Brixton Village: One Creative Community

The queue outside the burger joint slinks round the block. A 20-something girl in a checked shirt is lighting tea lights on the mismatched Formica tables outside her cafe. Round the corner, a teenager is demonstrating how to ice cupcakes, while a band set up their double basses outside a nearby bar. Welcome to Brixton Village. It’s 6.30pm on a Thursday night and the place is already jumping.

The name may sound like the product of an estate agent’s wishful imagination, but Brixton Village is very real. This 1930s indoor market is home to 20+ new restaurants, cafes, boutiques and other start-ups, and it’s all happened within the last few years.
Back in early 2009, Granville Arcade, as the covered market was then known, was in a sorry state. The covered market’s arcades were almost empty, save for a few hardy Afro-Caribbean greengrocers and market traders. The neighbouring Market Row was home to successful restaurants like cult pizza parlour Franco Manca and Rosie’s Deli Cafe, but Granville Arcade was a no-go area for all but the hardiest Brixtonites.

But that same year, Granville Arcade’s fortunes began to change. Then owners, London and Associated Properties, enlisted urban regeneration agency Spacemakers to resuscitate the market. Spacemakers transformed the market with the help of enterprising locals. They offered three-months rent free to creative projects and local start-ups hoping to turn their small plots into something more permanent. There were pop-up cafes and art exhibitions, weekly creative events and live music.

Soon the decrepit Granville Arcade was reborn as Brixton Village, and 20 empty shops were filled with business like Brixton Cornercopia, an ‘ultra-local’ restaurant and grocery which stocks Brockwell Park honey and ‘Brixton Pound sauce,’ made with ingredients from Brixton market. Lab G, which serves up the best salted caramel gelato this side of Milan. And Brick Box, a cafe and bar which puts on exhibitions and screenings as well as making a mean Nutella crepe. The Observer critic Jay Rayner describes Brixton Village as “most exciting, radical venture on the British restaurant scene right now.” He’s not wrong.

In fact, it was Rayner’s review of Kaosarn, in May 2011, which helped bring Brixton Village to national attention. Praising the family-run Thai restaurant, Rayner ended his review saying “on a Friday evening there were free tables before 9pm. It won’t be like that for long.” Six months on, there’s rarely a free table after 7pm. Arrive at the market much later and you’ll be queuing out into the street for a shot at Kaosarn’s punchy hot and green sour papaya salad and massaman lamb curry.

Kaosarn is just one of a dozen Brixton Village spots where the quality of the cooking justifies the hype. There’s Honest Burgers, the aforementioned burger joint, where burger obsessives from across the capital chow down on juicy 35-day-aged beef from The Ginger Pig, stuffed into golden brioche buns. Mama Lan’s, a 3-table restaurant serving Chinese ‘pot-stickers,’ dumplings filled with rich pork or beef (or tofu, if you’re that way inclined), fried till their bottoms stick to the pan. French and Grace, where local food bloggers Rosie French and Ellie Grace dish up warm chilli, squash and chick pea salads, flatbreads crammed with lamb merguez sausages and rosemary hummus, and ‘hearty bowls of seasonal stew’ for around £8.

Wander the market’s covered avenues and you’ll find more: Etta’s Seafood, Relay Tearoom, not one but two Columbian restaurants, a Japanese pancake place, a gluten-free bakery, an Italian restaurant which offers cooking classes in its tiny premises, and Federation Coffee, which serves one of London’s best flat whites. There’s enough space for everyone to play: the die-hard greengrocers and fishmongers from Granville Arcade are still here and a few shop fronts lie empty yet (though traders talk of a long waiting list for premises).

So far the relatively low overheads and start-up costs have kept prices down; the community and punters happy. But all is not entirely rosy in the village. The market was recently sold to In Shops Ltd, a landlord which specialises in shopping centres. Traders are reporting steep rent hikes, with some inevitably having to cover costs by raising prices. Spacemakers’ commission finished in 2010, and the agency is currently working on a similar project in nearby West Norwood. No-one knows what will happen to the market in the long-term, but the community spirit among traders and the support for Brixton Village from locals means it won’t turn into Chainsville without a fight. Go now anyway, before the queues at Kaosarn and Honest Burgers get so long, they cross the border into Clapham.

brixtonmarket.net

spacemakers.org.uk