Why Peckham Levels matters.
Peckham Levels is an inventive cultural complex where Peckham's independent creative character meets seven repurposed car-park floors, artist workspaces and an industrial structure adapted for public culture and enterprise.
Set along Rye Lane near Cerise Road and just steps from Peckham Rye station, the complex occupies the upper levels of a former multi-storey car park whose broad concrete decks rise above one of South London's busiest commercial streets. Exposed columns, beams, long horizontal openings and brightly treated circulation preserve the building's utilitarian construction while giving studios, workshops and communal areas a legible architectural order. The principal encounter unfolds vertically through successive floors where creative workspaces open into larger areas devoted to exhibitions, performance, food and social activity, allowing the former parking decks to operate as interconnected rooms. Long sightlines across the concrete structural grid introduce a distinct secondary mechanism, with open floor plates and perimeter openings retaining the immense horizontal scale created for vehicles. The result is a cultural venue whose character depends on the direct conversion of repetitive parking infrastructure into a dense environment for making, working, performing and gathering.
What defines Peckham Levels.
Peckham Levels is best known for transforming seven disused floors of a multi-storey car park into a major creative workspace and cultural venue through a project developed by Make Shift and Turner Works. The structure formed part of a larger commercial complex whose front section originally opened as a Sainsbury's during the 1980s before the supermarket closed and its former store became a multiscreen cinema during the following decade. Southwark Council launched an open ideas competition in September 2015 seeking a five-year temporary use for the underused parking structure, with local employment and creative activity established as central objectives. Architects, entrepreneurs and community groups submitted dozens of proposals before Peckham Levels won the competition in November 2015. Turner Works approached the existing building as a robust industrial shell, retaining exposed concrete, the regular column-and-beam grid and long strip openings as primary architectural features. The conversion distributed fifty studios across the complex alongside open-access workshops, a seventy-desk coworking area, screen-printing facilities, ceramics production with a kiln, photography and darkroom facilities and music rehearsal rooms. Levels five and six concentrated communal and public activity, creating an architectural transition between private production areas and spaces where the wider public could encounter the creative community. AO Architecture designed the vividly treated stair circulation, adding a separate visual system to the retained concrete structure. Peckham Levels opened publicly in December 2017, completing a conversion whose architecture depended on adapting an existing building with relatively limited physical intervention.
The project's subsequent history has tested the original concept of temporary cultural occupation against the longer-term demand for affordable creative workspace in Peckham. Turner Works conceived the conversion as an interim-development model capable of placing independent businesses, artists and entrepreneurs inside a building awaiting a different long-term future. More than 600 jobs were associated with the original scheme, extending the project's function beyond studio provision into local employment and small-business incubation. Architectural recognition followed with the Meanwhile category at the 2018 New London Awards and the Reinventing the Carpark category at the 2019 British Parking Awards. Years of operation established a working population spanning artists, creative studios, community organizations and other independent enterprises within the converted decks. Financial pressure on the operating company eventually disrupted that model, leading Southwark Council to regain control after the operator entered administration. The council appointed The Trampery to manage Peckham Levels in August 2024, protecting existing businesses and continuing operation of a complex supporting more than 200 people in its daily working community. The change placed a venue conceived for five years of temporary occupation into another institutional phase, demonstrating how the original car-park conversion developed into established creative infrastructure within Peckham.
How Peckham Levels fits.
Peckham Levels works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Victorian cultural reform, purpose-built theatrical education and experimental civic architecture through three institutions embedded across Peckham and Camberwell.
Begin at South London Gallery, whose origins reach to William Rossiter's South London Working Men's College, founded in 1868 as part of a reform movement connecting education and cultural access. The organization developed into a Free Library and Art Gallery before the South London Fine Art Gallery opened on Peckham Road in 1891, supported by a council that included Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, G. F. Watts and Walter Crane; Godfrey Pinkerton designed the surviving Victorian gallery, and newspaper proprietor John Passmore Edwards subsequently funded a lecture hall and library behind it. The institution expanded into the former Peckham Road Fire Station in 2018, extending a cultural project begun during the nineteenth century into a second historic building. Continue to Mountview, whose move from North London to Peckham produced a £30 million purpose-built drama academy developed with Southwark Council and designed by Carl Turner Architects. Construction began in April 2017 and students entered the building in September 2018, bringing theatre training onto a former brownfield site that had previously accommodated Whitten's timber yard and the Area 10 performance venue. The complex incorporates two theatres, extensive acting and dance studios, television production spaces, music practice rooms and professional workshops, with Gilbert-Ash constructing a building conceived as a permanent base for education, public performance and professional production. Conclude at Peckham Library, where Will Alsop transformed the conventional civic-library model through a building completed in 2000 with its principal reading room raised above the ground on angled supports. The elevated volume creates public space beneath its cantilevered floor, and internally sculptural pods contain meeting rooms and specialized collections within the larger reading environment; natural lighting and ventilation were integrated into the design as part of its environmental strategy. The building won the 2000 RIBA Stirling Prize, giving Peckham a nationally recognized work of civic architecture at the center of the public-realm redevelopment surrounding Peckham Square. The progression moves from Rossiter's nineteenth-century program of cultural education through a purpose-built academy joining theatrical training with professional production into Alsop's dramatic reworking of the public library, revealing successive approaches to making art, education and civic culture physically accessible in Peckham.
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