Yes — it’s always a question of who’s doing the forgetting or the remembering. I don’t think I knew that space behind the Tate Modern, but it doesn’t sound like it was forgotten by the students who played football there, or others like yourself who valued its quietness.

The Mapping Forgotten Spaces project came out of a conversation with the RIBA’s London team about their Forgotten Spaces competition. We wanted to work with the organisers of the competition, while introducing some broader space for reflection and participation, opening up these questions of who is involved in the forgetting or remembering of spaces like this.

We did this through a series of workshops with people who were considering entering the competition. These focused on the possibilities of small interventions rather than bulldoze-and-build, and on starting from the histories, memories and current uses of spaces which might (at first glance) appear “forgotten”.

It felt like this was reflected in quite a few of the shortlisted entries. I wouldn’t claim that was all down to our influence — I think it reflects a mood among quite a few younger architects and architecture students, itself driven by the economic realities of the last two years. When economic growth slows, it leaves more room for smaller, quieter, more specific kinds of growing.

Almost a year after that competition, with The Shard rising on the London skyline, it could feel like that pause is over — yet there’s a precariousness to this recovery, a sense that people are not convinced. The conversations we’re having suggest that there’s long-term interest in ways of remembering and regenerating space which are not based on big, capital-intensive building projects, but on reuse and rediscovery of the overlooked and undervalued potential of a place and the people already connected to it.

The Mapping Forgotten Spaces site has been an experiment — a first step, maybe, towards a tool which might help with this kind of reuse and rediscovery. But it also raises the question of whether mapping things is always a good idea. Is it always appropriate for information to be open and public, or are there times and places where a certain obscurity is a good thing? I think that’s a real question that we’re starting to hit in all kinds of areas in the age of networked technologies.

I’m looking to find a space where I can run art workshops.
I’m based in Herne Hill and would like to find a space locally and develop ccreative workshops for the community.
Please send me any relevant info or ideas.

Thanks in advance,
Kind regards,

Linda Skoglund

For example: “will you, in total and over a sustained period, help more business than you hinder in the wider Brixton Market?” That seems like a much better measure of success to me rather than focusing on a series of units in isolation.

You are correct to say that there have been empty units there for some years, but apparently had as much todo with owners deliberately running the market down in anticipation of redevelopment and general uncertainty about the future of the market.

This is the first time I can remember that there have even been for-rent-signs up, so it might be that these units would have just filled up more naturally without Spacemekers once the listing of the market had occurred and LAP had to start looking for tenants again.

On Rachel’s comment — yes we need a mix of old and new shops, but Spacemakers/LAP are also endangering some of the newer shops outside of Granville (see Rosies and Healthy Eaters for example, people who have put years of work into Brixton Market at risk of loosing their businesses though a chain of events that Spacemakers helped trigger).

Some other questions that I would urge you to consider with some urgency:

What kind of market are you creating and who should/should have had a say in that? To date the choices have been the reserve of Spacemakers/LAP with little input from traders, residents and the wider community. I live right in the heart of the market and feel alienated by the whole thing. Others feel the same.

Have you strengthened or weakened the market as a whole? After the campaign to list the markets last year the traders were in a very strong bargaining position with both LAP and the council, I’m not sure that is the case any longer.

What is the cultural impact of what you have done? The markets were listed because of their importance to British Afro-Caribbean culture. I think it’s probably fair to characterise a lot of the Spacemakers projects as “white-middle-class-foodie weekends & evening use” — that is great as part of a wider mix, but if it started to dominate at the expense of everything else (as it appears LAP want it to) then we loose the thing that was deemed most important in the first place. Would you really be happy to think you had helped trigger that?

Why has Spacemekers/LAP acted as though Brixton Market was a land barren of existing organisations and campaigns? That Friends of Brixton market feel they have to appeal to you publicly to speak out against the rent-rises should really be ringing some alarm bells for you. Where is the input from ABC Brixton, FBM, Market Traders Federation etc in all of this?

You failed to engage initially, which is understandable — sometimes you just need to get on with things to get stuff done — but that you and continue to work in isolation this late on in the project is odd. If you do this kind of thing again you really need to reach out further than twitter to stay credible.

Your priorities are looking increasingly aligned more with LAP than with the wider community (please can you publish details of your relationship with LAP and how much they are paying you) something you can now only answer by coming out against the rent-rises.

As a minimum you should use OpenStreetMap as a base map (e.g. look at these instructions http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Maps_Example ) It’s better than google. More detail and more community ownership. For that matter it sounds you’d be interested in getting involved in editing the map too.

We put some event details on the OpenStreetMap site: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Spacemakers_Brixton_mini_mapping_party