then submit,” she said, with a slight defensiveness. “But this has gone on for two years because of the community.”

This article was amended on 21 August 2024 to better reflect Southwark council’s legal requirements for planning applications.