Plans for a 21-storey tower in central Brixton have been unveiled by the owners of Brixton Village and Market Row.
It would sit on the current site of Sports Direct and Flannels on Pope’s Road and provide an “office eco-system” with 200,000 square feet of space.
The recently sold 11-storey Blue Star House, also in central Brixton, has slightly less than 55,000 square feet of space.
Hondo Enterprises, owners of the site in a joint enterprise with the US-based investment giant Angelo Gordon, say 10% of the office space would be “affordable”.
Hondo, in a dedicated website – which invites comments on the scheme – and two sparsely attended consultation sessions in Brixton Village, says the project will:
- Generate 2,000 new jobs in the creative, tech and cultural sectors.
- Raise £2m in business rates for Lambeth council, which is suffering from years of central government austerity policies
- Lead to an extra spend in the locality of £3.4m a year, enhancing local businesses
- Create “safer neighbourhoods and natural surveillance”.
Plans for the development, which show another, smaller, building behind the tower, are already being discussed with Lambeth council in the run-up to a planning application.
The plans would also see major changes to the area at ground level.
There would be a new public square between the development and Brixton’s overground station and an opening-up of access to the Brixton Village market.
This would involve demolition of the existing public toilets on Pope’s Road, but Hondo says the new building would provide double the existing provision and that they would be free.
Also promised is a “publicly accessible rooftop experience for Brixton” and a two-story-high central “market space” in the new building that could be used by community groups for events and exhibitions
Hondo says it already gives local groups access to areas such as the terrace of its Lost in Brixton club space and Granville Court opposite the new Ovalhouse theatre on Coldharbour Lane.
It says it is planning to host yoga sessions, children’s reading classes, food exchanges, and community networking events in current spaces in the two covered markets of Brixton Village and Market Row.
While it presses on with plans for massive developments in Brixton, there is growing concern about Hondo’s role in the actual or threatened disappearance of longstanding local institutions like the 414 Club and Nour Cash and Carry.
And, only last week, another traditional market food trader, T&A butchers in Brixton Village, who rented a unit that has housed butchers for decades, were told to leave when their annual lease ran out.
The new office development is designed by the acclaimed architecture practice of Sir David Adjaye, OBE – which recently submitted a full planning application for a Windrush Square memorial to Cherry Groce, whose shooting by police sparked the 1985 Brixton riots in which photographer David Hodge died.
