Features of Capitalism – Save North Street Mews

New community-led campaigns are fighting back across the city as privateers continue their attack on London’s independent business world.

Save North Street Mews! Investors plan to demolish and redevelop Clapham’s North Street Mews which is currently home to a cluster of thriving creative spaces – recording studios, art residencies, catering workshops. Here is a community who have been able to build careers, grow their businesses and create sustainable livelihoods because of their environment. Investors view the cultural and communal wealth of an area as an asset to be exploited, a product in itself, but it is a ‘wealth’ which depreciates to the point of non-existence with their intervention. The process is one of extraction; investors mine the cultural value from the community and substitute it with overpriced housing for maximum profit – a lure for the wealthy, and inevitable displacement for the people who created it. The promise of new jobs, and boosts to the local economy and neighbourhood house prices, is an illusion –in most instances the ecosystem, the very substance of the area, changes permanently when it is reshaped in this way – it is a conjuring trick performed for profit alone.

In ‘The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination’, author Sarah Schulman describes the re-appropriation of these spaces as a desire for a “social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the pre-sorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. The mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”

A similar story is found North of the river. The soul of Soho is up-for-grabs as Westminster council prepares to pawn off Berwick Street Market to a commercial landlord. Existing traders who have built their businesses from the roots up – developing exponentially, cultivating an earnest following – are under threat of rising rent and eviction. The identity and history of another Soho mainstay will be sanitised, neutralised and swept aside, replaced by modern homogeny: retail chains and corporate coffee.

Use your voice, petition here:

Save North Street Mews – Write to local councillors!
Linda Bray: lbray@lambeth.gov.uk
Christopher Wellbelove: cwellbelove@lambeth.gov.uk
Nigel Haselden: nhaselden@lambeth.gov.uk
Our local MP Kate Hoey: hoeyk@parliament.uk
Our local London assembly member Valerie Shawcross: val@valshawcross.com
The developer’s PR company: northstreetmews@fourcommunications.com
Up-to-date information: facebook.com/wearenorthstreetmews

Save Berwick Street Market: www.change.org/p/edward-watson-keep-berwick-street-market-independent