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Music

Local Music Scene in Peckham Trumps Property Developers' Bid for Gentrification

Bussey Building, aka The CLF Art Cafe, and Rye Wax will continue to thrive for now.

This past November, news broke that London property development company Frame Property had plans to turn a building in the town center of the London district of Peckham into 11 luxury apartments and up to eight retail units. Significantly, that building—on 133 Rye Lane—overlooks a number of crucial independent music hubs in the neighborhood: venue Bussey Building, aka The CLF Art Cafe, and record store and venue Rye Wax.

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Tom Stiedl of the latter business criticized the move in an interview with FACT: "This development threatens everyone in the Copeland Park site, but particularly the music venues as the flats will be overlooking the outside areas used for night trade, and we all know what's going to happen there," he said. "It's totally ridiculous, the building couldn't be worse positioned for becoming residential. On top of that the whole site will face access issues that will threaten businesses and undermine what everyone has been working towards in the past couple of years. Literally hundreds of jobs in the area could be at risk."

He encouraged the concerned public to fill out a form on Southwark Council's website commenting on the proposed plan. The window for feedback closed November 18; a total of 1500 comments had been made by then.

In an exciting turn of events, the Peckham Peculiar announced Friday "Victory for the Bussey Building campaigners." They report that Frame Property has withdrawn their planning application and said that they will not build housing on the site.

Nick Mansour, co-founder of Frame Property, told the publication they have been considering "alternative uses" for the site: "In terms of our future plans, we have been working very hard to assess the feasibility of alternative uses to the residential scheme which we had originally proposed," he said. "Whilst we still very much feel that residential uses in town centres help to create mixed, healthy and sustainable communities, we believe that there is a financially viable and positive alternative in this case." He went on to describe their strategy in Peckham as "a more light-touch, long-term approach to the redevelopment."

H/t FACT; read their original piece here.

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