"Five gays with a laptop" vs Mark Rylance: The Battle For Brockwell Park
Plus: An interpreter shortage halts Westfield chair-chucking trial and the Standard continues to lose money.
When an anonymous social media account popped up last week defending music festivals in south London’s Brockwell Park, many locals smelled a rat.
SayYesLambeth claimed to be a grassroots account representing the silent “majority” of people who secretly want big, noisy summer events to go ahead in one of London’s biggest public spaces.
Activists who are taking Lambeth council to court over the for-profit festivals, with the support of Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance, immediately looked for signs of nefarious influence or political links. London Centric’s inbox filled up with readers asking us to investigate — leading us to track down the self-described “five gays with a laptop” who are behind the group.
It’s all part of the Battle For Brockwell Park, which London Centric can reveal will come to a head in court next Thursday and could cause a range of major London festivals to be cancelled. As a result, the outcome of this one legal case is likely to shape the events scene in all parks across the capital for many summers to come. And at the centre of this row is a much deeper divide that has come to define London life – the “NIMBYs”" and the “YIMBYs”, and who gets to decide how the city’s neighbourhoods are shaped and used.
Scroll to the end to read an interview with the people behind the campaign group, details of the legal case that could change Londoners’ summers, and why Sadiq Khan’s office appears to be tentatively siding with the pro-festival faction.
Interpreter shortage prompts delay for Stratford Westfield chair-chucking trial.
A high-profile court case involving two teenage boys accused of filming themselves throwing a chair over a balcony at Stratford Westfield had to be adjourned on Wednesday due to a lack of interpreters.
London Centric was in court for the hearing in which the two boys, aged 14 and 15, were charged with criminal damage with intent to endanger life after a viral video originally uploaded to Snapchat showed a large chair being thrown from the top floor of the east London shopping centre, narrowly missing shoppers below. The pair cannot be identified as they are both children.
Leah Connolly, the representative for the younger boy, said that it "wouldn't be appropriate" for the trial to continue without the multiple interpreters the parents required, citing the "high-profile case" and the "big decisions" that her client would have to make. The older boy's representative, though also requesting an adjournment, said that he "would like to proceed, due to the stress that this is causing him".
A shortage of interpreters has become a growing issue in many parts of the capital’s courts, delaying cases that the legal system is otherwise ready to deal with. Both boys were released on bail, with conditions not to enter Westfield Stratford City, not to contact each other directly or indirectly, and a 9pm curfew. The conditions were prompted by the late occurrence of the incident, the prosecutor explained, as well as the younger boy's admission to police "that he had regularly engaged in pranks".
Lord Lebedev’s London Standard loses another £20m.
The London Standard lost a further £19.6m last year, according to recently-filed accounts, taking the total losses at the outlet to more than £120m in the last eight years. The outlet, backed by Lebedev and a bank with close links to the Saudi Arabian government, has taken a further £6m in loans from shareholders in the last six months and says it will require “additional funding” to meet its liabilities, with more cost-cutting on the way. Meanwhile chief digital officer Jack Riley has quit to join the Observer, meaning almost the entire leadership team has now left the organisation since the Standard’s September relaunch.
London Centric has been shortlisted for Private Eye’s Paul Foot Award due to our commitment to investigative journalism. If you aren’t already a paying subscriber and want to take a stand against clickbait while supporting proper local journalism about London, please consider joining now.
Heathrow buggy surplus takes off.
What do you do with hundreds of abandoned buggies? A London Centric reader tipped us off that the airport is stuck with vast numbers of prams abandoned by travellers. The exact cause of the pile-up is not clear, but one theory is that tourists frequently buy buggies for their trips to the capital then abandon them at the end of a holiday, as an easier alternative to transporting it back home.
Either way, hundreds of the capital’s parents have benefitted. Baby bank charity Little Village confirmed to London Centric it has received around 500 buggies in bulk donations from airlines such as American Airlines and British Airways since 2002.
The battle for Brockwell Park: Is a pro-festival group an online disinformation front — or are they for real?
Last month five members of a gay rugby team met for a drink in the Arch bar under Clapham High Street railway station. While there, they started talking about media coverage of a forthcoming legal challenge that could result in the cancellation of Mighty Hoopla and other festivals that are due to take place in south London’s Brockwell Park later this month.
“All of us live and die for Mighty Hoopla,” said David, a member of the group who lives in Brixton. He said the friends had seen isolated posts backing the two-day LGBT-friendly music festival, which attracts a combined 60,000 people, but noticed that “no one had organised” a formal campaign in support of it.
Believing that their voice was being excluded from the debate, they decided to anonymously register @SayYesLambeth on social media platforms and published an open letter claiming their views represented "the young people, the renters, the workers, the small business owners”.
“Our whole scene and culture is about to be deleted because of people who complain about noise when they live in central London,” claimed David. He said attempts to restrict festivals in parks are part of a wider issue around London becoming an ageing city where younger people cannot afford to buy a home and pubs shut early due to tight licensing conditions prompted by complaints from neighbours.
This perception may not have been helped by the fact that Oscar-winning actor and theatre director Mark Rylance, himself a local resident, joined the fight against the festivals last month, saying they cause harm to "the grass, trees and plant life for months if not for ever".
“The generational element of it is really important,” David told London Centric. “We’re all in our early 30s. We’re sitting there going ‘all of us are renters, none of us have a chance to buy these big houses in Herne Hill, and after Covid it feels like once again our freedoms are being taken away.”
David, who asked that his full name was not published due to his work in the civil service, was surprised by the subsequent backlash. The influential local website Brixton Buzz described SayYesLambeth as “slightly less than opaque” and pointed out that one of the first social media accounts that engaged with the account was a local Labour councillor, suggesting the whole campaign could be “astro-turfed by someone from within the Town Hall”.
“We see people saying no to things all the time”
London Centric was intrigued by the claims – not least due to the healthy debate raging in our comments section when we recently reported on the legal case over festivals in the park – so we set about finding out more.
David insisted the group is just “five gays with a laptop trying to make our voices heard”. Other members of the group initially agreed to on-the-record interviews and provided their identities, only to back out amid the online backlash from anti-festival campaigners. The members said they were not affiliated with the council and have personally voted for both Labour and the Greens. They rejected accusations of a relationship with Superstruct, the private equity-backed festival promoter that stands to make millions if the Brockwell Park events go ahead, saying they had had no contact with them – a claim supported by a spokesperson for the promoters.
Indeed, London Centric has yet to find anything to suggest SayYesLambeth is run by anyone other than an informal group of rugby-playing friends. They don’t dispute the anti-festival campaigners’ argument that the grass in the park is churned up and the local area is disrupted by the events. But they believe the disruption is overstated and the damage to the park is a fair trade-off for the fun and culture the festivals bring to the area.
However, the group have their sights on a wider set of issues – more housebuilding and later opening hours for pubs – that speak to one of London’s most crucial divides, seeing themselves as an answer to what they regard as increasing NIMBYism. David said: “It just annoys me that we see people saying no to things all the time.”
“We're not against Mighty Hoopla”
Lucy Akrill, the co-founder of the Protect Brockwell Park organisation and the woman who prompted the group’s campaign, doesn’t see herself as a NIMBY. Wandering around the park on Tuesday she showed London Centric the still-visible damage to the park’s grass from last year’s festivals, just days before the promoters are due to start setting up again. It’s been a busy time for the Protect Brockwell Park group, which has been receiving a lot of press attention in recent weeks.
“This park isn't sustainable, ecologically, for the events as they're being run,” she said, pointing out a copse of trees which has “bat roosting potential”, an area that has been a “swamp” all year, and concerns about the reduced number of birds in the park since the events started taking place in nesting season. She suggested there needed to be a reduction in the number of festivals, fallow years to let the ground recover, and a full planning process for events to let residents object to the back-to-back festivals.
“We're not against Mighty Hoopla,” she said. “We want people to enjoy Mighty Hoopla. What we're saying is, is this park a suitable venue annually for Mighty Hoopla and City Splash and Across The Tracks and Wide Awake and Field Day within nine days?”
She is the local resident who spotted what she believes is a previously overlooked legal issue with the way music festivals are held in Brockwell Park and many other parks across the capital. Festival promoters, to save costs, try to cram as many events as possible into a short period of time to spread the cost of building temporary staging and security measures. Planning permission is only required if an event takes over an area for more than 28 days. The Brockwell Park promoters previously argued that their back-to-back events easily fitted within this timeframe.
Akrill noticed that their assessment did not include the set-up and take-down time, meaning that a large chunk of the park is really fenced off for around 38 days — suggesting the events were potentially being held on an illegal basis. After hiring a barrister who came to the same conclusion, her group has raised almost £35,000 from local residents to take Lambeth council to a judicial review over its refusal to demand a full planning application. The case is due to be heard in court next Thursday, several days after the festival organisers are due to start building the stages for Mighty Hoopla and the other festivals.
If the judge sides with Akrill’s group then the festivals could either need to rapidly obtain planning permission or face cancellation at a few days’ notice. The people putting the stages together could have to stop work immediately. The ramifications could spread to other London parks where promoters take over parks for weeks before and after events.
Akrill’s concern with SayYesLambeth is that it could be a group “posing as young people who want to take us on” while possibly having links to local councillors. “It feels like the people in licensing know that the strongest argument against us is through the festival goers,” she said.
She doesn’t buy the argument that this is a demographic issue, a fight for the use of London’s public spaces between rich older NIMBYs who have gentrified areas and younger people who want to enjoy life in a city that is hard to survive in without much money. She said she believes that the majority of the local population wants to curtail the events, and that the groups most affected are people living in nearby social housing blocks who lose their nearest green space for more than a month. (The exact proportion of the park that is taken out of action by the festivals is a matter of some dispute and ranges between 20% and 40% depending on which calculation you prefer.)
Akrill instead wants to win over the people who go to Mighty Hoopla and other events to her cause: “I believe that people love the festivals. It's an opportunity to get together with like-minded people. But how would they feel if we said ‘can you do it every other year?’”
“What do you want to spend your summer doing?”
To complicate matters, festivals in parks has become a local political issue, especially as the Green Party looks to make breakthroughs on Labour-dominated councils across London. Last week a by-election in a council ward next to Brockwell Park saw the Greens gain a seat from its rivals, with a campaign that emphasised damage to Brockwell Park as its top issue.
At the same time, the aims of the SayYesLambeth appear to be politically influenced by the YIMBY movement, a loose alliance of policies that supports housebuilding, economic growth, and reducing the power of locals to object to developments on their doorstep. Even if they aren’t formally connected to Labour, the group’s objectives chime with the dominant thinking in the Labour government.
London Centric asked Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London who has pledged to overrule local councils on licensing issues and prioritise the capital’s nightlife, whether he backed the SayYesLambeth group.
In response City Hall provided London Centric with a carefully-worded statement from deputy mayor for culture Justine Simons, which emphasised the positive side of the events: “London is a global music capital and festivals offer the opportunity for many thousands of visitors to enjoy some of the world’s biggest artists, boosting our economy and providing jobs. Festivals can have a significant impact on their local area and that is why it’s important that councils continue to work with residents to ensure concerns are heard and addressed to deliver successful events.”
David, one of the gay rugby team behind SayYesLambeth, insisted there is no deeper meaning to their campaign. Mighty Hoopla, he said, is “honestly the best day of the year” where he gets to drink Prosecco with friends, wear glitter, and party in a safe space where “if I want to hold someone’s hands or kiss someone no one judges me.”
He concluded: “What do you want to spend your summer doing? I want to spend it having a good old dance. I can’t get a ticket to Glastonbury for love nor money, this is at the end of our street and it’s affordable. We’re part of the community as well as everyone else. If that park gives up eight days for young people who want fun then I think that’s a fair trade off.”
On Thursday, a judge will decide whether that will be a possibility this year.
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Thanks for the really interesting coverage about the Brockwell Park issue!
I've attended Mighty Hooplah several times and very much match the demographic of the '5 gays with laptops' and ordinarily would describe myself as more of a YIMBY.
However, I've lived very close to Finsbury Park for about 6 years and having experienced the disruption that occurs every summer I feel conflicted.
Every summer in Finsbury park the set up begins, taking over at least 50 percent of the park for weeks and weeks, erecting massive fences that get in the way of thoroughfares, huge trucks roll through, and burly staff in high-vis yell at you if you happen to try and walk or cycle the wrong way.
As someone who has lived without a garden for many years, Finsbury Park operates as my garden, my gym and my social space. I get frustrated when that is taken away from me for big chunks of the warmer months and resent the private companies using a community and public space to make money.
I appreciate that it's an important fundraiser for cash strapped council- but perhaps if we could see tangible results of that money improving the parks it wouldn't leave such a bad taste in the mouth?!
I believe there's a middle ground somewhere that allows festivals to still go ahead, while perhaps minimising the infrastructure, or compacts the set up and pack down time... or perhaps like your piece mentions, it's a case of every other year, or maybe there's alternative spaces that are more suitable?
Brockwell park local here who’s sympathetic to both sides of the argument. I do wish those opposing the festivals could make their arguments without having to get all conspiracy theory the moment someone’s brave enough to pop up in support. Thanks for looking into this!