Business owners in a crumbling South East London shopping centre earmarked for hundreds of homes fear the area will lose its sense of community if redevelopment plans go ahead.
Developers have been wanting to bulldoze Leegate Centre in Lee Green for over a decade but plans have never been realised.
Last year developer Galliard Homes revealed new proposals to build 563 homes and a 15 storey tower on the site, renewing hopes for the area’s future.
Lewisham Council will make a decision on the plans at a later date.
But for those businesses still occupying the rundown centre, the latest turn of events has been greeted with unease. They fear they don’t have a place in the developer’s vision for the centre’s future and face saying goodbye to the area for good.
Juliette Burke, manager of a Sue Ryder charity shop that has operated out of the centre for 25 years, said she imagined the store would have to leave.
She said: “The new units will be too small and too expensive. It will be the same as every new development: Starbucks, a gym, a supermarket. It’s a shame because it’s a good community here.
“We would like to stay here if it was affordable because the location is great. We are on the cusp of affluent areas where they donate and people from other areas come and buy. It’s a good community and there’s a good customer base.”
Ms Burke, who has run the Leegate store for five years, added: “Footfall in the shopping centre has got less because we lost Wetherspoons and we lost Iceland but for us personally as a business it has gone up.
“We are a destination. People spend two hours here because we’ve got free parking.”
Louisa Gillespie, owner of Rhubarb & Custard café, said the rents on offer in the planned new retail spaces were too high and the leases too long for most of the small businesses in the shopping centre.
Ms Gillespie, who moved her café into the centre five years ago, said: “I think the rents they are offering after five years are very high, both for new and existing [businesses]. It’s not going to be affordable.
“What they’re offering here, they are asking for businesses to sign up to a ten year lease. I think that’s the sticking point for the commercial offering. Even if we don’t stay, we would like there to be more of a commercial offering.”
She added: “It’s all being done at the same time so there’s no phasing at all and so it’s not going to be possibility to stay while it’s being redeveloped.
“There’s a community here. People do work together and that’s a good thing. It would be great if they did look at it in phases because then I think the community wouldn’t be so diluted.”
Under Galliard Homes’s plans for the site, a community centre, supermarket, restaurant and medical centre would also be built where the shopping centre currently stands, as well as a gym and a replacement pub for the now closed Wetherspoons branch.
Galliard Homes has redesigned original proposals submitted to the council in summer last year to include a second staircase in the planned tower block. The changes follow new City Hall rules which since February have required buildings over 30 metres in height to provide two staircases.
Jess Currie, owner of a zero-waste store Shop WithOut Packaging, said she was sad the developer hadn’t included more cheap retail space in the plans.
Ms Currie, who gets customers travelling from as far as Dartford, Kent to visit the shop, said: “There’s going to be a huge reduction in retail and at the same time a massive influx of people. It’s a shame to lose it but the developer is not interested in retail.”
She added: “The footfall has definitely fallen and Covid was pretty tricky and now the cost of living crisis it has made business tricky for everybody.”
A Galliard Homes spokesperson said: “Since early 2021, Galliard Homes has been discussing the future of the Leegate Centre with local residents and community groups.
“Over the last two years we have also engaged with the site’s existing traders on a range of issues, including viable options for them to return to a regenerated Leegate Centre – should our current planning application be approved by the council later this summer.
“If our plans are given the ‘green light’ by Lewisham Council, we look forward to continuing these discussions.”
