Popes Road / Brixton Station Road - Meanwhile Space, SW9
AN OASIS OF GROWTH - IN THE HEART OF BRIXTON
Presenting Grow:Brixton
We are delighted to have been selected by Lambeth Council in consultation with the local community and traders, to transform the 4000 square meters meanwhile site on Popes Road / Brixton Station Road SW9. Grow:Brixton will be an oasis of multi faceted growth right in the
heart of Brixton. It will transform the location providing a platform to grow knowledge, community, culture and food. Working alongside local businesses, residents and organisations, the site will bloom, turning an empty space full of potential into a vibrant hub to learn, work, play and flourish. Grow:Brixton, in conjunction with our partner organizations, will provide the opportunity to acquire skills in building, horticulture, arts or music. Our focus is to use food growing as a tool to connect people with each other, where their food comes from. We all eat! Lambeth has a strong heritage of food growing. This is very much alive today with Incredible Edible Lambeth championing the many food growers in the borough and its relevance is highlighted by the Lambeth Food Partnership being awarded the status of Flagship Food Borough by the GLA. Grow:Brixton provides an ideal opportunity to promote the growing of food to a much wider audience, reaching out to the unconverted and fusing it with the diverse and unique culture of Brixton and surrounding areas. Alongside horticulture, we will provide space for small businesses, the arts, design, and performance. Our scheme draws inspiration from public spaces and community schemes across Europe. Shipping Containers have been used for many different applications, as they are cheap, versatile, easily up-cycled and can quickly be implemented to create enclosures and define spaces. At Grow:Brixton containers will be used to not only enclose the site, but also to create spaces for small businesses to rent as retail outlets, workshops and studio space and even a handful of live/work spaces. A combination of 20ft and 40ft containers will create a variety of rentable space. grow:knowledge
The site itself will be made up of an evolving modular system of customised shipping containers centering around a large indoor growing space, which will act as a central hub, housing a café and public meeting place. There will be a strong emphasis on a sustainable approach to the whole site, by setting examples on recycling, rainwater capture etc. Each container will be fabricated in situ, working with trainees supported by organisations such as Lambeth College, to transform the units into rentable studios, shops and workshops. grow:food
The kitchen is a vital part of any home and should ideally be at the heart of family life – centering around the eating area, we plan to emulate this by creating a home from home café space right in the middle of the food growing area. grow:growth
Utilising food growing, we can create a ‘plant to plate’ grow scheme. The site will be verdant small scale resource for horticulture. Working with Streetscapes to deliver this element, there will be scope for accredited training programmes for interested parties to get into the industry or simply to learn growing skills to take home. grow:culture
Our ambition is to provide space for makers-in-residence, studio space for artists, musicians, photographers, fashion designers and more, selecting those that either live in Lambeth or will bring extra benefit to the borough. An Event Space will present film, the arts and music performances and can be hired out for private functions. grow:enterprise
We will provide a variety of spaces for rental, some of which will cater towards startup or small businesses to help them to flourish in this central Brixton location. There will be a variety of live/work spaces, workshops, studio’s, retail and performance spaces up for rent. To express your interest go to www.growbrixton.co.uk
grow:forward
grow:brixton could just be the start – by setting a precedent with it, we can roll out the model to future locations, creating a network of grow: # # # sites across the borough and beyond, that act as resourceful urban village greens, a place for people to meet, learn, work and play. We will build a knowledge base that we can take forward and be shared with future apprentices building new sites. The infrastructure itself will be very low impact insitu, being built of modular components that can be reconfigured, moved and re-set up at a new location or be split up to work on a number of sites and thus having a bigger impact.
