There’s a scene in Rye Lane, a film said to be breathing new life into romcoms, where the two main characters stroll past a body-popping white-haired man in a spangly Yves Klein blue cowboy outfit, then continue their conversation sitting in giant high heels outside a shoe shop.
The moonwalking cowboy is an actor, but the shoe shop is real – one of dozens of outlets inside Rye Lane market giving Peckham the personality that inspired the film’s director, Raine Allen-Miller, to treat the south London neighbourhood as a character rather than mere scenery.
How much longer it will be there is another matter. The covered market is part of the Aylesham Centre, a site that developer Berkeley Homes has decided should be the location for 14 tower blocks with 1,050 homes, looming over Rye Lane’s low-rise streetscape.
The course of development never did run smooth. Berkeley’s proposals have been condemned by thousands of Peckham residents in a petition. Southwark council denounced the plans – an unusual step for a planning authority to take before any formal permission had been sought.
Then last week the developer split from its architects, Sheppard Robson, who said they had “collectively reflected” and had “decided with the client that the project requires a fresh start”. Now Berkeley is back to square one, hoping for an architectural meet-cute – or at least a practice prepared to take on its new design brief.
“It’s just profit maximisation,” said Chris Allchin, a member of Aylesham Community Action (ACA), which has been coordinating opposition to the scheme. “This isn’t your classic Nimby kind of thing. People want to see the site developed. People want the housing. There’s not a lot of green space in Peckham so there’s an opportunity to do something really great.
“But they’re just trying to ram as many units as they possibly can into the site and push it through, based on their knowledge of all the policies the council has to adhere to.”
For Clyde Watson, another ACA campaigner, Peckham’s character derives from its ability to survive. “It wasn’t particularly war damaged. It survived the depredations of big developers. And so far it has survived gentrification pressures.”
Allchin describes it as vibrant, entrepreneurial, dark and scrappy. “It’s not neat and tidy. The graffiti is out of control. But it’s a successful place. It doesn’t need an outside intervention. It doesn’t need regeneration. It’s not like Canary Wharf [which was] a blank canvas. What Peckham needs is affordable family housing and spaces for local businesses to grow.”
Rye Lane, the film, showed the area at its best, he said. “It shows the area how we’d like it to be, very bright, quite glossy in some ways.”
Allen-Miller, the director, grew up in Peckham after moving there from Manchester at the age of 12. “It was originally written to be set in Camden,” she said, in publicity material for the film. “It’s an important part of London for me, but it’s just an important place in general – the history of it, its identity, the multicultural influences. Growing up there, going to Nour Cash & Carry with my gran to get seasoning did so much for me and I really wanted to showcase it in a different way.”
Anna Rhodes, the film’s production designer, said south London was “a character in the film in its own right. We were really specific with all the locations and didn’t want to fake anything. We were shooting things in real locations that these characters would be hanging out in.”
The movie follows Dom, a heartbroken accountant, as he wanders through south London with Yas, a livewire costume designer. The street scenes invite comparisons to Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill, and Allen-Miller pays homage by casting Colin Firth as a burrito seller at a street food stall called Love, Guactually.
How Berkeley Homes’s scheme evolves may dictate whether Peckham follows the same path as Notting Hill. Watson, an architect, said the plans were “visually grotesque” but he was also concerned about the “indirect consequences – gentrification, which up to a point is a good thing but beyond that point becomes displacement, a bad thing. It will also have an impact on retail which is very, very precarious in Peckham.”
Allchin said the area’s communities wanted to have a proper discussion about the trade-offs – skyscraping tower blocks might allow for more green space, while smaller buildings would be more in keeping with the Peckham skyline. Instead the consultations have been about peripheral issues such as what kind of children’s play area people would like, he said.
“It’s as if they’re surprised that people don’t like it. Because they haven’t really talked to anybody about what they actually want. [Instead] they’re treating the public like children.”
Berkeley Homes made no comment to the Observer, although it told the Architects’ Journal that it had prepared a new design brief “including a series of objectives informed by the priorities and concerns shared during consultation so far”.
Allchin said the campaigners’ initial reaction to the revised brief was that little had changed.
“We want this development to make Peckham better for the people who live here and for newcomers,” he said. “The community needs to be involved in deciding what’s done with the site. What people don’t want is this sort of gentrified citadel being plonked into it.”
