The Green administration has cancelled Labour’s plans to sell off the public toilets, giving a local campaign group the chance to prove their ‘watertight’ plans for the building are credible
Hackney Council has changed course on plans to sell off derelict public toilets, in a win for community campaigners. On Monday (July 20) the new Green administration officially cancelled Labour’s plans to dispose of the vacant council-owned sites on Brooksby’s Walk overlooking Chatsworth Road, which have not been used for their original purpose as loos for two decades.
The Clapton Improvement Society (CIS), a community group set up to revitalise vacant properties in the area, argued that the boarded-up building was “readily able to restore for public use and benefit”. Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) at a protest outside the Town Hall on Monday, the group’s spokesperson Jon Aldenton denounced the sale as “complete madness”.
“It’s crazy economics because if you sell off assets to meet a revenue budget, you never get them back,” he said. Opponents of the sale added that the eastern part of the borough only has 11 public toilets, unfairly impacting wheelchair users or those with mobility problems.
The group claims they have “a watertight plan to create an environmentally-friendly, community-led initiative to generate income for the public and the council at zero cost to the community,” though the finer points of this plan have not been disclosed. The toilets in the 1930s-era building have a history of redevelopment plans, including proposals for the nearby Homerton Hospital to turn the site into a sickle cell clinic, but this never materialised.
In recent years the building played host to a community cafe, ‘Nana’, until 2015 when it was forced to shut – triggering a campaign by CIS to safeguard the site. The loos later became home to a rooftop restaurant, Brooksby’s Walk, but by 2018 its doors had also closed.
In December 2025, the Labour-run council signed off on plans to sell the site, due to the costly investment required to restore the building and its need to generate revenue. But after the party’s defeat at the May elections, the CIS revived its campaign to keep the toilets in public use.
At a cabinet meeting on Monday evening, senior councillors accepted the campaigner’s demands – citing both the “strength of feeling” and the Green Party’s election manifesto pledge to bring more council-owned buildings into public use. Cllr Rachel Nkiessu-Guifo, Cabinet Member for Inclusive Economy, Skills, High Streets and Markets, confirmed the council would trigger a “fair and time-limited” process to consider “credible” community-led alternatives.
“Any solution must respond to the very real financial pressures the council faces,” she added.
The decision comes as the new administration confirmed the borough continues to face a “real financial crisis”. At Monday’s meeting, Cabinet Member for Finance, Cllr Florence Schechter, put the council’s current forecasted overspend at £5.4m.
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