The Peckham Coal Line Urban Park
The Peckham Coal Line project has reached its funding target after a successful crowdfunding campaign, alongside funding from the Mayor’s High Street Fund and others. The project has now raised enough money to move to the next stage: creating a Design and Feasibility study brief, described below.
The Peckham Coal Line project is a fantastic example of how we can harness the enthusiasm of civic crowdfunding and work more directly with Londoners to improve their neighbourhoods.
Boris Johnson, former Mayor of London
What is the Peckham Coal Line?
The Coal Line is a community-led project that aims to better connect Peckham’s neighbourhoods: a 900m long park to link Queens Road and Rye Lane. The line will run on disused coal sidings alongside the railway line, through the heart of Peckham.
The aims of this project are to:
- encourage businesses and residents to engage with each other, building community groups and a stronger neighbourhood
- share the regeneration already happening in Rye Lane with the rest of the Peckham community. The line will bridge a busy road, improving walking and cycling connections between the two high streets. It will also become a cultural space to attract visitors
- fill a gap in the road-free cycle and walking route from inner South London to Greenland Dock, where Sustrans are proposing a bridge to Canary Wharf. This would provide tens of thousands of commuters with a safe, quick, healthy way to get to work, reducing pressure on roads and public transport
Find out more about the Peckham Coal Line project on its Spacehive page.
A crowdfunded project
In 2015 we launched the Mayor’s High Street Fund to improve London’s high streets. We asked local community groups to pitch ideas on how to make their local high streets better places to visit, live and do business.
We asked them to do this using the Spacehive website – a ‘civic space crowdfunding’ platform which encourages local residents to transform where they live by submitting projects and funding ideas. These groups could then use Spacehive and social media to build local enthusiasm for their ideas, to try to reach their funding target.
To gather support for the project on Spacehive, the Coal Line team ran frequent events and workshops for the community – residents, businesses, schools, commuters – to learn about the Coal Line and to share ideas.
The project needed to raise £76,000 to fund several aspects, including a full feasibility study to explain how the line would be built, the planning issues involved and building costs.
Design and feasibility study brief
The Coal Line project has now published a Design and Feasibility study brief, to answer questions and move the project forwards. These questions include:
- what will it look like?
- how much will it cost?
- how will it work with the existing railway and how will it benefit those who currently live around the route?
- what is the business case and how will the Coal Line support itself in the future?
This brief is now open to groups of architects, engineers and landscape designers who are interested in collaborating on this exciting project.
You can find out more and download the brief document from the Peckham Coal Line website.
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