The Trouble with things that don’t look important: swapping Blackheath farmers’ market for a housing development would erode community
In March 2025 Acorn Developments submitted a planning application to Lewisham Council to build 45 homes on Blackheath Station car park. The scheme has been almost overwhelmingly rejected by locals, with more than 1200 objections to the development received by the council and public figures with a local connection including Jude Law, Dominic Cooper, Mark Knopfler, Jools Holland, Terry Waite and Dame Joan Ruddock all lending their support.
Those objecting fear that the plans will harm the Blackheath Conservation Area, cause loss of residential amenity, school safeguarding and essential public parking, damage local businesses, create construction traffic and disruption, and cause the potential loss of the weekly farmers’ market.
The planning application was deferred by Lewisham Council in March, saying that it didn’t have enough information to make a decision. However, the threat of this wildly unpopular development plan remains.
Here SARAH TUCKER reflects on how development plans like this can do untold damage to communities.
A man is handing over £8 for a loaf of sourdough. A woman is examining a beetroot with the concentration usually associated with brain surgery. Three dogs appear to be conducting diplomatic relations. Somebody is discussing mushrooms with such intensity that you begin to suspect they may be negotiating a peace treaty rather than lunch.
Around them, at Blackheath farmers’ market, dozens of people are drinking coffee, meeting neighbours, exchanging local gossip, supporting small businesses and participating in exactly the sort of community interaction that councils, planners and developers spend a great deal of time trying to encourage.
Reading about the debate surrounding Blackheath Station car park recently, where the farmers’ market is held, I found myself wondering whether everybody had accidentally identified the wrong thing. Although I live in Richmond rather than Blackheath, where our own farmers’ market occupies a car park every Saturday, the discussion felt immediately familiar because it appeared to rest on an assumption so obvious that nobody seemed to be questioning it.
We assume the car park is the important thing and the market is the temporary visitor. What if it is the other way round?
At first glance this sounds ridiculous, which is often an encouraging sign because lateral thinking frequently begins with an idea that appears faintly absurd before revealing an uncomfortable truth. The market returns every week. It generates economic activity every week. It creates social interaction every week. It supports traders every week. It gives people a reason to leave the house every week. The cars, by contrast, merely visit.
Seen from this perspective, it becomes possible to argue that Blackheath does not contain a market occupying a car park. It contains a car park that occasionally occupies a market.
The reason this matters is that London undoubtedly needs housing, and few sensible people would argue otherwise. The current proposals for Blackheath Station car park include dozens of new homes and, as with almost every planning debate in modern Britain, the conversation has quickly become framed as a choice between development and preservation.
Yet what if that is the wrong question?
One local resident described the farmers’ market as “the village square we never had.” Another pointed out that she sees more people she knows during a couple of hours at the market than she does during the rest of her week. Traders have expressed concern that successful markets depend on habit, visibility and routine; qualities that are remarkably difficult to recreate once disrupted and almost impossible to manufacture artificially.
These comments struck me because they echoed conversations I hear regularly in Richmond. Every Saturday our local farmers’ market performs the same transformation. Nobody attends because they are passionate about tarmac. People arrive intending to buy vegetables and somehow end up discussing politics, schools, grandchildren, local restaurants and the weather. Dogs acquire admirers. Children acquire cake. The shopping itself becomes almost incidental.
This is the point at which economists and planners often become slightly uncomfortable because the most important product of a farmers’ market may not actually be the produce.
A loaf of bread can be purchased elsewhere; a conversation cannot.
The difficulty is that modern society has become exceptionally good at measuring some forms of value and surprisingly poor at recognising others. Housing units can be counted. Financial returns can be measured. Projected revenues can be modelled. What proves much harder to quantify is the value of running into a neighbour beside a cauliflower or the reassuring familiarity of seeing the same stallholder every Sunday morning for years.
Edward de Bono, the inventor of lateral thinking, used to argue that societies instinctively award gold medals to whatever can be counted while overlooking forms of value that can only be experienced. Housing numbers receive a gold medal because they fit neatly into spreadsheets. Financial returns receive a gold medal because they fit neatly into reports. The sense of belonging created by a thriving market receives considerably less attention because nobody has yet invented a reliable formula for calculating the economic value of unexpectedly meeting a friend while buying asparagus.
Yet those encounters matter because communities are not built from buildings alone.
Applying a little lateral thinking changes the nature of the debate entirely. Suppose somebody proposed removing the market while retaining every parking space. There would be understandable outrage. Suppose somebody proposed retaining the market while eliminating parking altogether. There would be a different sort of outrage. What this suggests is that neither the market nor the parking is the central issue. The real issue is flexibility.
One of the least appreciated characteristics of successful places is their ability to perform multiple functions. The village hall that hosts yoga classes on Monday, a council meeting on Tuesday and a wedding reception on Saturday is more valuable than its architecture would suggest. The church hall, scout hut and recreation ground all operate according to the same principle. Their value lies not in what they are but in what they enable.
The Blackheath site belongs to this overlooked category of places. During the week it serves commuters and shoppers. At weekends it becomes a market. At other times it functions as informal public space. It is less a location than a piece of civic equipment.
Perhaps this is why I find myself unexpectedly sympathetic to Blackheath residents despite living several boroughs away. What I recognise is not the specific site but the pattern. Across Britain we seem increasingly determined to create places that perform a single function while quietly losing places capable of performing several. Flats are for living in. Offices are for working in. Shops are for shopping in. Every square metre has a designated purpose and a management strategy.
A flexible space, by contrast, behaves more like a Swiss Army knife. It adapts. It changes. It responds to different needs at different times.
The irony is that this flexibility is often mistaken for underuse.
A market occupies the site only once a week, therefore the site must be underused.
A village hall stands empty for much of the day; therefore, the hall must be underused.
A recreation ground sits quietly between football matches; therefore, the ground must be underused.
Yet this logic would lead us to conclude that a spare bedroom, a public library or a fire station are failures because they are not operating at maximum intensity every minute of every day.
Perhaps the real question is not how many homes can be built on the site but whether modern Britain has become so obsessed with maximising every square foot that we have forgotten the value of places that are useful in more than one way.
If I were making the decision, I would begin not by asking how many homes could fit onto the site but by asking how many existing functions could be preserved, expanded and improved before a single brick was laid. Could housing be introduced while strengthening the market? Could public space be enhanced? Could better drainage, electricity supplies, seating, planting and facilities make the site more useful rather than less? Could development increase flexibility instead of reducing it?
These are not anti-development questions – they are questions about intelligent development.
The potholes can and should be repaired. Housing can and should be built. The market can and should be improved. None of these objectives are mutually exclusive. The challenge is recognising all the different kinds of value a place already possesses before we accidentally build over them.
Because the most valuable places in Britain are often the ones that look entirely unremarkable. They are the places we barely notice until somebody proposes removing them, at which point we suddenly discover how much work they had quietly been doing all along.
Further information: rejectblackheathstation.co.uk
Sarah Tucker is a journalist, travel writer and the biographer of Edward de Bono, inventor of lateral thinking. Her latest book, Love Laterally, explores relationships, creativity and modern life through the lens of lateral thinking, published by Aurora Metro Books.
