Monday 11 February 2008

Living la vida social enterprise


Ended up out for a drink the other night with various people of a social enterprise leaning and found ourselves chatting to Ted and George, who have been involved in just about every bit of community development in and around the area we’re living. It was a privilege to talk to them and hear all about our local history.

The street we live in was one of the first initiatives between the community and the GLC back in the eighties. The land and buildings over a couple of acres were formerly the Courage brewery (our block was the office building) and they were redeveloped through a partnership between the council and the community into affordable social housing. Since then, there’s obviously been a bit of ‘right to buy’ leakage (presumably what has happened to the flat we’re living in) but the whole area remains one of the few centrally-located bits of social housing in London.

Round the corner from us is the Borough Market, a social enterprise which has been around for around thirty years and which brings hordes of middle class shoppers into the area every weekend. Our local pub is the Market Porter, which we were delighted to find out is actually owned by a local charity – guilt free drinking!

A few minutes along the Thames is the Oxo Tower Wharf, part of the Coin Street Community Builders development, which is more social housing (co-operatives and community-owned), combined with a whole set of bars, restaurants, boutique shops and galleries, again bringing money into the areas. We had dinner at the Oxo Tower 8th floor restaurant on Saturday night (thanks Kevin!), and I would highly recommend it for food (melt in the mouth flavours), wine and amazing views (see above for evidence!)

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