For 20 summers, the upper floors of a Peckham multi-storey car park have been home to art, architecture, music and performance. Next door, the future of an ageing shopping centre has become the subject of a major battle over housing, heritage and development. Together, they raise a question London will increasingly need to answer: how do we decide what to keep, what to adapt and what to replace?
Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park was built in 1982 to serve a Sainsbury’s supermarket. When the supermarket moved away a decade later, the car park gradually fell into underuse and its upper floors were eventually closed to the public.
In 2007, those upper levels became home to Bold Tendencies. Over the following two decades, the concrete decks have evolved into one of south London’s most distinctive cultural destinations, hosting visual art, architecture, music and performance in a building never designed for any of them.
As Bold Tendencies celebrates its 20th Anniversary Season, Euphoria, its story offers an interesting example of how an apparently obsolete building can acquire an entirely different value. Look beyond the car park, however, and the choices facing a changing London become more complicated.
A second life for a car park
There is nothing conventionally gallery-like about Bold Tendencies. The exposed concrete frame and open decks are integral to the experience, providing vast spaces for artworks alongside panoramic views across London.
Rather than disguising the building’s original function, Bold Tendencies has worked with it. In 2009, it commissioned Frank’s Cafe, designed and built by Practice Architecture, whose distinctive red tarpaulin roof created a place to eat, meet and spend time above the city.
The cultural infrastructure developed incrementally. The covered levels now provide 42,000 sq ft of raw concrete performance space, hosting a live programme that began in 2011 with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and has since included the first BBC Prom to take place outside the Royal Albert Hall.
This was not a comprehensive redevelopment with a new use determined from the outset. The building’s second life emerged over time, as temporary occupation developed into something more established.
In 2017, following consultation and a community petition signed by 5,000 people, Southwark Council removed the car park from its core redevelopment plans and confirmed its long-term cultural use. In a city where artists and cultural organisations are often displaced from the areas they help make desirable, the cultural use of the car park had instead become part of the argument for keeping it.
Two 1980s buildings, two very different futures
A short distance away, the Aylesham Centre presents a strikingly different story.
The 1980s shopping centre has been the focus of a long-running redevelopment debate. Berkeley Homes proposed demolishing it and replacing it with a major mixed-use scheme of 867 homes, alongside new shops, leisure and commercial space.
The proposals attracted significant local opposition over their scale and design and the level of affordable housing. Southwark Council refused planning permission and, in May 2026, a Planning Inspector dismissed Berkeley’s appeal, concluding that the scheme’s benefits did not outweigh harm to surrounding heritage assets and the historic character of the area.
The heritage argument is particularly interesting because it is not primarily the 1980s shopping centre itself that is being protected. Rather, the proposed replacement was judged against its impact on the historic Peckham around it.
Within a few minutes’ walk, then, are two buildings from roughly the same era facing very different questions. One has been retained because an unexpected new use demonstrated its value. The other remains standing after an attempt to replace it with hundreds of homes failed to secure planning permission.
The comparison is not an argument that reuse is always preferable. London urgently needs new homes, including affordable homes, and a large town-centre site must meet very different demands from the upper floors of a car park. But together the two sites expose the difficulty behind apparently simple calls to “reuse first” or “build more homes”.
The real question is how we judge what produces the greater long-term value for the city.
Dancing in a changing Peckham
That relationship between buildings, culture and neighbourhood change gained an additional layer in 2025, when Bold Tendencies presented Gillian Wearing’s Dancing in Peckham.
The 1994 film shows Wearing dancing alone in the nearby Aylesham Centre on Rye Lane. Bringing the work back to Peckham more than 30 years later placed it in a very different context: the shopping centre in which it was filmed was at the centre of a redevelopment battle, while Peckham itself had undergone significant economic and cultural change.
It is a reminder that buildings are not the only things that change when neighbourhoods evolve.
Bold Tendencies has become part of Peckham’s contemporary identity during the same period in which questions about affordability and gentrification have become increasingly prominent. Cultural organisations can bring neglected buildings back into use and create valuable places to gather, but culture and regeneration frequently occupy the same territory.
That makes the relationship between cultural success and neighbourhood change worth examining rather than romanticising. The challenge is not simply to preserve successful cultural institutions, but to consider how they remain connected to the places and communities around them as those places change.
What should London keep?
Bold Tendencies marks its 20th Anniversary Season in 2026 with Euphoria, including new visual art commissions by Andreas Gursky, Emma Hart, Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban, Tarek Lakhrissi and Louis Morlæ.
Twenty years after the first cultural occupation of the car park, the wider lesson may be less about what London can do with redundant car parks and more about allowing buildings enough flexibility to prove their value.
Some will find successful second lives. Others will need to be replaced to accommodate new homes, infrastructure and the changing needs of the city. The harder decisions sit between the two.
Peckham offers an unusually concentrated illustration of that dilemma. One 1980s building has found a future nobody originally planned for it. Another remains at the centre of an unresolved debate about what should take its place.
As London faces pressure to build more homes while reducing carbon emissions, protecting heritage and retaining the cultural spaces that give neighbourhoods their identity, these choices will become increasingly important. The useful question is not simply whether an old building should stay or go, but whether we have properly understood what it already contributes, what else it could become and whether what replaces it will genuinely make London better.
Euphoria at Bold Tendencies is running until 12th September. Join us during its 20th Anniversary Season for a special behind-the-scenes tour led by Charlie Mills, Senior Curator & Producer. The visit will explore the organisation’s history and 2026 visual art commissions, offering an opportunity to experience this unusual example of London reuse firsthand.
Following discussions in Enfield and the City of London, we will also be bringing our housing events series to Peckham later on this year, earlier this year. With the future of the Aylesham Centre and wider questions about housing, development and neighbourhood change all part of the conversation, there is plenty to explore. Register for The London Society newsletter to be kept up to date with this and other upcoming events.
