Here the Granville Story from 1993-2023 shared with us by Deirdre Woods and Leslie Barson.
In February 1993 a small educational charity, The Otherwise Club moved into The Granville. Many happy years were spent in the building with hundreds of families, children and young people benefitting from the space and amenities it offered. The Granville, and Carlton buildings were appreciated and well used by the local community as places for education, health and wellbeing and social gatherings from youth centred activities to birthday parties and funerals.
In the late 1990s Brent received £50.06 million from central government as part of New Deal for Communities (NDC) to transform South Kilburn which was recognised then as one of Brent’s most deprived areas. Brent worked with the local community to “create a desirable place to live, learn and work”. This strong commitment to the regeneration of the neighbourhood included a commitment to the built environment, to improve, expand and future proof community spaces.
Housing was the primary priority for the local community that Brent committed to. People wanted decent, truly affordable homes. However we could see the price of land in London rising and realised this put the Carlton and Granville buildings as prime property with its location near to Queens Park, Maida Vale and central London, under serious threat to be sold for the development of a different type of housing.
In 2009 New homes were built on Granville Road right across from The Granville where we lost a significant proportion of green open space. For people moving into those homes it was said that there is a paragraph in their contracts stating with words to the effect that “you have moved in near to a community centre and will therefore put up with some noise and nuisance from the centre”.
In 2013 Brent Council decided that the main hall, a three hundred (300) person capacity grand hall with pillars and a stage, could no longer be let out to any party giver ‘as the neighbours (in the homes on Granville Road) were being disturbed by the noise. This hall was, and is, the economic heart of the site. This meant that the site, Granville and Carlton, would no longer be able to pay for itself.
The writing was on the wall!
The kitchen was not being used and had been empty for about five years. Dee suggested we move in and use it to provide food related activities that build and bind community, reviving the building that was going to become quiet with the close of the hall. This was alongside the observation that deprivation had not been reduced as an outcome of the NDC program but was in fact increasing as more and more people were experiencing household food insecurity.
We spent several months in 2014 fundraising and getting support from the building manager and other local organisations and people. We launched Granville Community Kitchen in September 2014 with a seasonal Pumpkintastic feast! In the kitchen we worked with learning disabled adults to learn catering and front of house skills, cooking classes, and work experience. We also had regular social events like film nights, salsa classes and introduced a free weekly community meal
Granville Community Garden which we started in 2012 continued to grow in its importance for community health and wellbeing with a community food grower that fostered volunteer sessions in the garden. They also partnered with a local school to grow food there and run workshops for the children. We ran several community health events attracting over three hundred (300) people to the building
During this period Brent also decided to close the building as a Youth service space. This added to the narrative that the building was underused and therefore a brownfield site suitable for housing development. Between 2017 and 2018 we left the building temporarily as it underwent renovations.
The estate is isolated from the decision makers. Those in power don't come to South Kilburn to visit very often unless there is some ulterior motive. The people in South Kilburn feel distanced from the town hall in Wembley. It is either very expensive to get to on the tube or it is a long journey having to travel for an hour and a quarter by bus. A lot of the meetings are also held at times when working people, and others with caring responsibilities can't make them.
The area was fast becoming wide open for gentrification with the ideal of co-produced regeneration long lost to the goal of profit.
In 2016 we were asked to comment on the new masterplan in which the Graville and Carton were included for the first time. We quickly pointed out to Brent that this was not an accessible document to be commented on by the community without some professional help. It was nearly 200 pages long! The language was architectural and built environment jargon. Each division of the estate in the masterplan had only two pages on it with a line drawing of what was expected to be built, a justification of why that area was chosen to go in the masterplan and a few sentences of what was going to be built and how it was going to be built. We argued that this was too little information for the community to know what they were accepting, reiterating that they weren't able to read this document without some professional help. The response from Brent was to give the community six(6) weeks rather than the statutory four(4) weeks to view and comment on the document. This was thought to be enough for the community to be able to comment coherently on the document. For those of us able to navigate the document we supported some of the community in understanding it enough so that they could comment. Needless to say the masterplan was passed.
In July 2016 the cabinet suddenly out of the blue voted to tear down the Granville and Carlton buildings. We heard about the decision when they started a consultation on what the community might want to put on the land once the buildings were gone. We led a fight back which meant calling in the decision with support from Councillor Duffy. The decision was sent to the scrutiny committee and they came to The Granville and looked it over. We had several public events including one with the author Zadie Smith, who grew up in the area and whose mother had worked in the building. She came and gave a talk about the importance of community spaces.
We also had a huge petition against the decision. We were in the press, and on television. We even received support from Sheila Dillon, of The Food Programme, BBC Radio4 who had visited the Granville to interview Dee after her nomination for the BBC Food and Farming Awards, BBC Cook of the Year, which Dee went on to win earlier in the year.
The decision was revoked. We proposed the establishment of a stakeholder group for inclusive participation in the decisions about the Granville and Carlton. This was set up consisting of all the statutory bodies in Granville and Carton; the nursery, the family services and the South Kilburn Trust, and the Algerian Centre, the Otherwise Club and Granville Community Kitchen the only three(3) non-statutory and community based organisations. The Algerian Centre decided to move in the early stages of this stakeholder group.
We noticed that for the first time when the council were describing what should go onto the site including nursery family services, community centre, all sorts of support for the local community, the words ‘and housing’ appeared.
“The Council is seeking to review options for Phase 2 in light of the consultation provided within this report. The Council would seek to engage with a Design Team to take forward a review of the options for the site and to conduct in-depth engagement with the local community. The Council would envisage that the site would still deliver an Enterprise Hub, Education/Community Space and Housing (our bolding) with the priorities being: to secure a permanent enterprise hub, to secure the future of the Nursery School, to secure the future of the then Barnardo’s operated Children’s Centre (within the South Kilburn area although not necessarily on this site) and to secure the future of the Granville Community Kitchen and Otherwise Club as being incorporated into the Enterprise Hub space”
https://democracy.brent.gov.uk/documents/s45978/09%20-%20cg_report.pdf
The fact of housing being on the site was disputed at every meeting and asked where and why it had become part of the regeneration of the two community buildings. This was never explained except to say it was the Council's decision.
We continued to argue throughout the next four years that there should be no housing on the site. The regeneration was going to double or even treble the population on the estate therefore they should double to treble the amount of multi-purpose community space that was available to everyone who lived in the area. Instead a plan was made for Granville and Cartlon that meant that we lost 72% of our multiple purpose community space. Most of the space in these two buildings would be for workspace.
There was to be a 3 year interim where the South Kilburn Trust would move into The Granville, lead on the interim redevelopment and start to build up the Granville as a place to hire workspace. This last period of renovation from 2017 changed the layout of the building drastically. It included the destruction of the grand hall to make way for individual workspaces. A new staircase was built in the middle of the grand hall leading down to more cubicles. The radio station had a new prefab soundproof studio where 2 people could barely fit. Walls were taken down to open up some spaces and new walls built to create a division between the community and the enterprise hub.
The stakeholder group met throughout this period and we tried to get information from the South Kilburn Trust about how well the workspace was working. Was it being hired, who by and at what price? We argued that some workspace was needed for the community at very low cost but not the whole of these two buildings. We argued that the three hundred person hall was the social and economic heart of the two buildings. We further argued that it should be let at a higher price for some time to big organisations, businesses and people so that it can be let at a very low cost to local residents and small organisations most of the time. This type of large meeting space is very rare in London and is in great demand and therefore would be a business plan to make work then workspaces in a place such as South Kilburn.
In January 2020, despite all our objections the planning permission was granted. This was just before the covid 19 pandemic which changed the landscape of economic and community infrastructure globally with almost everything then closed down for about 2 years. During this time it became apparent that workspace rental could no longer support the business plan because people were now working from home and were in fact leaving London. Even successful global workspace businesses that had been developed many years before in highly desirable locations near central London stations were closing down because of the lack of use.
During the pandemic GCK continued to operate from the building, using many of the available spaces to provide food aid to at least one thousand, two hundred households weekly. The building was also used as a vaccination and testing centre. This further highlighted the need for large, accessible, multipurpose space
GCK, in 2021 during the pandemic, commissioned research that was undertaken by UCL Bartlett School of Planning about the future use of both community centres with the possibility of more pandemics in the future. One of the prime recommendations in the report from this research was to have a mixed-use financial plan so that the buildings were not reliant solely on business space rental income as the pandemic period had shown how vulnerable economically this made many buildings.
In December 2022 the South Kilburn Trust began to agree with our analysis of the situation and the future of the Granville and Carlton. They hired their own architect to revise the purpose of the Carlton which has now become a ‘Maker space’ hoping to attract people who are in light creative industries and need space, such as those in the fashion industry, photographers or jewellery makers. The Granville’s old hall was also seen as a valuable resource to let for events and gatherings rather than to continue to be used as workspace. Granville Community Kitchen were in discussions with the South Kilburn Trust about turning the old hall and basement spaces into a food hub. Brent Council were positive about some of these suggestions and negotiations were moving forward about how to change the original plans.
In July 2023 a 17 year old young man was murdered on Granville Road after a party at The Granville. There have been many consequences that have( not )been attributed to this tragedy but we believe also precipitated what happened next.
We believe that Brent Council lost faith in the South Kilburn Trust and decided to shut the Granville as soon as possible citing a very odd seemingly “unforeseeable” underpinning of an internal wall as a reason to close the building quickly. It was obvious that this reaction to the murder was part of a catalogue of many mistakes at all levels, including Brent council closing the youth service in South Kilburn in 2017. A more enlightened consequence of that terrible tragedy should have been a revitalisation of a youth service in South Kilburn. Instead all activities for the community were stopped and all the occupants were thrown out of The Granville at the end of December 23.
GCK has eight (8) interconnected projects and these will now be situated all over the estate. It is difficult, disruptive and time consuming. Our rent will rise four fold. Our equipment and resources will be dispersed stored in the backs of cars, staff homes and various lock ups. This will make it difficult to continue doing what we are doing now. Planning any new projects seems highly unlikely for the foreseeable future.
But … despite what Brent Council has thrown at us we are still here and still running our community meals that are now more popular than ever. Our radical solidarity veg box scheme, the Good Food Box, is growing. We are still providing food aid by referrals only, health and wellbeing classes and volunteer sessions in new community garden areas. We are award winning and recognised throughout the four nations and further afield for our work. More importantly we are well known and well supported by the local community. This warms our hearts and makes carrying on worthwhile. The marginalised community of South Kilburn recognise our value. This keeps us going.
GCK is a community centred organisation that has built and continues to build social and physical infrastructures of care, for safety, resilience, resistance and belonging.
GCK offers much more than food. We offer connection, sanctuary and renewed hope.