INSIDE
STAY UP TO DATE with brixtonblog.com and @brixtonblog
BRIXTON BUGLE YOUR FREE
No 57 | OCTOBER 2017
Published monthly in and for Brixton
ISSN 2397-852X
GO-AHEAD FOR BRIXTON HOTEL NO-ONE WANTS Michaeal Johns, who already has the keys to Brixton, and is known to anyone who has used the Popes Road public conveniences, has been honoured again in a giant mural opposite his place of work. The new work appeared at the end of the Brixton Design Trail week. Michaeal, who runs the market toilets, was presented with the keys to Brixton by council leader Lib Peck at the reopening of Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant last October. The mural artist is Dreph, known for his murals that are tributes to unsung heroes and heroines.
Developers have got the go-ahead for a budget hotel in the centre of Brixton that only they and Lambeth council planners are keen on. Councillors on a divided and unenthusiastic council planning committee voted by four to two to back an application to demolish the building that houses the Superdrug store opposite the Tube station and to build a six-storey budget hotel on the site. Superdrug will return to the site, but councillors on the committee accepted the advice of officers that they had no legal ability to stop developers replacing the SW9 bar at the back of the site that has been a vital part of the Brixton scene for more than 20 years. Lambeth council has turned down an application by its proprietor Alan Culverhouse to lease a replacement council property in nearby Landor Road. After the vote, residents living near the proposed hotel – who will be affected in the short term by massive building work in a confined and busy area – repeated their charge that they had not been properly consulted on the plans, if at all. Objectors told the committee: “We, local residents on Nursery and Tunstall Roads, Bernays and Shannon Groves, Pullross and Bellefields Roads, Stockwell Avenue and Ferndale Road, have NOT been properly consulted.” Now, as one councillor pointed
out, guests of a 96-room budget hotel without its own bar and some of its basement rooms without windows, will be turning out of gigs at the Academy and elsewhere with little incentive to go quietly to bed. Committee chair Claire Wilcox, who proposed acceptance of the application, expressed its mood by saying: “I’m aware that if we had been in the position of choosing applications, this might not be the application we would have chosen. However, we are here this evening thinking about the application that is in front of us, rather than one we might have dreamed up ourselves.” Another committee member who had observed that “Brixton deserves better” was one of four members of the committee who supported plans for the hotel. The one item that the committee did agree to was to “encourage” the developers to consult ward councillors on traffic management. One of the three Ferndale ward councillors, Paul McGlone, a deputy leader of the council, had earlier told the committee that consultation on the scheme had been “just not good enough.” The development is being undertaken by Miraj Investments, a property company based in small offices in Colliers Wood. The owners of the freehold of the SW9 part of the site are an offshore company based in the Isle of Man.
COMMUNITY PAPER
HIGH FLYER
Civil servant to rave runner
14
BRIXTON’S BLACK OPERA
Ready for Black History Month 15
POETRY FOR HEALTH
Catch the documentary
FRIENDS, NEIGHBOURS But Nathalie needs more
9
8