A vibrant hub for 'criminals' and race adviser's cronies

Creativity is certainly involved at Brixton Base, but not in quite the way the Mayor might hope. The project, in Offley Road, Kennington, has become a giant siphon of City Hall cash into questionable pockets, and an object of serious concern to its local community.

According to answers to the London Assembly, the Mayor's half-million pounds over the past two years appears to have bought just three training programmes, one lasting just six weeks and the other two, running together, six months.

And even those may not be all they seem. South London filmmaker Shango B'Song told the Standard Brixton Base used his project to get money out of the LDA under false pretences.

"I financed all the spending on my project out of my own pocket, which I reckon came to £133,000 in cash and equipment," says Mr B'Song. "But I saw almost none of the grant the LDA gave Brixton Base to pay for it. They pocketed it and told me they'd been refused a grant."

When he realised what had happened, Mr B'Song said Brixton Base's director, Errol Walters, gave him 24 hours to leave the building and kept all his valuable studio equipment. The LDA and Brixton Base repeatedly refused to deny Mr B'Song's claims.

The reality of Brixton Base is that it has become a gathering place not for young people wanting to enter the creative industries, but for two other slightly less deserving groups. First is the constellation of friends and business associates around the Mayor's race adviser, Lee Jasper, a very high number of whom seem to have places on Brixton Base's board, or to work for it, or both.

Their links with City Hall may explain the project's good fortune in winning public money - including a grant of £237,000 for "premises" when they occupy an LDA-owned building and paid no rent at all for the first year.

The second group, according to some locals, is the area's criminal fraternity. "This project is becoming of major concern to the community," said one. Another person described how a Brixton Base staffer boasted to a meeting of nine people, at which our informant was present, that he had threatened the LDA with gang violence if they did not continue the project.

The same informant told us that Mr Walters had welcomed and introduced a leading member of a south London street gang to callers to the Base. The LDA's refusal to act on repeated complaints by the users of the building about the "intimidating" atmosphere there may have been because of the project's City Hall connections.

Or it may have been that they themselves felt intimidated.