... and launched UK’s first urban local currency:

The B£, which is supported by Lambeth Council, is available in denominations of B£1, B£5, B£10 and B£20 and can be used with a growing number of participating independent businesses in the Brixton area. Because the B£ can’t leave the area, nor be ‘banked’ to earn interest, customers using it know they will be putting money in to circulation, supporting local shops and jobs. The scheme will maintain the diversity of the Brixton high street and preventing it becoming just another ‘clone town’ in the face of the credit crunch and fierce competition from chain stores.

The Brixton Pound (B£) supports local shops, encourage local trade and production and keep money working for Brixton for longer.

Each of the new Brixton notes will commemorate a local hero, voted on by the people of Brixton and celebrating the diversity of the South London suburb:

B£1 – Olive Morris, a radical political activist and community organiser who established the Brixton Black Women’s Group, and played a pivotal role in the squatters’ rights campaigns of the 1970s; Olive was born in Jamaica in 1952 and moved with her family to Britain aged 9. She was a Brixton resident from 1961-1975 and died at the age of 27 from cancer

B£5 – James Lovelock, the independent scientist and environmentalist who, whilst working for NASA, first developed the ‘Gaia’ theory, that the earth is in a delicate but dynamic steady-state that human activity is disturbing, in particular through global warming. James was a Brixton resident from 1925-1933

B£10 – C L R James, the Trinidadian journalist, historian, socialist thinker and anti-colonialist who chose to spend his final years on the ‘front line’ of Brixton