Debt forces Lewisham’s only cinema to close

Last week, Lewisham council took the drastic step of shutting down the Catford Mews Cinema in the heart of the town centre’s main shopping mall. This leaves Lewisham as the only one of London’s 32 boroughs without an operating cinema.

The Really Local Group who ran the cinema were £650,000 in debt to the Borough and were also in receipt of a grant of £50,000 from the council for repairs which are yet to be completed. The Catford Regeneration Partnership who run Catford Mews, local housing at Milford Towers plus Catford’s open air market, asked the cinema chain to supply an asset-based guarantee to ensure any debt could be recovered. However, the guarantee could not be provided. The Really Local Group had also failed to repair the cinema. Sites run by RLG at Peckham Levels and Ealing have both entered administration in the last three months.

But October’s meeting of Lewisham’s Mayor and Cabinet revealed even more debt within the system. The Catford Regeneration Partnership, an “arm’s-length” subsidiary of LBL, was set up to run the Mews pending the redevelopment of all of central Catford. This organisation is now itself in financial difficulties and is owed £1.3m by its tenants. The last business plan set out by the council allows the Partnership a three year deferment of a loan of £17m to help stabilise its financial position. The question now is whether the council can move forward on its plan to regenerate central Catford with a scheme for 2,700 new homes plus a diversion of the main road running through the town centre to the rear of Laurence House. LBL’s statement responding to last week’s events states that “this makes it more challenging to meet our regeneration objectives in Catford”.

Since 2018 Lewisham Council has funnelled £16.21 million into repairs to Milford Towers in Catford (an estate it aims to bulldoze as part of redeveloping the area) because of complaints by tenants about the bad state of repairs to the building.

Plans for the redevelopment of central Catford (below) now “in doubt”.

Picture below copyright architect Studio Egret West