Brickwood Café on Lower Richmond Road will close when its lease runs out in October, and the site will not return as a shop of any kind.
Brickwood opened in the former Flour+Water site in spring 2025, bringing its antipodean-style brunch menu to Putney. Two upstairs neighbours, not a developer, are behind what happens next. Amy Katherine Harris and Georgia Kitty Harris, who each own a flat above the café, have applied to Wandsworth Council (reference PP-14916096) to extend their own flats down into the ground floor once Brickwood goes, turning two two-bedroom flats into two larger three-bedroom houses. Building work is expected to start in November and finish in November 2027.
That makes this a harder ending than the changes seen elsewhere on Lower Richmond Road over the past nine months. Where other units on the strip have simply changed hands, this one is leaving commercial use for good.
Nobody close to Brickwood is describing the closure as a failure of the café itself. The site has struggled to attract passing trade throughout its life as a café, sitting on a stretch of the road with no other shops for some distance on that side.
A reader who spoke to the Brickwood team relayed that the café’s own view of the closure was close to a blessing: the site, not the food, was what never gave it a fair chance. Brickwood itself isn’t disappearing either way. The brand already runs cafés in Balham, Battersea Rise and Clapham, run by co-owner Graham Firminger’s team; it’s this specific site that’s closing.
It’s the latest turn in Lower Richmond Road’s ongoing churn, which we have tracked since a wave of change hit the road last November. The Grill Heist has taken over the former Persian Grill House unit further along, Raaz has been closed since a flood, and TaxAssist has moved into another unit that recently changed hands.
Brickwood’s departure is different in kind, not just in degree. If the planning application goes through, the ground floor will leave commercial use altogether, permanently replacing shop space with housing rather than passing to a new tenant. It would be the clearest sign yet that at least part of Lower Richmond Road’s difficulty lies with the location itself, not any one business that has tried its luck there.
