Lewisham is an inner London borough covering an area of approximately 14 square miles of south-east London.
Lewisham has excellent transport links to central London and is just 12 miles from the M25 motorway. The southern extension of the Docklands Light Railway has further enhanced the attractiveness and accessibility of Lewisham to other parts of London, in particular to Canary Wharf where employment is set to rise by 60,000 over the next five years.
Despite its inner London location, Lewisham has more than 560 hectares of green space, excluding domestic garden space and railway land, with 45 public parks covering about 360 hectares. Just over 300 hectares of land is designated as a Site of Nature Conservation Importance.
The borough has a large shopping centre in Lewisham town centre and other smaller shopping centres in Deptford, Catford, Sydenham and Forest Hill. For many of the borough's residents, Lewisham is a place in which they choose to live but, on the whole, they tend to work in other parts of London and the southeast.
The borough benefits from a highly diverse population, both ethnically and culturally. We have around 250,000 people living in Lewisham. The borough has a younger age structure than the national 'norm', with a relatively higher proportion of residents in the 0-4 and 15-44 age groups. Approximately one third of the overall population and 50 per cent of pupils in Lewisham schools are from black and minority ethnic communities. The largest of these are of Caribbean and African origin, but the borough is also home to sizeable Asian, Chinese and Turkish/Turkish Cypriot communities.
The Community Strategy values and seeks to build on this diversity, recognising and challenging racism, institutional or otherwise. Lewisham has many attributes and successes to be proud of. However, some of the borough's strong and successful communities are also some of its most deprived ones. The population of Lewisham faces some very distinct challenges:
- An above average proportion of the population with low levels of literacy and numeracy.
- Levels of teenage pregnancy that are amongst the highest in the country.
- Deprivation - the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions showed that four of Lewisham's former wards are in the worst 10 percent in the country for employment, with 21 wards in the same category for housing, five for education and four for child poverty.
- 7 percent of all adults aged 18-64 live with physical disabilities or sensory loss.
- Almost a quarter of all households are pensioner only households.
- Lone parent households comprise 15 percent of the total, almost twice the national average.
In addressing these issues, public agencies in Lewisham annually spend £1.5 billion, around half of the estimated local economy. Despite these issues, local communities are vibrant and creative. For example, a recent assessment of the creative sector in Lewisham found that the borough has over 550 small and medium-sized creative businesses alone. Above all, local people and communities are actively involved in the life of the borough.