making high streets work
West Norwood & Tulse Hill, London
Type | Vision and Strategy
Client | London Borough of Lambeth and Station to Station BID
Collaboration | PRD
Publication | Vision and Strategy for West Norwood and Tulse Hill
In 2021 A Small Studio was commissioned by the London Borough of Lambeth and Station to Station BID to develop a Vision and Strategy for West Norwood and Tulse Hill, focusing on how underutilised spaces across the area could be activated for use as workspace, supporting enterprise and the local creative community. This vision was the outcome of a robust evidence base including extensive socioeconomic profiling of the area, as well as engagement of key partners and identification of opportunities to act. The emphasis of A Small Studio’s approach was to deliver a useful and usable output to inform subsequent phases of work. It supported Station to Station BID to secure £130,000 of GLA funding to create affordable workspace and this current commission directly builds on this work.
Click below to read the different outputs of this project:
At first glance, West Norwood & Tulse Hill has much of what a ‘15 minute neighbourhood’ needs; good local amenities (library, cinema, leisure centre, theatre), a traditional high street with a mix of independent retailers, chains and healthcare services, and an adjacent industrial estate and Workspace-run Parkhall business centre which both provide a combination of light industrial and office space.
However, the single aspect that is missing is a good supply of flexible and affordable workspace which, if realised, could bring hundreds more workers into the area. This would provide a positive uplift to the local economy by increasing high street footfall levels and demand for a wider evening economy, which in turn would lead to a more vibrant, compelling and sustainable town centre.
While there is plenty of retail space, there is a chronic shortage of both flexible workspace for those wanting to work closer to home and the ‘dirty, smelly, noisy’ light industrial premises required by craftspeople, food & drink manufacturers and mechanics. These types of businesses were typically found on West Norwood’s Key Industrial Business Area Norwood Works, or in the Parkhall business centre, but as landlord models gradually focus on the relatively more profitable per square foot ‘office’ type businesses, these sectors are finding themselves priced out. Light industrial work space is also being lost locally to speculative developers, with the sale recently of both Bainbridge Studios and ACME’s Carlew House which between them housed 35 artists and creatives (despite their being waiting lists of several hundred artists for each studio space).
The challenge for us is to provide the right offer for this strong and growing demand across London and enable them to locate within Tulse Hill and West Norwood.
We have the space; our high streets and the Norwood Works industrial estate are home to both long-term vacant and underused stock due to lack of landlord funds (further depleted in the pandemic), lack of landlord/owner ambition or interest, or increasingly, because landowners are holding out for the more lucrative prospect of a change to residential (whether policy compliant or not).
The demand is also there; Parkhall business centre is almost full to capacity and local people are working informally at café and pub tables. However, rent and service charges are pricing many SMEs out of our existing workspace provision and poor internet connections and facilities on the high street affect its ability to provide good-hot desking opportunities.
The High Streets for All Challenge funding received by Station to Station and Lambeth will help to lay out formally the issues and the evidence that anecdotally we already know, and to come up with a workspace policy that encourages and enables landowners and landlords to capitalise on this demand. We commissioned this “Making High Streets Work’ Vision & Strategy policy along with Evidence Base and Engagement Process documents to support its development.
We have a key opportunity here to harness further investment and create a local USP for creative business space. This will be beneficial to those workers and businesses seeking affordable workspace as well as to the wider resident and business community of West Norwood & Tulse Hill.
Charlotte Ashworth, BID Manager, Station to Station