Uggly Fences

‘Can’t you ping elsewhere?’ The question, daubed on the twelve-foot green fences encircling much of Brockwell Park in South London, has long been on the minds of local residents. For months, the park has been the subject of a battle over urban public space and culture. Austerity is driving it. Facing a large budget deficit, Lambeth Council is expected to cut local services by £99 million over the next two years. To boost its income, the council has been renting out Brockwell Park to Summer Events Ltd (which operates under the brand name Brockwell Live) since 2018. Between 23 May and 8 June this year, the park hosted five festivals – Wide Awake, Field Day, Cross The Tracks, City Splash and Mighty Hoopla, followed by the non-commercial Lambeth Country Show. As well as the direct revenue, the events boost trade for local pubs and music venues.

For 37 days, the centre of Brockwell Park, including its views of the London skyline, was closed to anyone without a ticket. In 2024, bad weather meant that some fences stayed up for 68 days. Much of the rest of the park was filled with fencing and portaloos. Large electronic signs reminded everyone that drug searches and CCTV were in operation. There were police patrols as well as an army of private security. On 16 May, the High Court ruled that the decision to grant planning permission for the festivals was ‘irrational’. Three days later, Lambeth Council issued an emergency ‘certificate of lawfulness’ so the festivals could go ahead regardless.

Protect Brockwell Park, the group that brought the legal challenge, is fronted by local citizens. Its website says it is ‘apolitical but unapologetic about protecting this important green oasis and heritage parkland’. It is unclear if it approved of the graffiti – ‘Fuck Lambeth’, ‘Reclaim the Park’, ‘Uggly Fence’ – that sprung up on the walls around the park. I first heard about the campaign at an anti-cuts meeting organised by local unions, when a participant spoke from the floor about ‘these wretched pop concerts’. She didn’t seem the type to spell ugly with two Gs.

Brockwell Park is an especially difficult place to hold ticketed music festivals. At fifty hectares, it is considerably smaller than Victoria Park, where Mighty Hoopla has previously been held. It is surrounded by Brixton, Camberwell, Streatham and other areas with high density housing, chronic air pollution and a long history of community organising. For many local residents, especially for those without gardens, the fences and the ecological damage are a significant hit.

The festivals take place at the height of nesting season. In the summer of 2020, Brockwell Park was home to pipistrelle bats, kingfishers, skylarks, white fronted geese, cuckoos, house martins, short eared owls and pied flycatchers. Protect Brockwell Park has analysed data from Greenspace Information for Greater London, which it got from the council with a freedom of information request. It shows that 23 species of bats and birds that were sighted in 2020 did not return once the festivals restarted in August 2021. The grass in much of the park will not recover for months. If it rains, as it did in 2024, much of the park turns to mud. Trees inside the perimeter are failing.

Some argue it is a price worth paying. In early May, as legal challenges began to make the news, an anonymously run campaign called Say Yes Lambeth urged Londoners to say ‘no to the Nimbyism’. It got its opening statement in the Evening Standard, claiming that without the festivals, Lambeth risked becoming ‘sterile, unaffordable and soulless’. The organisers turned out to be five gay rugby players in Clapham, fans of the LGBT-friendly Mighty Hoopla (their statement singles it out as ‘a space of joy, pride and freedom’). They deny any link to Lambeth Council or the festival organisers, and their petition has 1500 signatures.

Where the council was once excited to announce its partnership with Brockwell Live, its more recent statements reflect the growing unpopularity and legal jeopardy of the project. Rather than bullishly backing the cultural and economic benefits of hosting the festivals, it switched to a defensive strategy, limited to factual updates from unnamed spokespeople. Brockwell Live has continued to make a case for its ‘much-loved, culturally significant events’.

Their job is not made easier by the festivals’ commercial interests. Brockwell Live claims to be a collective of five independent festivals. In fact, two of the festivals, Field Day and Mighty Hoopla, are owned by the multinational Superstruct. In 2024, Superstruct was bought out by the global investment firm KKR, which also invests in Israeli military surveillance hardware and housing developments in the occupied West Bank. Mighty Hoopla, whose organisers have no say in its ownership structure, outright condemned ‘apartheid and occupation against the Palestinian people’. Field Day at first noted that its fan base was ‘hurt and angry’; under pressure, it put out a second statement, clarifying that it was ‘passionately opposed to KKR’s unethical investments in Israel’.

Yimbyism is a growing force in British politics. The Labour Growth Group of fifty loyal MPs calls on the government to ‘back the builders and not the blockers’. If nothing else, Brockwell Park is another reminder of the limits of this politics if it lacks a critical eye on capital. We need new housing, but the experience of many local communities is of council estates being demolished and replaced by developments with only a minority of ‘affordable’ homes (where ‘affordable’ means only 20 per cent below market rate). Festivals could be a boon, but not if they privatise and damage our parks.

At some point before Jeremy Corbyn spoke and Kneecap performed at Wide Awake, someone (presumably Summer Events Ltd) painted over the graffiti that adorned the tall green fences, with a single layer of a slightly paler shade of green – the odd ‘UGGLY’ and ‘FREEDOM’ still shone through – so it was obvious to festival goers what had happened. Now that the fences have come down, it’s worth reflecting on the divisions that this episode has raised, though the struggle between local residents and festivalgoers deserves less scrutiny than the tensions between austerity, profit and urban public space.