SAVE THE LAST SPACE OF ITS KIND INSIDE THE M25

Aim

A Good Growth campaign for Brixton.

WE’RE FIGHTING TO SAVE ONE OF LONDON’S LAST GRASSROOTS CREATIVE SPACES AND HELP FIX THE SYSTEM THAT PUT IT AT RISK.

SAVE THE LAST SPACE OF ITS KIND INSIDE THE M25

A Good Growth campaign from the joy-makers of the Brixton Arches.

• We’re the Bureau of Silly Ideas — a joy-making, not-for-profit grassroots arts organisation, in the Brixton railway arches since 1992. We hold five today.
• Our landlord, Arch Co (wholly owned by US company Blackstone, $1 trillion+ in assets), proposed a 155% rent increase. We challenged it. The case settled in our favour, on terms BOSI can sustain. However the challenge pushed us to our knees.
• We signed a new 10 year lease then days later, Arch Co served a six-month break notice on all our leases on redevelopment grounds. We have until autumn 2026 to respond.
• We're asking Arch Co — and the wider institutional landlord sector — to choose Good Growth: investment in long-term cultural infrastructure and community value alongside commercial return.
• We need £50,000 to keep BOSI operating to Christmas and to support UK commercial tenants in similar situations.
• Where your money goes: your donation funds  BOSI to get off its knees and return to the negotiating table -  only possible if BOSI is still standing.

Who we are, and who we’re talking to:

Us (small): Bureau of Silly Ideas. Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. Joy-makers, public art and outdoor theatre. Brixton, since 1992.

Our landlord (large): Arch Co. Around 5,400 UK railway arches. Wholly owned by US company Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager.

The choice on the table: Two commercial strategies are available to the landlord on this estate. One extracts value quickly through standardisation and turnover. The other invests in long-term occupiers with measurable social return. We’re asking for the second one; and asking that the first not be defaulted into by accident.

These two strategies are known as bad growth or good growth.

We are campaigning for good growth: for most of the time Bureau of Silly Ideas has been at Valentia Place, our landlord has been a person. Someone you could phone. Someone whose word was a bond.

That relationship was practical. We cleared out fly-tipping and scared the junkies away from the arches, in exchange for the use of space that would otherwise sit empty. The kind of arrangement that, given time, becomes a formalised agreement. “Can I park a pedal-powered pineapple in there for a bit?” “Of course you can, I know some of the kids that made it.” 

That has changed. The single point of contact became several, then a rotating cast. Alongside that, a variety of tactics — procedural, legal, commercial — has been applied with what looks, from the inside, like a consistent aim: to increase the value of the estate. Word is no longer bond, because there is no longer a single person whose word it could be.

Why we (and other small businesses) need your help

We disagreed with our landlord Arch Co over a proposed 155% rent increase, and we held our ground. Funding the legal process was its own battle for an organisation our size — but at the point of going before a judge, Arch Co chose not to proceed.

It nearly broke us. Money that should have gone on making shows went on fighting the case and legal fees; that’s why many tenants in our position just concede.

Days after the rent matter settled, Arch Co served break notices on our leases on redevelopment grounds. We are negotiating with Arch Co (and you can read all the legal details below in The Story So Far section).

But we’re not alone. We’re part of Brixton’s thriving ecosystem of small, local businesses living under arches, many of them rooted in migrant and Black-led communities,  wiping out decades of history if they go too.

Things like this are happening all over the country, thanks to monopoly landlords insisting tenants sign away their rights. This is lawful, but we need change so small businesses can thrive.

What your £50,000 enables

Your contribution funds BOSI. It does not subsidise the landlord, the estate or the development itself. Investment in the arches is a separate, downstream conversation — one we hope to enter into with Arch Co and other partners if a Good Growth direction is agreed. None of that is possible if BOSI doesn’t make it that far.

Target: £50,000 to get us to Christmas.

Every contribution moves us up the ladder.

£10,000 — Stage 1: BOSI keeps operating

A month of organisational capacity while we contest the break notice and stay in the room.

£20,000 — Stage 2: The public-facing work continues

Free events, outdoor theatre, the civic weirdness Brixton turns up for — running while the planning process plays out.

£30,000 — Stage 3: A dedicated voice for the wider movement

A campaigner in post, connecting commercial tenants, cultural organisations and small businesses across the country.

£50,000 — Target: Through to Christmas, with capacity to spare

People paid. Programme running. Campaign infrastructure in place. Ready for whatever the next phase asks.

Every contribution counts:

• £5 keeps the kettle on.
• £75 covers an afternoon of rehearsal.
• £200 covers a freelancer for a day.

This crowdfunder isn’t a rescue. It’s the down-payment on a discussion we believe ought to happen.

It will seed:

1. Lambeth Outdoor Arts Foundation (LOAF), expanding what we already do to reach more of our community, offering practical skills, career pathways, and joy to our neighbours.

2. Support other tenants through a national campaign, led by The Association for Social Tenure, a soon to go public start up that addresses these issues, and whose members have been advising the Law Commission on the effect of the current practice.

We’ve won our first battle, and want to stick around to help others do the same.

On paper, this is exactly what Arch Co’s owner, Blackstone, says they want to do: create good growth that works for everyone.

Other ways to help — free, but powerful

Support doesn’t have to cost anything except a bit of effort.

• Share this page. A forwarded link finds the next tenant who thought they were on their own.
• Add your voice here. If something similar has happened to you or to someone you know, share the experience. We’re building a shared record to explore group action, share legal resources, and make the case for fair tenancy as a collective.
• Talk about it. A re-post, a word at the pub, a heads-up to a sympathetic ear — all of it helps.

_____________________________________________

The story so far

Spring 2026

We secured a 10-year lease at a sustainable rent — the first of our leases to come up for review, covering three of our arches. As far as we know, BOSI was the first Arch Co tenant to bring a rent dispute of this kind to court. Both sides presented their case. The landlord’s proposed 155% increase (£11k → £28k) was not upheld, and the matter resolved on different terms.

The process nearly broke us. Money we’d budgeted for freelance artists and producers to make our work went on lawyers and court costs instead. In situations like ours, the cost of enforcing your legal rights can intimidate tenants into different decisions — many concede before they reach a courtroom, not because the law isn’t on their side, but because the cost of getting there is intimidating.

Arch Co offered us an alternative arch in another neighbourhood. It was too small and too low for our work, in the wrong location, and not licensed for what we do. The rent began low but was set to rise to a figure significantly above what we pay now, and above the new lease they had just issued and signed. Setting the unit aside, the timing alone made it unworkable: a commercial relocation on this scale can be turned around quickly when an organisation has the resources and reason to move at pace, but a small arts organisation cannot match that speed. Rebuilding a licensed, fit-for-purpose space — and moving an audience and a programme with it — takes time we did not have. The arch was not fit for our purpose, and we could not have delivered our work from it.

What happened next

Within days of the rent matter settling, Arch Co served a six-month break notice on all of our leases on redevelopment grounds. We now have until autumn 2026 to respond.

We have a pro bono legal team engaged, and we believe we have substantive grounds. We won’t set out our legal arguments here — those belong with our lawyers, in the right forum, at the right time. Two things, though, are already on the public record:

Arch Co’s own planning application (Lambeth ref. 26/00491/FUL) describes our occupied, leased arches as “derelict.” They are clearly not.

Arch Co previously argued — in submissions to Lambeth Council — that this estate was low-value, in support of removing it from the Creative Enterprise Zone. In the rent matter, the same estate was argued to be high-value. Both positions are on the record.

These are public observations, not legal arguments. The legal case stays with our lawyers.

Why this matters for 1 million UK commercial tenants

We’re not alone. We sit alongside other cultural occupiers and independent traders who have been here for decades — many of them small businesses rooted in Brixton’s migrant and Black-led communities, making a unique space under the railway lines since the 1940s.

There is a wider standardisation strategy across the estate: refurbish and re-let at commercial rates.

That is a legitimate commercial direction. It also destroys, in one decision, the post-war heritage these arches have been building over eight decades. 

It removes the small-trader and cultural ecology that has grown alongside it. BOSI is one tenant in that picture. The picture is much bigger than us.

It’s even bigger than Brixton.

The bigger picture

• There are roughly one million commercial tenancies in the UK.
• Eighty percent (c800,000) are held by institutional investors like Arch Co.
• Arch Co owns nearly every railway arch in England & Wales.
• These leases are routinely contracted out of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 — removing statutory tenant protections as a matter of standard practice, and leaving tenants completely vulnerable.
• Since Arch Co took over the arches, over 50% of protected tenancies have been lost.
• Monopoly landlords now offer 100% of new lettings contracted out of the 1954 Act.

In Derec Hickman of Guardians of the Arches’ words:

You cannot start a business with these statutory rights.

This is lawful. The question is whether the 1954 framework — designed to protect small businesses, and now operating in a market dominated by institutional investors — is still doing what it was originally written to do.

Commercial tenants have no shared voice yet. Most negotiate alone. Part of what this campaign builds is the start of one — a record, a network, and the conditions for collective dialogue with the institutional landlord sector. Not against them. With them, where possible.

The long game: LOAF

LOAF = the Lambeth Outdoor Arts Foundation. Because everyone should be using their loaf around here.

LOAF would secure what BOSI already does — using the sensible side of silly for positive change:

• A community hub with genuine local ownership — life-skills learning and pathways into the creative industries, anchored in the estates us
• Free and low-cost training in outdoor arts and production
• Paid pathways into creative careers for young people who don’t typically see those doors as open
• Positive alternatives to street violence through structured programmes with purpose
• Academic partnerships on cultural value, social-impact research and how to measure the S in ESG
• Tie-ins with the place-making and regeneration sector — where outdoor arts is already a recognised investment area
• Local access to global partners in carnival, circus and street arts
• Shows, outdoor theatre and joy — civic weirdness that turns up uninvited and reminds people Brixton is still Brixton

That’s the kind of long-term occupier that builds asset value differently — through three decades of place identity, not annual rent reviews.

The collaboration we offered — and still hope for

After the rent matter settled, we convened two meetings with Arch Co — chaired by the Greater London Authority (GLA) Culture at Risk team, with Lambeth Council and Arts Council England at the table.

Our offer: Work with us. Make this estate a dedicated centre for celebratory and outdoor arts in London. A planning win. An ESG outcome — Environmental, Social and Governance — with real numbers behind the S. Long-term occupiers with a thirty-year track record of investing in Brixton.

Arch Co’s stated position at the time: £30–35 per square foot, under a lease contracted out of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954.

That’s not a level any cultural organisation can sustain, and the GLA’s Culture at Risk team said so plainly. A senior officer summed up the gap between commercial policy and civic outcome in a line that has stayed with us:

“What you’re telling us is your corporate policy is going to erode the cultural fabric of this city.”

We don’t believe the people inside Arch Co or Blackstone want that as their outcome. They’re professionals working inside a framework that defaults to extraction unless someone actively makes the case for something else. That’s what we’re doing. We’re still at the table.

On “market rate”

When a single landlord sets terms across thousands of units, there is no independent market to benchmark against. The “market” becomes that landlord’s own asking price, which then becomes the comparable cited to justify the next one.

We’re not aware of any cultural tenant currently paying £30–35 per square foot on this estate.

If there isn’t a tenant, there isn’t a rate.

This is a structural feature of dominant-landlord markets — not a criticism of Arch Co specifically. It’s part of what a Good Growth discussion can usefully address.

Why a Good Growth outcome is achievable

Planning policy already points in this direction.

• Our arches sit inside the Brixton Creative Enterprise Zone.
• Under London Plan Policy HC5, planning decisions are required to protect existing cultural venues and creative workspace inside a CEZ.
• The GLA’s CEZ framework is explicit: “no net loss of space.”
• BOSI is named on the Mayor’s website as “figureheads in the UK Outdoor Arts sector, recognised pioneers within the field” — listed as a key beneficiary of the CEZ.
• In March 2026, Lambeth Council publicly committed to strengthening arts-venue protections in the next Local Plan: “planning rules will be used to protect arts venues.”

Planning decisions are always a balancing act. But the policy weight points toward a Good Growth outcome here — not as special treatment for one organisation, but as the framework already in place doing what it was written to do.

Good Growth vs Bad Growth — for the asset managers reading this

This section is part of the public ask. It’s also written for the people at Arch Co, Blackstone and across the wider institutional landlord sector who may end up reading it.

Bad Growth is the default path. Extract value quickly. Standardise units. Push rents to “market.” Optimise for portfolio metrics inside a fund cycle. Headline asset value rises fast — and the local character that originally drew interest to the area gets thinned out. The pattern is visible on high streets across the UK. It’s not malicious. It’s a default nobody actively chose, and that everyone now lives with.

Good Growth improves the asset too — but by investing in long-term, community-rooted occupiers that contribute decades of place identity, footfall, cultural participation and economic resilience. That kind of value compounds. It also makes the S in ESG measurable in a way boards increasingly need.

Arch Co’s own ESG Plan commits to “maximising positive economic and social impact” in the communities around the arches. The challenge:

• E (carbon) can be measured in tonnes.
• G (governance) can be measured in policies and reporting.
• S (social value) has no agreed metric.

Asset managers are required to make data-driven decisions — and they do, rigorously. The question isn’t capacity. It’s which datasets are admitted into the process. Carbon and governance datasets are. Social-impact datasets, mostly, aren’t — not because the data doesn’t exist, but because it hasn’t yet been treated as standard input.

That’s the gap. As a National Portfolio Organisation, measuring social impact is BOSI’s daily work. The GLA and Lambeth hold the borough-level datasets that map onto Arch Co’s portfolio. The pieces are already on the table. What’s needed is the will, and the partners, to put them together.

Practically, we think this makes sense. Rather than a slow, costly process to argue away the cultural and affordable-workspace protections on these arches, Good Growth offers an easier, more durable solution that works with the framework and the area to raise the real value. Lower-effort, but higher quality.

An open invitation, in plain terms. If you work in asset management and the case here interests you, we would welcome a conversation. The opportunity on this site is a measurable, repeatable model for Good Growth that doesn’t require giving anything up. It requires choosing a different starting point.

Who we are

The Bureau of Silly Ideas — joy-makers since 1992. Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. One of London’s leading voices in outdoor arts.

Roger (aka Roger Silly) has been making art from these Brixton arches since 1992. BOSI itself was founded here in October 2002. For more than thirty years we’ve been making public art, outdoor shows and theatrical folktales — from robots in the streets to surprise cabarets. Work that makes people smile and think. The perfect ingredients, we’ve found, for starting positive conversations about complex issues.

We work out of five Brixton arches: performance and rehearsal spaces, workshop, storage and office. The last spit-and-sawdust creative workshop and performance venue of its kind inside the M25 — the kind of place London used to be full of, and now barely has.

One last thing

Imagine Brixton thirty years from now with this place still standing in it — still making joy, still making people smile and think, still making art for the streets of south London.

That’s the outcome we’re working toward. This Crowdfunder support keeps the organisation on its feet while the dialogue happens. Landlord investment, if Good Growth becomes the agreed direction, builds what comes next. Both, side by side, are how this works.

Thank you for being part of it.

Sources

1,344 lost protected tenancies — Derec Hickman / Guardians of the Arches, September 2025.

100% of new Arch Co lettings contracted out of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 — Derec Hickman / Guardians of the Arches, April 2026. Arch Co portfolio: ~5,400 arches, 3,750 customers (Arch Co CEO email to Derec Hickman, 28 February 2025).

80% institutional investor share of UK commercial property, ~1 million commercial tenancies — Guardians of the Arches submission to the Law Commission.

Planning reference 26/00491/FUL — Lambeth Planning Portal.

Good Growth definition — gov.uk.

“No net loss of space” — GLA Creative Enterprise Zones programme framework, london.gov.uk.

BOSI named as key Brixton CEZ beneficiary — london.gov.uk, About Creative Enterprise Zones.

Lambeth commitment to strengthen arts-venue planning protections — Lambeth Council Creative Economy Strategy, March 2026.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 29th July 2026 at 5:45pm