{"id":9773,"date":"2012-10-04T20:50:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T19:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/?p=9773"},"modified":"2012-10-04T21:31:21","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T20:31:21","slug":"brixton-square-marketing-day-the-awful-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/brixton-square-marketing-day-the-awful-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Brixton Square marketing day: the awful truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’ll be honest: I walked right past Brixton Square tonight when Barratt Homes were holding their marketing day event.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t bring myself to walk in when I saw the clipboard-toting, super-smarmy, swivel action suits doing their thing, but an\u00a0intrepid\u00a0reporter for urban75\u00a0bravely\u00a0ventured in and has posted up what he saw.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Barratt<\/p>\n

And yes, they really are naming one of the\u00a0upmarket\u00a0blocks after one of Brixton’s most loved old pubs\/squats (“Bradys<\/a>“). \u00a0Another will be called ‘Windrush’ because that’s really<\/em> appropriate for a block where the cheapest one bedroom flat starts at \u00a3265,000.<\/p>\n

Here’s his report…<\/p>\n

I went in, posed as a buyer and drank their free bubbly. I felt a bit dirty tbh.<\/p>\n

There was a wide range of people there: posh white people, posh black people, posh asian people.<\/p>\n

Two Jamaican guys were stood on the pavement outside looking in and muttering something about “bloodclart rich workers.”<\/p>\n

They are giving free ipads to people who make a reservation.<\/p>\n

There are 5 blocks of flats in the development, which will be called “Windrush”, “Academy”, “Ritzy”, “Brady” and “Village”.<\/p>\n

Flicking through their glossy brochures (full of pics of Brixton Village, pics of people raving it up in the Academy, and pics of parks which aren’t even in Brixton) I was soon cornered by an agent who started giving me the spiel.<\/p>\n

I was probably the scruffiest person in there but she still asked me if I was a buy-to-let investor (!) and handed me a sheet showing potential rental income and annual gross yields etc.<\/p>\n

I was interested in their reaction about the “affordable homes” thing and was about to ask when she handed me a plan of the building showing the make up of affordable, private, commercial etc (I’ll scan it and post it up if anyone’s interested?)<\/p>\n

The ‘affordable’ bits of the building seem to be stuck in the back corner of the development (next to the railway lines) on each floor.<\/p>\n

There are some flats on the ground floor (which face Coldharbour Lane) which were marked “planning to be agreed” which I assume are the flats in question re: the change in planning we’ve been discussing.<\/p>\n

I made my excuses and left. I felt pretty miserable about the whole thing, which was compounded when I got back outside and saw one of the agents had parked their car right across the pavement. A guy in a wheelchair was coming along the pavement and had to go out into the road in rush hour traffic to get past the car.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And how much will these flats cost to rent? Take a deep breath and scroll down:<\/p>\n

\u00a3310 per week for a one bed, \u00a3360 per week for a two bed (which they say is based on independent valuations made in April 2012.) Quick calculation makes that \u00a31343 per month for a one bed, \u00a31560 per month for a two bed.<\/p>\n

That’s over \u00a316,000 a year for a one bed flat. In Brixton<\/em>, for fuck’s sake.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read more and join in with the discussion on Brixton Square on the urban75 bulletin boards<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll be honest: I walked right past Brixton Square tonight when Barratt Homes were holding their marketing day event. I couldn’t bring myself to walk in when I saw the … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,193],"tags":[1191,449,450],"class_list":["post-9773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brixton","category-places","tag-brixton","tag-coldharbour-lane","tag-gentrification"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/brixton-square-coldharbour-lane-021.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQI7P-2xD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9773"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9777,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9773\/revisions\/9777"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}