NEW FACES MEET UP IN BRIXTON VILLAGE

I remember going to Brixton Village way before it has become the cool place it is today. Katrina is one of my good friends from the MA Innovation Management course I took and she was working with Space Makers then to rejuvenate the market.

Brixton Village — also known as Granville Arcade — is a 1930s indoor market in South London. By mid-​2009, a large number of its shops were standing empty. 

With funding from the market’s owners and the support of hundreds of local people and organisations, Space Makers filled those empty shops with new community-​driven businesses, creative projects and a rolling festival of weekend and late night events.  

At the end of October 2010, Space Makers moved on from Brixton Village. After a year of pop-​up theatres and galleries, temporary shops and trial-​run cafes, all the shops were now let to long-​term tenants — many of whom arrived through our original competition.

The other night, I met up with one of my university friends from Singapore, Shermeen, and we had dinner with two of her friends at Brixton Village, one of whom is a singer - Sharliza. It was fascinating to see how the market has transformed into this trendy destination. It is a weird feeling encountering change at that any one point in time as your body is trying to decipher the triggers that help it sense what exactly has changed.