Gabriel’s Wharf was created from converted garages as a five-year experiment in 1988. Thirty-eight years later, its independent businesses are leaving and Coin Street Community Builders is preparing the site for another temporary use. Look beyond the familiar traders-versus-landlord story and its closure reveals the investment, management and difficult trade-offs involved in making room for small businesses in central London.
This weekend marks the end of Gabriel’s Wharf as London has known it for nearly four decades. By Sunday 27 September, the remaining independent businesses on this stretch of the South Bank are due to cease trading ahead of the site being cleared for a new use.
For anyone walking along the river this week, there is little about Gabriel’s Wharf that looks like a place at the end of its life. Shops and galleries are still trading from the small units around the courtyard, with restaurants and cafés facing towards the Thames. Coin Street itself describes the Wharf as an “arty enclave” of independent retailers, artists and restaurants. Yet the buildings were originally expected to be there for only five years.
Gabriel’s Wharf opened in 1988 on land owned by Coin Street Community Builders, the social enterprise created four years earlier after the long campaign over the future of this part of the South Bank.
The site had previously been used as a cash-and-carry warehouse and then as a construction compound. Working with the operators of Camden Lock Market, Coin Street installed factory-built garage units, added shopfronts and turned them into small designer studios. Food businesses followed, while the blank wall behind them became the familiar painted trompe l’oeil streetscape.
It was a modest intervention on land awaiting a more permanent future. Instead, the temporary Wharf survived for 38 years, through the transformation of the South Bank around it. The London Eye arrived upriver, Tate Modern opened along the Thames-side walk and the South Bank became one of the capital’s busiest cultural and visitor destinations. Gabriel’s Wharf remained a collection of small converted garages.
Coin Street now says those structures and the infrastructure serving them have reached the end of their economic life. Professional assessments identified problems with the units, drainage and electrical infrastructure. Essential repairs were undertaken to allow trading to continue until this September, but Coin Street says keeping the Wharf in longer-term use would require much more substantial work.
“The infrastructure of Gabriel’s Wharf is well beyond its economic life and can no longer be repaired, it must be replaced,” Coin Street told The London Society.
The organisation has another consideration that distinguishes this from a conventional landlord and tenant dispute. Coin Street is a not-for-profit social enterprise and income from its commercial estate supports its work locally. It maintains co-operative homes and the wider 13-acre estate, while also running a Family and Children’s Centre and community programmes. Coin Street says it does not have the resources to undertake the major works required at Gabriel’s Wharf without diverting money from that work.
The organisation deciding that Gabriel’s Wharf can no longer continue in its present form is therefore the same community organisation that created it. Its argument is not that independent businesses have no value, but that the cost of maintaining the buildings and infrastructure which accommodate them can no longer be justified against the other calls on its resources.
The Gabriel’s Wharf Traders’ Association disputes the idea that the choice needed to be between closing this month and keeping the existing Wharf operating for another decade or more. It says businesses proposed refurbishment and shorter extensions, as well as phased closure or relocation elsewhere on Coin Street’s estate. In particular, it questions why the repairs that allowed the Wharf to remain open for a final year could not have been followed by a two, three or five-year extension while plans for the site developed.
The Association says it has not seen an options appraisal comparing those possibilities with closure. Coin Street’s position is that the infrastructure has passed the point at which further repair offers an economically viable solution and needs to be replaced.
Earlier plans add another layer. During the preparation of Lambeth’s site allocation policies, Coin Street said Gabriel’s Wharf would receive investment so that existing uses could remain for at least another ten years, with the buildings and surrounding land repurposed. Lambeth subsequently supported investment to enable meanwhile uses on Gabriel’s Wharf and neighbouring Prince’s Wharf ahead of comprehensive redevelopment. Coin Street now says the condition of the site and cost of the necessary works mean it cannot pursue that approach.
There is no permanent development waiting to begin when the businesses leave this weekend. Coin Street’s longer-term plans for Gabriel’s Wharf have included a nursing care home and other community facilities, but that redevelopment remains some way off. Another temporary use is expected to occupy the site in the intervening period, potentially for 10 to 15 years, and Coin Street says it is still considering what form that should take.
For the Traders’ Association, the timing is a source of particular frustration. It argues that describing the current process as the “redevelopment” of Gabriel’s Wharf can give the impression that a finished scheme is ready to follow the existing businesses onto the site.
“The long-term permanent development is much further away, and Coin Street has been talking about another meanwhile use for the intervening years,” it told us. Its concern is that an existing use which has proved capable of occupying the site for 38 years is being removed before its successor has been settled.
The answer lies partly in the physical condition of Gabriel’s Wharf, but Coin Street’s response to The London Society revealed another change which has received less attention. It no longer wants to manage the site in the same way.
“We do not have the resources to manage Gabriel’s Wharf as a multi-occupancy site therefore we are moving to having a single site operator,” Coin Street told us. “Under this arrangement, the site operator will manage all trading on the site.”
At present, Coin Street deals with the individual businesses occupying the Wharf. Under the proposed model, it would deal with one operator, which would then take responsibility for trading across the site. Coin Street says this is why it cannot guarantee that existing businesses will return, although it has not said that a future operator would be prevented from accommodating them.
That change helps explain something about Gabriel’s Wharf which is easily missed when walking through it. Its collection of small shops and businesses may feel informal, but somebody has to manage each of those individual occupiers. The physical spaces may be modest; the landlord’s job is not necessarily so.
For Coin Street, moving to one operator removes that responsibility. For Gabriel’s Wharf, it means that the character of whatever follows will depend as much on the operating model as on the replacement buildings.
London’s discussion about affordable workspace tends to concentrate on the price and supply of property. Gabriel’s Wharf suggests another constraint. Making room for very small businesses also requires a landlord or operator prepared to deal with them individually.
The converted garages helped make that possible in a central London location where conventional shop premises would be beyond the reach of many small businesses. The Traders’ Association says its members now face the costs of finding and fitting out new premises, alongside the possibility that another location will not bring the same customers. For some, it says, leaving Gabriel’s Wharf may mean closing rather than relocating.
At the same time, inexpensive buildings do not necessarily remain inexpensive to own. Coin Street says the cost of maintaining these ones has reached a point where it can no longer justify doing so alongside the other demands on its resources.
The longer-term plan complicates any attempt to cast Gabriel’s Wharf as a simple contest between independent businesses and redevelopment. Coin Street has for some time envisaged a nursing care home on the site alongside other community facilities. Earlier proposals described a 76-room nursing home with residential, retail and public uses, although no permanent scheme has yet come forward in that form.
There are therefore different calls on the same land and on Coin Street’s resources. Today’s Wharf provides relatively affordable space for independent enterprise in central London. A future care home would address another need, while commercial income from the estate already helps pay for Coin Street’s existing community work. The organisation has concluded that maintaining the current Wharf is no longer economically viable; the traders believe other ways of extending its life should have been explored.
Gabriel’s Wharf also exposes something less obvious about the independent places London often says it wants to protect. Providing space for small businesses is not simply a question of holding rents down. Buildings have to be maintained and infrastructure replaced. A collection of individual occupiers takes time and resources to manage, while the businesses themselves may not be capable of generating the returns available from letting a site differently.
Those costs are particularly visible here because the landlord is a social enterprise rather than a conventional commercial developer. Coin Street has to decide whether money spent keeping Gabriel’s Wharf operating is money well spent when it could support housing, children’s services or community programmes elsewhere. Its answer is no. The traders understandably place a different value on the businesses and relationships that have developed there.
Versions of that choice are being made across London, sometimes much less visibly. At Smithfield, the London Museum opens its first phase in the Victorian General Market on 28 November, beginning a very different process of adapting a place with a long-established identity. The Poultry Market follows in 2028, while discussion about the wider future of Smithfield continues. The London Society will return to that subject with a talk in February 2027.
The circumstances are very different, but the question of what London chooses to accommodate in valuable central locations will be familiar. It is relatively easy to say that the city should retain room for independent businesses, makers, new ideas and experimentation. Gabriel’s Wharf shows some of what has to sit behind that ambition: suitable space, continuing investment and an operating model capable of supporting lots of small occupiers.
For 38 years, a collection of converted garages on the South Bank provided those conditions. Their closure does not prove that they should have been preserved indefinitely, nor that Coin Street is wrong to spend its resources differently. It does show that the parts of London where small businesses and new ideas can take root do not happen by accident. If we want them in the city, somebody has to provide the space, take on the complexity and ultimately meet the cost.
Those trade-offs may be unavoidable, but their consequences are real. As for the soon-to-be former tenants of Gabriel’s Wharf, for many the immediate question is simply where they go next. Some are still looking for affordable workspace in London. If you know of suitable spaces looking for independent makers, retailers and creative businesses, you can contact the Gabriel’s Wharf Traders’ Association via its Instagram page and help some of the businesses that made the Wharf what it was find their next home.
Image credit: Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0
