A new music venue for Lewisham designed and built, danced in, performed in, run, and owned by YOU,” read bold billboards in Deptford, near Goldsmiths, and up around Forest Hill. The show illustrated people with various skin shades of red, white and blue — some playing instruments or dancing, others in wheelchairs, all happy and belonging.
The venue will be the latest home for Lewisham music co-operative Sister Midnight, which aims to prove people can take control of their neighbourhoods together. The borough saw the highest jump in London rent between 2022 and 2023, and the quickest and steepest rise in house prices in the last decade — a staggering 74.78 per cent.
As developers reshape it, erecting bolshy gleaming towers creating a Manhattan south of the capital, pubs face being knocked down (or have already been) and business owners struggle to keep up with costs. Finding and maintaining a vibrant creative community in the area is tough. But Sister Midnight now has 1,000 members and raised over £350,000 through community investment (including £10,000 from the Beggars Group music label which owns XL Recordings and Rough Trade). “We could never have done this if we hadn’t set ourselves up as a cooperative,” says founder Lenny Watson.
It started when the record shop Watson was volunteering at in Deptford was due to turn into a cheese and wine shop: “I just thought, ‘f*** that. That sounds like the last thing we need more of. We need music venues.’ So I decided to take on the lease to the space and keep it running.” She refused to capitulate to the difficulties faced by venue owners in hospitality and events shuttered by the pandemic. Watson and the Sister Midnight team — primarily DJ Sophie Farrell and Goat Girl’s frontwoman Lottie Pendlebury (all are under 30) — are now set to take over a dilapidated working men’s club in Catford after reimagining the business as a Community Benefit Society. Watson believes a cooperative model makes them “more sustainable, bigger and better”.
It’s part of a new crop of nearby ventures trying to stake their claim to public spaces by harnessing the power of collectivism. A radical live performance space under railway arches in Deptford called Matchstick Pie House is fighting closure via a new cooperative arm called Friends of the Pie House led by Sisters Uncut campaigner Liv Wynter. Rising Sun, a former pub-turned-artist residence with an on-site recording studio and space in the basement for creating and exhibiting visual arts, has gathered impressive momentum. SET in Peckham hosted a recent workshop on how to build a cooperative. There’s a growing grassroots movement in the area.
This rising south-east London trend reveals a larger shift around the UK. There’s been a 62.6 per cent rise in community-owned pubs over the past five years. Some 130,000 people pooled together £210 million to create and save 540 community businesses and organisations using community shares. Whether your contribution is primarily capital or time, everyone has decision-making power as a shareholder.
Chris Cowcher, head of policy and communication at the Plunkett Foundation, says the organisation helped Sister Midnight and others get set up, supporting them with marketing, planning public meetings and consultations, and pointing them towards other foundations and societies that may assist. Though he says community shares are growing out of “market failure, business closures and assets becoming redundant”, its success is in its social togertheness.
For example, The Star of Greenwich — an unassuming boozer tucked in a residential backstreet near the naval college — has been reborn with a mission statement to improve community cohesion, to remain affordable, to skill up and accommodate those who may not feel looked after in central London. “There’s a growing concern and residents are saying ‘Actually hang on, this means something more to us than just the bricks and mortar’,” says Cowcher.
Matchstick Pie House’s champions feel the city is becoming inhospitable to marginalised voices. The feminist activist Wynter, who once made headlines by quitting her Tate artist-in-residence post to protest how the institution fails women, says finding open-minded spaces for complex needs was impossible before Matchstick Pie House. “A lot of venues are very reluctant to program outwardly political stuff or have attendees who may be homeless, have severe mental health issues, or need wheelchair access,” she says. “I love that we welcomed people in crisis somewhere they’re not just tolerated. I want it to feel like everyone wants you here, this is for you.” Sister Midnight’s founder is helping Wynter with the project. “We're very close and I'm hopeful in the next six weeks we might have a signature on a dotted line somewhere,” they add.
While such endeavours might feel like a herculean task given Britain’s property crisis and economy, the chief executive of Co-operatives UK, Rose Marley, is buoyant. “There’s been a strategic move to crush collectivism but we’re at the coalface seeing change,” she says. The organisation recently produced a report that found the democratic economy (businesses owned and controlled by their members) is worth £87 billion to the UK. “Amazingly that money is staying usually within a 10-mile radius of where it was generated,” explains Marley. She says Labour has been communicating with them to devise a strategy to double the size of the cooperative movement and mutuals which is likely to appear in their manifesto. “Why wouldn’t this be at the heart of your economic strategy?” she says.
Just a short walk from Catford Bridge train station, steel gates guard Sister Midnight’s new home for the next 10 years. The boarded-up pebble dash relic — with large rooms and a darkened dancefloor littered with old furniture, bric-a-brac, and the remnants of old patterned carpet — is yet to be brought to life. This disused working men’s club will become a 300-person capacity venue, community lab, bar, workspace, kitchen and studio. Right now the space requires you to use your imagination but it is still the quickest option to open new doors for the co-op.
Sister Midnight had previously bid to buy the Ravensbourne Arms in Lewisham and had organised a campaign to raise funds to do so. The owner had applied for planning permission to convert the building into four flats, but earlier this month Lewisham planning officials turned that down. Meanwhile, the council promised a decade of free rent to Sister Midnight in return for the resurrection of the old Brookdale Club in Catford. “If we do this it sets a precedent that people can take back their crumbling high streets,” explains Farrell.
Buying is a challenge as communities only have a right to bid for property and can therefore lose out to luxury flat developers. The Plunket Foundation is campaigning for Community Right to Buy to give locals first refusal on a property they’ve got the capital to claim and keep open to the public.
Despite making headlines, and then raising £1.2 million, challenges remain for the artists at the Rising Sun. Tom, who owned the recently-closed Rye Wax space in Peckham and is now one of the residents, says for a number of reasons they had needed to hunt for another location, which kick-started their fundraising and press attention. They had donations from long-established housing co-ops who now own their properties and reinvest money into similar projects, loans from ethical mortgage lenders and even dinners where they’d invite potential investors who used to squat in their youth.
Their co-op is governed by the consensus of the people living in the building. “Investors do not get a say. The money kindly coming from other people is a loan, so those along with mortgage are paid back over time using monthly rent payments from co-operative members,” explains resident, performer and designer Chloe Curry.
Luckily, most benefactors have supported their aspirations regardless of location. “They’re helping put a load of people up who wouldn’t be able to pursue art otherwise, people who can’t afford studio fees,” adds Tom.
The hands-on democratic approach to co-operatives and mutuals means each member is informed enough to skillfully weather the tough economic climate rather than a few at the top of a pyramid. This means they’re more than twice as likely to survive for five years than other new start-ups. You only have to look at the longer established co-operatives in the area to see what may be in store for the new influx.
Ceramics Studio Co-op was established in 2014 to support ceramicists in the face of rising studio costs and workspace scarcity. Tatiana Baskakova who set the studio up with her sister Anna, says, “Being a co-op has allowed us to create jobs where we are treated with dignity and respect, and afforded us to create a maker’s community that thrives with talent and contributes to culture in ways we couldn’t have imagined before.” Meanwhile, the Ivy House in Nunhead, just slightly across the border into the next borough, closed in 2012 but thanks to the Localism Act which allows neighbours the right to bid on important institutions and buildings in their area, and its Grade II listed status, it reopened as London’s first community-owned pub.
There’s also the Field, a short, white, easy-to-miss community centre and garden on Queen’s Road. Opening its doors to the public in November 2014 with a five-year rent-free deal in exchange for their renovation efforts, the former squat has become a community resource hosting mending workshops, food growing projects, “pay what you can” meals, mutual aid drives to give back to the local area, and nights of live music to raise money for Gaza.
People are more likely to be independently productive, engaged and knowledgeable about the running of a business if they’re directly benefiting financially, socially or vocationally. These businesses resist the feeling of their surroundings slipping through their fingers, communities fracturing with no hubs to get to know each other and work together, and what many of these collectives see as an isolating hyper-individualist culture.
“I don’t want to call it the start of a movement, because that feels a bit too grandiose,” Watson says. “But there’s a real sense of renewed urgency for us to have institutions and businesses and community groups around us that represent and reflect who our community are and what they believe in. I think these models are best placed to do that.”
Starting a co-operative - by Tatiana and Anna Baskakova from the Ceramics Studio Co-op
1. Starting a co-op is like starting any other business, but having a clear set of values and principles that guide you, and help you make decisions.
2. Strap in for a long flight, be ready to learn, and reach out for help when you need it.
3. The best thing about starting a co-op is doing business as a team, and having a good team is fundamental. It means there is always someone next to you to bounce ideas off, and never being alone with the problem.
4. Running a democratically governed and owned organisation can be challenging on the level of the relationships, but in the long run it is the best challenge one can take on. The benefits to workers and the community are innumerable, even on the level of just keeping the wealth we generate in the community.
