Open Letter to the Mayor of London: Stand with Brick Lane, Not Cultural Erasure

ConserveConnect publishes the following open letter in response to the ongoing threat of cultural displacement and speculative redevelopment in Brick Lane. We invite cultural institutions, small businesses, residents, and public figures across London and beyond to endorse, share, or republish this letter in solidarity.

This is a moment to choose between community-led regeneration and policy-enabled erasure.

To add your name or discuss a joint publication, contact: team@conserveconnect.com

Open Letter to the Mayor of London

Stand with Brick Lane, Not Cultural Erasure
October 2025

Dear Mayor Sadiq Khan,

We write to you on behalf of residents, conservationists, cultural leaders, small businesses, and communities throughout Tower Hamlets and London to urge you—unequivocally—not to call in the Truman Brewery redevelopment proposal and to publicly uphold the Strategic Development Committee’s decision to reject it.

This is no longer just a local planning matter. It is a moral and political test of leadership—and a defining moment in how London chooses to confront the loss of its memory, meaning, and human scale.

Brick Lane Is Not an Asset Class

Brick Lane is one of the most symbolically and culturally significant streets in Britain—a place where migration, memory, and resilience converge. Generations of working-class communities—Huguenot, Jewish, Bengali—have built a living archive of radical, creative, and inclusive life.

The development your office may be asked to “call in” was never about regeneration. It was a speculative investment vehicle, dressed in architectural renderings. It offered just six social homes, zero rent protections for existing market traders, and over 70% of its space allocated to office blocks and a multi-storey car park.

“This is not regeneration. This is removal by design.”
— Save Brick Lane campaign

To allow this proposal to proceed would be to sanction the commercial sterilisation of a historic, living neighbourhood—a place still beating with life and meaning.

You Know This Story

You have spoken movingly about your family’s roots in South London—about growing up in a neighbourhood shaped by trade, community, and belonging. That same fabric is being undone across the capital—not only by gentrification, but by policy-enabled cultural erasure.

Brick Lane has endured far-right violence, post-industrial neglect, and austerity. Now it faces the slow violence of commercial extraction, where profit is privatised and heritage is commodified.

London Is Losing Its Human Scale

In A Pattern Language, architect and theorist Christopher Alexander wrote:

“A city is not merely a place in space, it is a drama in time.”

When that drama is disrupted—when market arcades become chain outlets, and memory is replaced by yield—the city fractures. Brick Lane’s scale, rhythm, and cultural texture are irreplaceable. The developers proposed not enhancement, but cultural vandalism under glass.

We must resist the illusion that heritage is preserved simply because façades remain. Culture is not a shell. It is use, memory, trade, food, resistance, and belonging.

Your Record Will Be Judged

Your office has previously intervened in major schemes—Bishopsgate Goodsyard, Southbank, Westferry Printworks—with mixed legacies. In some, you corrected injustice. In others, you enabled it.

Let us be clear: your actions—or inaction—on Brick Lane will be remembered. They will be examined by planners, policy makers, cultural historians, and by the communities whose lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Silence in the face of cultural erasure is not neutrality. It is complicity.

What We Ask

We respectfully call on you to:

• Refrain from calling in the Truman Brewery application;
• Publicly endorse the Strategic Development Committee’s rejection;
• Acknowledge the deep cultural harm this scheme represents;
• Support the community-driven Brick Lane Central Masterplan as a viable, heritage-rooted alternative.

A City at a Crossroads

This moment reaches beyond one street, one borough, or one planning decision.

Do we build cities for markets—or for people?
Do we preserve façades—or do we preserve meaning?
Do we lead from above—or listen from below?

Brick Lane belongs to the people who built it—not the investors who seek to extract from it. We urge you to stand with them—clearly, publicly, and without delay.

Respectfully,
ConserveConnect
on behalf of cultural advocates, residents, and communities across East London and beyond