Shafait Rana, 37, has owned the stall that sells fruit and vegetables at the mouth of Peckham Rye railway station since his mid-20s. From his stand you can see shoppers move down Rye Lane, the area’s busiest commercial street. Hoards of fresh arrivals pour out the station, heading to the area pegged by the Evening Standard as “London’s newest hotspot”, centred on the bars and galleries in the railway arches at the station’s rear. Trade now is better than ever, he says.

There is £25m on the line to re-build the station site where Rana works: to turn a collection of arches – housing market stalls, small restaurants, builders’ yards and barbers – and a gloomy shopping arcade into a new “gateway” to Peckham and public square for the community.

And now the council is looking to the secret expertise of locals to tell them how to do it.

“Co-design” aims to reveal the community’s invaluable stock of daily knowledge and insight into their surroundings, explains Katerina Alexiou, a lecturer in design at the Open University. “Local people have knowledge which often experts don’t have,” says Alexiou. “They are experts in knowing how their area works, what it needs, how it needs to be developed.”

Shafait Rana, 37, has owned a stall in front of Peckham Rye railway station for more than a decade. He says no one consulted him about previous plans that would have seen him evicted. Photograph: Sophie Davidson Photograph: Sophie Davidson/Matt Ponsford

By tapping into locals’ visions of the place they where they live – and forming ideas into structured plans in conversation with architects and planning experts – Alexiou says co-design can offer a more inclusive debate about regeneration.



In a series of participatory workshops, members of the community will be tasked with succeeding where regular consultation failed. That process – described as “token” and “superficial” in feedback from locals – resulted in plans revealed in January for a seven-storey-high commercial and apartment development, which local campaigners accused of “bleaching” Peckham’s longstanding communities from the site. Rana says no one discussed plans with him during the consultation, despite them calling for the demolition of his stall.

For a community at the centre of the debate about urban gentrification, the outcome of the process will be a key indicator of where the future lies. There’s currently no “blueprint” for how co-design workshops should run, says Alexiou. It will be in the hands of the council and hired community engagement specialists to ensure the process is inclusive.

The approach has been tested in hospitals, where breast and lung cancer patients worked with staff to improve their surroundings and care. But Southwark’s decision marks the first time a planning authority has given free rein to co-design at the concept stage to generate the outline for a project of this scale. No idea will be disregarded they say – for now.

The ‘Co-imagine’ exhibition invited visitors and local people to give their vision for the Peckham Rye site. Photograph: Sophie Davidson Photograph: Sophie Davidson/Matt Ponsford

Workshops are yet to start but ideas have already begun arriving. Local architect and campaigner Benedict O’Looney has produced 3D renderings shedding light on the ornate Victorian renaissance frontage of the station – currently concealed by a poorly maintained 1930s arcade – and plans for an open public market square to take the arcade’s place.

Artist Shaun McDowell has sketched a rival take, that would breathe life into the arcade and celebrate the inventive use of space that can already been seen around the site – opening up vacant and chain store-occupied lots to create a Brixton Village-style complex with room for commercial art galleries to move in.

These two ideas, and more, were featured in ‘Co-imagine’, an exhibition curated by Katy Hawkins, an urban researcher from north Peckham. Most ideas presented were less developed: pencil-and-watercolour sketches highlighted hidden art-deco detail inside the existing arcade. Texts talked about encouraging new arrivals at the station to explore the area’s history. And there were postcards: 200 of which Katy handed out to all the business proprietors on the site, plus rail station users and visitors to the exhibition, to build a collage of responses to the regeneration scheme.

Hawkins says her intention was to allow submissions to communicate subjective emotional connections to the area. The assortment of media had a purpose: to provide an easy way for anyone to say how they wanted the site to develop, free from the planning jargon and complex processes that usually exclude many from such a debate.

Architect Benedict O’Looney envisions an open public square edged with adaptable small business premises and a restored Victorian station frontage. 3D rendering: Benedict O’Looney Photograph: 3D rendering: Benedict O’Looney/Matt Ponsford

“The thing that was important to me was the conversation that followed the event,” she says. “To get people talking, so that – before these co-design workshops – people had had a chance to have this conversation before it gets shut down and decisions get made.”

Community consortium Peckham Vision are now working with volunteers to build a 1:100 scale cardboard model of the Rye Lane site that allows anyone to manipulate and adapt the space, and see how changes could affect the area.

If co-design needs a proving ground to show it can be a viable way to design cities, campaigners look set to ensure the debate in Peckham will not lack creative input. But one postcard left at the exhibition summed up concerns: “Interesting exhibition. But I wonder if the approach will only appeal to a narrow portion of the community.”

Despite Hawkins’ best efforts to advertise the show widely, a glance around the room could tell you who the “narrow portion of the community” referred to. The suggestion that co-design could allow the area’s new “creative classes” – typically white, middle class, in their 20s and 30s – to likewise dominate the audience during workshops would be fatal to the councils stated intention for a “community-wide discussion”.

In a long list of barbed questions, local campaigners Southwark Notes accuse the council of being “compliant” with the desires of the new creatives, and the mere mention of Brixton Village will be an early red flag, when most are keen to avoid the widespread gentrification seen in that “cultural hub”.

Eileen Conn from the community consortium Peckham Vision, which has built a 1:100 scale cardboard model of the Rye Lane site that allows locals to see how changes will affect the area. Photograph: Sophie Davidson Photograph: Sophie Davidson/Matt Ponsford

New cabinet member for regeneration, planning and transport, councillor Mark Williams, says the council will be “proactively engaging with local residents, businesses and creative groups to ensure we give equal voice to everyone concerned”. A council spokesperson has also admitted, after the previous failed proposal, the need to start to rebuild trust with the local community and move the forward with a greater degree of consensus.

Rye Lane remains “an intensely multi-ethnic street” – in the words of Ordinary Streets, an LSE study of the area. In a kilometre stretch across the front of the station, you can count 21 distinct countries of origin among the business proprietors. Economical diversity is palpable, too: Peckham is classed among the 10% most deprived areas in the UK, but a walk from Rye Lane to the rear of the station site – to “the delis of the feted Bellenden Road” – reveals a community far apart from that.

“One of the things that locals are very concerned about is that in Peckham you’ve got a very diverse yet strangely coherent community,” says Mark Saunders, who is currently making a film “Bleacher on the Rye” detailing the community’s response to the Gateway regeneration scheme.

Saunders says he hopes landowners Network Rail “will find other, less problematic arches and spaces to develop”. Rana’s vision for his stall and the site around it is straightforward, too: “If it’s bustling, I don’t want to move from here,” he says.

Doing nothing shows an understandable appreciation for how easily social cohesion can be strained by large-scale developments. This summer, the challenge for co-design will be to show that regeneration and gentrification are not the same thing, and that a community as diverse as this can design a development which enriches – rather than divides – existing communities.

• Why I’m flying a balloon over London this summer