Nish Kumar and James Acaster have joined a local campaign to halt the redevelopment of the Aylesham Centre in Peckham, writes Simon Clarke

It takes a special kind of irony for comedians who built their careers skewering middle-class hypocrisy to end up embodying it. Yet champagne socialists Nish Kumar and James Acaster, two of Britain’s most recognisable left-wing comics, now find themselves trying to stop new homes in one of London’s worst housing blackspots.

The pair, darlings of Radio 4 and fixtures of the liberal comedy circuit, have joined a local campaign to halt the redevelopment of the Aylesham shopping centre in Peckham. Berkeley Homes, one of the UK’s most respected housebuilders with a strong track record in urban regeneration, plans 867 new flats on the site. The scheme has become a lightning rod for every tension in the capital’s housing debate: affordability, bureaucracy and the cultural cringe of Britain’s comfortable........

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