West Norwood locals at the press launch

Letting local businesses and residents decide how their area is used seems like an obvious idea, but it’s something that rarely happens. Not so for the South East London borough of West Norwood which, after months of planning and preparation, will be the home of West Norwood Feast – a market built and run by locals with the help of Space Makers.

The market launches on Sunday 3rd April and will sell everything from reworked furniture and gardening tools to street food and pieces of art. Locally sourced, of course.

We interviewed Dougald Hine, the founder of Space Makers, about West Norwood Feast.

How did you get involved with West Norwood Feast?

The first project we did as Space Makers was at Brixton Village indoor market, bringing people together to fill twenty empty shops with pop-ups and new businesses. While we were working on that, we were approached by Lambeth Council who wanted to talk to us about some of the other town centres around the borough. We went with them to meet some local business owners in West Norwood and that’s where the project started from.

I think the council expected us to come up with another empty shops project, but we soon realised this was a different situation. Apart from anything else, there wasn’t a single landlord with lots of empty property who you could negotiate with. So we asked ourselves how we could bring some of the spirit of what had worked in Brixton to work in a different way – and the answer was to create a new street market, using some of the under-used bits of space around Norwood Road and Knights Hill.

What will set West Norwood Feast apart from your average local market?

What’s different is that it’s been organised by local people. Space Makers has been there to support them and to work with the council, but the ideas for how the market should work – and the hard work of making it happen – have come from the dozens of local people who have come to our weekly open meetings at the local pub. There’s an amazing attitude, a feeling that people have been waiting for a long time for something to happen in their neighbourhood and their determined to make it special.

In terms of what you’ll find on the day, there are four separate marketplace hubs within five minutes walk of each other, around West Norwood station. There’s a food fair, a retro village with vintage clothes and furniture, a gardeners’ market and an artisans’ market with locally-made crafts. There will all sorts of other things to do, with street entertainers, art at the Portico Gallery, a guided tour of the historic West Norwood Cemetery, and a guerrilla gardening expedition with Richard Reynolds.

Are you involved in any other local London projects?

We just won a competition to create a project in Canning Town, together with an amazing collective of artists, architects and community organisers. It’s called the Canning Town Caravanserai and we’ll be working on it over the next three years. We’re looking forward to getting to know a very different corner of London and working with the people we meet there.

Where do you live in London and why?

I live in Brixton! I moved here a couple of months into the Brixton Village project. I’d already got to know more people there than I knew in Hackney, where I’d been living for the previous two years. But I’m originally a northerner, I didn’t move to London until I was thirty, and I’ve ended up enjoying it more than I ever thought I would.