Brixton Buzz reports that Lambeth College, near the end of Josephine Avenue on Brixton Hill, is due to be demolished and replaced with a new two to five storey building…
The Brixton Hill campus for Lambeth College looks set to be completely demolished with a new two to five storey building being built to take its place.
The Lambeth Council Planning Applications Committee will consider a report [pdf] that recommends the new facility when it next meets at the Karibu Centre on 24th November.
The site will continue to be used by Lambeth College, although the organisation is scaling back the number of students attending the Brixton Hill campus from 500 to 420.
The rest of the space will be taken up by Trinity Academy – the controversial Free School with a Catholic ethos, and Southbank UTC – a new college that will specialise in building and medical engineering academic and technical courses for students aged 14-19.
A Multi Use Games Area will form part of the new development. This will be available for the public to hire out during out of school hours. There is also the possibility that the library and ICT suite on the site could also be available to residents.
The full planning application calls for:
“Erection of 2-5 storey buildings to provide an Educational Campus (Use Class D1) for 3 institutions comprising Lambeth College, Trinity Academy and Southbank Engineering University Technical College including the provision of new Sports Hall, Multi Use Games Area (MUGA), external play/seating/social spaces, relocation of the existing Grade II listed fountain sculpture, soft landscaping, cycle parking and disabled car parking (following demolition of existing buildings).”
The Officer recommendation in the planning report is for conditional permission, subject to the signing of a Section 106 agreement.
The Brixton Hill site of Lambeth College was originally built with the aim of housing 1,400 students. The Clapham and Vauxhall sites have now helped to spread the students around the borough. The College is expecting the Brixton Hill site to become a facility for part time students in the future.
Trinity Academy Free School opened in September 2014 after the government bought part of the site from Lambeth College for £18m. Only 17 students turned up for the first day of teaching.
The Free School now has ambitious plans to take this figure to 840 students on the new Brixton Hill site. It estimates that 82 full time teaching staff will also be employed.
Southbank UTC meanwhile is proposing to offer 600 student places. This takes the combined number of learners on the existing Lambeth College site to 1,860, hence the need for a taller building.
The planning report makes reference to the current design of the site, even suggesting that it is not tall enough when considered in relation to nearby buildings:
“The loss of the existing college building is considered acceptable as it does not make a positive contribution to the area.
The Brixton College building, which uses different materials and methods of construction from its older neighbours, is described within the Rush Common and Brixton Hill Conservation Area Appraisal as being “far too low in height in relation to the reminder on Brixton Hill – a building of say four storeys would have been far more appropriate.”
Your wish is granted, it seems.
No car parking will be offered on the site except for disabled users. The location is incredibly well served by public transport.
The decision to allow the Free School to expand in the borough is worth exploring further. The planning report argues that there is a need for extra education places at a secondary school level in this part of the borough:
“A key priority of the Lambeth Local Plan (2015) is to provide essential infrastructure. Policy S3 states that ‘proposals for new primary and secondary schools or the extension or expansion of existing schools, will be supported where they help to deliver the Council’s agreed strategy for the provision of additional state-funded school places in the borough’.
The supporting text states that state-funded schools include local authority maintained schools (community, foundation and voluntary aided and controlled schools), academies and free schools.”
Which must irritate Lambeth Labour.
As recently as February of 2014, the local Labour group was in ideological opposition to the opening of one of the flagship Free Schools for the Tory government:
“The free school policy can cause havoc for the council’s admissions policy, where schools are set up in areas where there is no demand for places. This is the case with Trinity free school in Brixton where there’s no need for another secondary school.”
