The Nimbys have conquered Peckham

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This week, Nimby Watch is in south-east London, just for a change…

Alright then, where have you brought me this week? We’re in rapidly-gentrifying Peckham, in south-east London. Specifically, we’re by the Aylesham Centre, a shopping centre that has clearly seen better days, and they definitely weren’t recent.

Hang on a second, haven’t we been here before? You were complaining about celebrity Nimbys! Busted. Yes, we covered plans to redevelop the Aylesham Centre last October, when local opposition to the cause won the backing of celebrities including Nish Kumar and James Acaster.

I’m pretty sure they didn’t self-identify as Nimbys, you know… They did not! As ever, both of them – like many campaigners against the development – claimed not to be against new housing developments in Peckham per se, just against this particular one. In any case, they have much to celebrate now, as they have won: on May 18, the planning inspectorate ruled against the developer Berkeley Homes, much to the delight of Southwark Council and multiple Nimby campaigns.

Well, it sounds like the development has been considered by multiple relevant authorities and found to be lacking. They must have had good reasons. Well. Let’s see about that. The headline decision is that the ‘benefits do not outweigh the harm to the relevant designated heritage assets important to the area’. I urge anyone reading this to go to Google Images and look at various images of the Aylesham Centre. Not everything from the 1980s is either vintage or heritage. Sometimes it’s just dilapidated and in need of demolition.

You’re from the 1980s, after all. Ha ha, thank you for that. Perhaps the stronger argument for the objectors was that of the 867 new homes that would have been built on this site, only 77 would have been designated as affordable. That’s only 9% of the total, against a target of at least 30%.

That does sound bad. Doesn’t that make refusing this permission a good thing? Now the site can be used for a project that genuinely benefits local residents, instead of just more luxury flats. You’ve been reading the press releases from the various Peckham Nimby groups, haven’t you? It hopefully won’t shock you to hear that I have a few issues with that idea. The first, by the by, is to wonder when we started calling any flat that isn’t designated as affordable ‘luxury’. Anyone who’s seen a new-build one-bed or studio flat in London knows it’s not ‘luxury’. Liveable, yes. But no one is building Peckham flats for Russian oligarchs or Middle Eastern royalty.

Point taken. But if they’d let this project go ahead, that site would’ve been gone forever. Now there’s a chance to build a better proposal on it. The Aylesham Centre is a half-empty run-down mall and car park. It’s been designated for a housing-led development since 2014, and nothing has been built on it. Now, whichever developer decides to try again will have to do so from scratch – and we know that process takes years. How many decades are we going to build nothing while we wait for the perfect plan to arrive? What if it doesn’t exist?

Look, you can’t rush these things. And it’s not like that this is the only housing site in Southwark Council, is it? Not quite, but to be blunt, Southwark’s building numbers suck. It completed 1,020 homes in 2024/25, against a target of 2,355. The Government has upped its annual housing target to 2,914 just to meet the needs of the existing community – but in 2024/25 it only started on 42 new homes. It is coming nowhere close to building what is needed, and the council is now celebrating the failure of yet another project.

But the affordable housing target wasn’t met. What do I keep saying about the perfect being the enemy of the good? It’s a brownfield site, higher interest rates mean finance costs are higher and building costs are up – even Southwark Council’s own appointed adviser agreed the site couldn’t support affordable housing and still be viable. It’s a project like the one that just got denied, or nothing at all.

Well, a lot of the locals seem happy with nothing at all. Yes, but then they’ll go back to complaining that housing is too expensive and that locals are being forced out by ‘gentrifiers’. We seem to be addicted to complaining that there’s nowhere to live, while making sure we never fix the problem.

At least that problem’s only confined to housing, right? You’re just baiting me at this point, aren’t you? As well you know, I could point to HS2 and say just the same thing – people like the idea of a project, but the second the realities of one start to bite, we pick it apart and issue legal challenges until none of it makes sense any more. We built the world’s railways and now we can’t connect London to Manchester, but worse than that, we can’t even knock down an old shopping estate.

Still, at least Nish Kumar’s happy. That is some comfort for us all, yes.

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