A grassroots campaign to get an urban park running along a disused railway line in Peckham has smashed its fundraising target with a record number of pledges.
The crowdfunding website SpaceHive received 937 individual donations towards the Peckham Coal Line’s £65,000 target – three hundred more than their highest previous total.
By the Saturday night deadline, local architect Nick Woodford was relieved to see they had not only met their target, but exceeded it by a whopping £12,000 with a total of £76,000.
“It’s really great,” said Nick, who admitted he was “a bit worried” back in August, when he calculated the project would need more than £1,000 a day to achieve their target amount.
At the eleventh hour Southwark Council pledged £10,000 to London’s answer to New York’s High Line, which would run along a 900-meter-long stretch of elevated track from Ricketts sidings by Peckham Rye station to Kirkwood Nature Reserve, coming out behind Queen’s Road station.
“In the last few weeks it seemed to pick up. Every time we got a big backer that was great but by far the biggest number of pledges came from the general public,” said Nick, who got the wheels in motion earlier this year with fellow Peckham architect Clyde Watson.
The nine core members of the Coal Line team are now working with Southwark Council, National Rail, the Greater London Authority and Transport for London to prepare a brief for the feasibility study to look into how the Coal Line could work in practice. This will go out to tender and a company will be appointed by the New Year.
900 meter long ? What are they, gas or parking meters ?
Just so – sloppy Americanisms get everywhere nowadays: bleaughhhhh!