Car park to cafe bar: how the Really Local Group is renewing the UK’s derelict spaces

theguardian.com:

“This is really exciting,” says Ealing resident Alafair Celestine as she surveys a shopfront just off the local high street where the black-painted boarded-up windows of the former Karma Club don’t immediately appear to justify her comments.

Celestine is an impromptu late addition to a tour of a project that is revamping the redundant space under Ealing Broadway shopping centre that once marketed itself as “west London’s hottest nightclub”.

The red velvet decor and dancing poles are being replaced by a light airy space that will open next month as a cafe by day and then a bar with live music or comedy in the evening alongside three cinema screens showing the latest blockbusters, locally made films and indie movies.

Celestine is excited about the plans. “The community really wants a cinema,” she says. “If we want to go and see a film we have to go to Westfield [three and a half miles to the east]. It’s not that far, but it’s nice to have something really for the local community. So many places closed but now new things are coming in.”

The £2m Ealing scheme is the latest from developer the Really Local Group (RLG) to transform former retail sites in shopping malls into community assets with cinemas, bars and space to host live music, after opening Catford Mews in south London in 2019 and Reading’s Biscuit Factory last year.

The group has already announced five more projects along the same lines, including a refit of a building that used to house the nightclub Chicago’s in Sutton and of the Thorowgoods furniture shop in Bermondsey, both in south London, plus the redevelopment of a vinyl pressing plant in Hayes, west London.

The schemes are all based in south-east England, but this week RLG plans to raise £4m in fresh funds, up to