Catford’s lanes where people go to “shoot up or do a pee” could become more like Brighton’s famous lanes in a transformation of the town centre.

Lewisham Council’s sustainable development committee heard from master planner David West, who through Studio Egret West is preparing a draft master plan for Catford town centre, about his vision for the £500m regeneration project.

Part of the plan includes an initiative to revamp the lanes over January and February next year so they lose their unsavoury associations, Mr West told the committee.

This could include low-cost items like painted planter boxes.

“If I say Brighton Lanes, I am sure everybody has been down to Brighton and enjoyed the Brighton Lanes, [they are] a characterful, tight-knit, interwoven amazing use of a town centre,” he explained.

“If I say Catford Lanes you think ‘oh, that is not very nice.’ One of the things that have come out really often is that there are little lane ways spinning out all the way around the middle of your town centre.

“Thomas Lane car park could be somewhere we actually want to put one of these lanes. I have asked people and they say nasty things are happening there.

“It isn’t pleasant to walk through, [and] isn’t a safe pedestrian environment,” he added.

Mr West also said the town centre itself wasn’t a safe or pleasant area as a pedestrian or a cyclist, with cars speeding down the busy South Circular Road.

“I for one don’t feel very comfortable in it because I am not sure if someone will whoosh past me with a moped,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s green enough or verdant enough. I don’t get a sense of the eco-system in the surrounding area,” he continued.

Early plans also include the removal of Milford Towers, although the towers could be put to better use for the time being, in the style of Peckham Levels – a  temporary workspace in a car park with affordable rents for small businesses, he said.

“Milford Towers will be removed, in the long term, but for now everybody is telling me the most horrible element is the car park,” he told the committee.

“The lower levels [of the building] are really, really terrible. We could make them much nicer, much quicker for at least three, four or five years.

“Why not take a problem and transform it?” he said.

Studio Egret West was awarded the contract to create a draft master plan in June which, when completed in the autumn, will act as a blueprint to guide development in Catford town centre over the next 10 to 15 years.

Residents are asked to contribute to where they think new shops, homes, workspace, the library and the council offices should be located as well as what the new public space should look like by visiting https://catfordtowncentre.commonplace.is/about.