Thessaly Road, The Who, the wonderful wizard of Battersea murals, and the Yellow Brick Road to profit

The luxury apartment development of Nine ELms and Vauxhall seen as a high-rise Emerald City in Brian Barnes' latest mural, on Carey Gardens Estate, Batttersea. The reality - which is horribly visible from the site of this work - is less of a mirage than an architectural and social nightmare, and it's getting worse.
Maybe an all over green colour scheme would help....

*PLEASE READ THE SAD UPDATE TO THIS POST IN THE FOOTNOTES*

Once you start wandering around Nine Elms, you realise the area is far from being just the industrial wasteland the developers would like to write it off as (mind you, cities sometimes need a bit of wasteland anyway, fertile territory for many things).

Not the Yellow Brick Road, but the multi-coloured Happy Street!

There are rich historical seams in this stretch of the former Battersea marshes, as covered in a previous post.  But the most recent visit wound me up so much that I forgot to mention the positive aspects of our long walk, with echoes of the surprisngly rich history of the area, from lavender fields to pioneers of aviation, and the occasional rock star. Plus some warnings of what the future might hold.

The good stuff begins on Thessaly Road. The cheerfully repainted railbridge underpass marks a division between old Nine Elms and the new development up to the river. Maybe the work - funded by Wandsworth Council - could be seen as an attempt to smarten up the neighbourhood for its new and much wealthier residents, but that would be overly cynical. 

It's there to be enjoyed by all, and unlike some of the public art scattered around the Embassy Gardens luxury development, this one was designed for, and with the help of,  existing residents.

Yinka Ilori's work - which in art-world parlance is an installation rather than a mural, using 56 painted panels as well as the structure of the bridge - remains amazingly bright and clean and the title, Happy Street, is well chosen. Local communities including children from St Georges primary school helped  design and choose the colours for this project, which also reflect Yinka's Nigerian heritage.

Quite how happy Thessaly Road is now and was in the past is debatable, but it had its moments. There were certainly some happy faces around in 1973 when The Who's drummer and notorious prankster Keith Moon donned the uniform of a lollipop man and stopped the traffic to allow schoolchildren to cross the road, which in those days was a dangerous rat-run (so, what has changed? Ed.).

Moon was taking time out from recording at The Who's Ramport Studios, an old church hall on the corner of Thessaly Road and Corunna Road. 

The building is still there, part of the NHS Battersea Fields health centre. There's a green Wandsworth Borough plaque on the wall to commemorate its former life. It was put there in 2011 after a campaign by the Battersea Power Station Community group, led by prolific local community artist Brian Barnes.

Brian's work brings colour and alternative narratives to many south London walls. One of his best-known pieces, Nuclear Dawn, covering a full-height wall on the former Cavendish Mansions in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, is now protected by law and is under restoration to its former glory as I write. 

If only that could be said of one of his earliest and biggest pieces - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - which stretched from the southern end of Battersea Bridge all the way Battersea Church Street, on hoardings put up by the developers around the old Morgan Crucible factory prior to its demolition. 

I only saw this work once, in passing. Next time I crossed the bridge it was gone, smashed to pieces by the developers in a night-time act of vandalism for which, so far as I know they were never successfully prosecuted.

Looking at the photos on another brilliant website, For Walls With Tongues , makes me sorely regret that I didn't make the effort to look at it properly: there was a lot of brilliant and powerful art there.

Barnes's most recent mural, from 2017, is a couple of blocks away from the Ramport Studios plaque, and among much else it immortalises Keith Moon's zebra crossing duties.

This painting is literally in the heart of the community it celebrates - covering the entire end wall of one of the blocks of flats on the Carey Gardens Estate, just off Stewarts Road. 

The mural is filled with clues to the history of this area, but the huge hourglass at the centre of the painting shows that time is running out for old Battersea, while a glimmering mirage of the future is a high-rise Emerald City. Those shiny green towers are the stuff of fantasy - the Land of Oz, which would make Nine Elms Lane the Yellow Brick Road. And maybe the US Embassy is the lair of the wicked witch...but hang on, they're not fantasy or sci-fi, they are just over the railway tracks, looming down at us all. 

There's a great article about this mural on the Inspiring City website, which provides a thorough explanation of all the imagery he uses. The mural's title is A Brief History of Time, and the spirit of Prof Stephen Hawking floats at the top of the wall, dancing with the planets in his wheelchair, and looking down on other high-flyers including the US Embassy's eagle, the Sopwith Camel WW1 biplane, and the Pink Floyd pig floating between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station.

My favourite bit of the painting is the man down on the ground at the right, a white-haired bloke holding what appears to be a

CND-style peace symbol. At first I thought this might be a self-portrait, but this is in fact Nick Wood, the modest but visionary local authority architect who designed the Carey Garden Estate. The peace symbol is also a plan view of part his design, the circular green spaces at the heart of the estate, surrounded by the low-rise housing. What a great tribute to another unsung hero of social housing!

The Inspiring City site also has an excellent interview with Brian, made in September 2020 as part of  Battersea Arts Centre's Radio Local project. It's a rewarding 30 minutes.

As so often, looking at a couple of great pieces of streeet art - both so different, but both uplifing - provokes a thirst to see more. In fact on a a good day and a decent bike you are less than 10 minutes from yet another Brian Barnes co-production, the 1988 "Battersea in Perspective ", filling a whole end wall of the former Haberdashers Arms pub in Dagnell Street. Like other works including Nuclear Dawn, this takes a bird's (or aviator') eye view of the area, a birdseye perspective from a great height, with landmarks receding from the great centrepiece of Battersea Park and its Peace Pagoda.  

This is a comprehensive celebration of Battersea's radical recent past, with portraits of social reformers such as John Burns MP, suffragettes, the great campaigning (and still very active) MP, and now Lord, Alf Dubs, and many others including artists and aviators. Battersea's place in aviation history is recognised, with the early workshops of the A & V Roe and the Short Brothers in railways arches, and a stately balloon hovering over this great sweep of south London  landscape. 

Battersea Perspective - still in great shape over 30 years since it was painted, and full
surprising details, including, if you look very hard, a tiny version of this
mural. 

Luckily many others examples of Brian Barnes' work survive, most but not all in south London. He usually works with other artists and always involves local communities in designing the paintings. The Stockwell War Memorial mural, for example, was painted by students from a local school where Brian ran a community arts project.

You can check them out on the excellent London Mural Preservation Society website, and next time you go along Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, take a look at the progress on restoring Nuclear Dawn, which many regard as Brian Barnes' master-work! 

Sad, sad footnote: Shocked to learn that Brian Barnes passed away on November 28, just five months after this story was posted. He was 77, and suffered with COPD which was the eventual cause of his death. The Guardian's obituary is by his friend Steve Lobb;  and there's a good obit on the MyLondon website, which also shows that Brian's campaigning continued right up to the end, with his fabulously laconic twitter post about the lack of affordable housing in the Battersea Power Station redevelopment. This post includes a photo of a self portrait  standing in front of his version of Breughel's Mad Meg (updated for Corona Virus). God, what are we to do without these wonderful humans?

Finally, watch a lovely brief tribute to Brian  from his family, on YouTube.

Sneak preview of Battersea-Nine Elms "village" life as river frontage opens to public

Good news (or so it seemed) last week, to hear that the river frontage by Battersea Power Station was open to the public for the first time since that brief glimpse we had back in 2013 (when there was a sort of alternative Chelsea Flower Show staged on the land about to be transformed into luxury flats).

So on Sunday, after a happy hour or two in Battersea Park, including a visit to the Pump House Gallery (re-opened after being flooded in January) I thought I'd check it out.

It's good that you can get from the park to the new bit without having to cross Queenstown Road, via a walkway under the first span of Chelsea Bridge.

So you walk under the road, and emerge in front of those lumpy flats which went up in the 1990s and now seem rather jaded, set as they are against a backdrop of the splendours oF Battersea - Nine Elms extravagance.  So now, you can walk on, until you get to the wide Grosvenor railway bridge carrying all the Southern rail lines into Victoria Station over the river.

This bit of the walkway has been transformed using lots of Scandinavian-look timber. It's all very nicely-built. There's a new Santander bike rack and large timber-framed exhibition room, plus several shop/bar/restaurant and kiosk spaces. And lots of festive lightbulbs. Just round the corner it leads to what they are calling a "village hall" for the first of the new residential areas ("Quarters" I mean)  at this end of the massive Battersea-Nine Elms development.

With people supposed to be moving into the first flats very soon, this bit - Circus West Village - is a sort of sneak preview of what this vast development might feel like. I never did find the idea of London's urban villages very convincing or  attractive, and to describe this encampment for multi-millionaires a village is stretching the concept a bit, isn't it?

The folksy map shows some of the first occupants of the retail and restaurant
spaces: looks like you won't have to far for a cocktail or an artisanal toasted
sandwich with a cold-pressed flat white, if that's your thing...

On this day, it felt a bit odd, a bit sad, a bit of everything really. Smartly dressed security guys clutched walkie-talkie phones and did their best to smile at the occasional pedestrian or cyclist visitors, the inquisitive passers-by and lost joggers.

Not sure how many serious potential buyers there were there.

The new residential buildings are very showy, very smart and cold.
There's one clad entirely in copper sheeting, another a great glass snake that follows the railway line, said by the developer to be as long as the Shard is tall.

One of the rooms under the bridge is hosting a display about the development. It includes one of those wonderful old wooden models of Battersea Power Station as it was in 1935, complete with neatly stacked piles of coal by the quayside.

This room contains big panels of texts and diagrams informing us of what to expect. Not too many surprises. The developer is making  efforts to win over the more influential local residents. For example there will a programme of free cultural events over the summer, involving among others, Battersea Arts Centre. Which is a good sign, isn't it?

The "village hall", which is being built under one of the massive arches, will include a large performance area.

Then there will of course be shops, bars, restaurants galore. Not - we are promised - from the big international chains. Oh no. But neither, judging from the descriptions given here, will they be terribly affordable to the passing public. Well, at least not to the old menaces like me who like to float around with a Sainsburys bag usually containing a couple of charity-shop bargain books and a camera or two.

The view east: any resemblance to San Gimignano or Trebizond is entirely
a figment of this author's fevered imagination.

It should have been great to see what's left of the power station close up again. Of course it never fails to take your breath away - even now. And the scale of the whole redevelopment is also breathtaking, if in a rather different way.

But, seeing the stumps of the chimneys and the non-existent walls and roof of the main hall was also like walking into an operating theatre and seeing an old friend all opened up and bloody on the table.

You just know that when it's finished it will be all scrubbed up and lovely, like a CGI image in a Hollywood movie. It will be hard to tell which are the new bits and which the original. And, it won't matter. Will it.

They've built a neat little viewing platform so you can gaze across the whole development towards Vauxhall.

The new concrete cores of high rise towers, the lift and service shafts, stick out of the churned up soil of Nine Elms. On some they've painted the number of each floor in case they forget where to stop.

 If you screw your eyes up you could almost be looking at the medieval towers of San Gimignano in Tuscany. They were built by wealthy barons, initially to defend themselves, but really to show off their wealth and outdo their neighbours in a macho, phallic display. So what changes?

Well, at least those medieval barons didn't drive SUVs.

The Battersea end of the Nine Elms nightmare: is there an uglier road in London?

Look what they've done to our road, ma! Look what they've done to Queenstown Road.  This long final strip of Queenstown Road, from Battersea Park roundabout up to Chelsea Bridge, was always a sort of runway or ramp, a diving board from which south London likely lads and lasses launched themselves into the monied worlds of the King's Road, Chelsea, Westminster and beyond.

Mods, rockers, boy racers used that half-mile of tarmac as their catwalk or drag strip. Bikers would meet at the tea hut on the south side of the bridge en route for their Friday night runs out to Heston Services and back.  That bridge, with its Christmas tree lighting,  was always a potent symbol of the gap between north and south London. Posh and arty on the north side, industrial and a bit rough on the other.

Now, it's getting bland on both sides.  The money-zombies have taken it for themselves. They've taken over the Queenstown bit, the whole length of the bit that faces dear sweet Battersea Park. And soon the road that continues on the north side will be overshadowed by the Chelsea Barracks re-development. The views into Battersea Park are still there, but that knockout close-up view of the great looming power station has gone completely.

Look at this photo - how on earth has this happened? People joked about how absurd the old
Observer/QVC building, Marco Polo House, was. This place - occupied briefly by the supposed rival for Sky TV, BSB (later BSkyB as Murdoch added its scalp to his knapsack) - was a veritable cathedral of restraint and good taste compared to what we see now.

Looking north towards the bridge from the Battersea Park roundabout, it seems that three or four bulky, mass-market holiday cruise liners have backed up against the road. Those horrible blunted curves. Wrap-around balconies in some dismal white stone-look material.

It seems they have used every available inch to shove their bulbous bodies as close as possible to each other and to the public realm, the street.

Are these the "affordable" bits of this monster development? Or are the people paying their £850,000 plus happy to stroll around their balconied decks, looking straight across at another block which is identically ugly to the one they live in?

Tell me, please, I really don't get it.

Now you see it, now you don't…Isn't that where Battersea Power Station used to be?

May 2016, the view from the north-east side of Chelsea Bridge. Soewhere in there behind the flats is
Battersea Power Station.

On a misty morning in 2012, the developers are already preparing to start work on the first of the four chimneys.
That huge gas container to the left disappeared early in 2015. And, as the mists fall, so the power station itself slowly
disappears into the ether….

In all the advertising for flats in the redeveloped  Battersea Power Station area, there's constant reference to the building's status as a historic London landmark. In fact, as the developers are eager to point out, it is "iconic".

Those four great white chimneys rising out of the massive cathedral-like brick turbine hall are recognised anywhere on the planet, thanks to their appearance in numerous films and on certain album covers.

In recent months, however, you could do the classic drive south down Sloane Street and over  Chelsea Bridge and fail to notice that you've just passed what's left of this icon.

Heading east on the riverside path from Chelsea Bridge, you expect a fine close up view of the majestic facade of Battersea Power Station. Five years ago, yes. Today, this is what you see.

Obviously, three of the four chimneys are missing, awaiting replacement with the replicas which  the developers promise will be rebuilt to full height by late summer of this year. The one chimney in place is also a replica - the first one. It looks a lot like the old ones but the colour's wrong. All four new chimneys will be painted early in 2017, we're told.

So at least we'll be able to see those four off-white chimneys again, but that's about it for most of us. Whether driving past or on a train crossing the river into Victoria station, or from other parts of Battersea and south West London, the upper parts of those four chimneys are all we will see. Because the great bulk of the building will be screened by a densely-built labyrinth of enormous apartment blocks, to the west and south of the power station.

The writing's on the wall for the future of this place -
in this case a load of platitudinous developer-
speak about the importance of community, and how
they value this so much (see  pics below)

The biggest is already nearly complete - "Circus West", a great wall of 865 luxury apartments right next to the railway track, which is already blocking the view of the power station for road and rail passengers. From the riverside path you can just about see the top of the one remaining chimney.

In the final phase 6 of the redevelopment, a similarly huge barrier block will go up to the east of the station as well, completing its enclosure to all except views from across the river.

Words, words, words…so, the power station is going
to be "browsable" is it? Can't wait.

Of course you will get "wonderful views" of the power station if you can afford a flat in Prospect Place, the Frank Gehry designed area of five of his characteristically wonky, titanium clad apartment blocks just to the south of the Giles Gilbert Scott's monster. Or, perhaps you could take a top floor suite in the proposed "Art 'Otel" next to these. Or stroll along the high-level Foster & Partners designed Battersea Roof Gardens, which will surely be open to all. Or, if not, then snap up one of the one-bedroom apartments, "from £590k". If you are not happy with anything in your new dream home, remember that Foster & Partners are just across Battersea Park, so you can deliver your complaint in person.

Of course, if the power station had been even slightly looked after in the 30 years or so since it was decommissioned, the developers might not have had to do so much drastic surgery. This is a question which only structural engineers with access to this much fought-over building could ever answer.

Er, was it not a real place before?

Anyway, to get back to my initial point, isn't it odd, how with all this talk of the regeneration of the Battersea to Nine Elms riverside, with all those Asian billions invested into a forest of new high-rise luxury apartment blocks, that somehow we were hoodwinked into believing that at least the developers would be preserving and glorifying the power station itself.

By the time the development is complete - what, about 2025? – it seems likely that the re-fitted power station building will be almost completely hidden behind vast cliffs of luxury apartments. Just think of all those very rich people up on their roof gardens, floating in their infinity pools, sipping on their cocktails, worrying about their investments, then looking down on the building that used to dominate the skyline for so many people in and around London, and thinking….what a weird old pile of bricks. Why did they bother to keep it?

Here are a few photos showing how views of the "icon" have changed in the past two years.

The power station in May 2012, when the area in front of the facade was turned into a Chelsea Flower Show
overspill attraction. It was one of the last times the public could get this close to the building. 

6th November 2014: the SW chimney nibbled down to half-height, the cranes are gathering to prepare for building the Circus West blocks. And a full gasholder.

14 March 2014, Netherford Rd SW8. Typical view from the time when Battersea Power Station seemed to loom over  every street in Battersea, Clapham North and Stockwell.

Nine Elms Disease spreads west: the demolition of Battersea Power Station's chimneys

A strange slow motion spectacle is unfolding three hundred feet above the terraced slums and industrial wastelands of Battersea, south west London.

The developers of the new riverside ghetto of luxury apartments and embassies is, as promised, carefully dismantling the first of the four cast-concrete legs of the Giles Gilbert Scott's upside-down kitchen table.

There's a strange green cage around the top of the chimney, and it is gradually sinking, maybe only a few feet each day.

Apparently the people responsible for all this - Battersea Power Station Development Company (BPSDC) - are going to replace the chimneys with replicas, "using the same techniques and materials". Looking forward to seeing these going up - but somehow can't imagine that the sight of the power station will ever again be the same. 

Like so much of the rest of London now, the rough edges, the decay, the patina of decades, the ingrained dirt, the cracks and the weeds - all that will be gone. Nine Elms disease, unlike most natural blights - does not leave scars and blemishes - it does the reverse, it abolishes them, leaving just a bland Hollywood style film-lot.

Nine Elms disease revisited: welcome to the seriously bland quarter

Since the last entry on the redevelopment of Nine Elms in South West London, things have moved ahead at a terrible speed. The view from here has already been partly blotted out by cranes and skeletal buildings shooting up along the river from Vauxhall to Battersea.

The killer tower now has stupid stripes of white lights all the way from top to bottom, making it look even more like a giant AAA battery stuck into the Thames mud.

And the developers have revealed their master plan, complete with the obligatory 3D computer visualisations of the finished project.

What's it  like? Well, when even the local free magazine, Battersea Time & Leisure, damns it with the faint praise that it was "a pretty model…But a new Southbank? It just didn't look, well, cult enough"- you realise we're in for something amazingly dull.

The editor of this mag, whose revenues come mainly from the estate agents who will be flogging these flats for millions and millions, is being quite bold here.

Not that the property men will care - they know that their customers would much rather buy into something safe and secure, bland and convenient and comfortable,  and certainly nothing like the real Southbank, which as I recall has relatively few luxury apartment blocks and lots of great big buildings devoted to theatre, music, art and cinema.

But we must withhold judgment - any investment in art and community has to be good, and even if it's just lip-service, or just a veneer, it could still do some good. Apparently the RCA is involved and maybe Testbed as well.  If they could get the Battersea Arts Centre on board, with all its attendant philosophy of arts for everyone, pay what you can afford, then we might be a bit less sceptical.

Anything that might lure the young and penniless into this zone of the super-rich and powerful could be a good thing. Maybe a new skate park, graffiti and all,  will develop here to make up for the one currently on its last days at Southbank…

Anyway, enjoy those green river views here at the nineelmslondon.com website.

Sweet and sour thoughts on Open House London weekend

The 21st annual Open House London weekend has been bigger and more popular than ever, hitting the news with reports of 18,000 strong queues in Battersea  to get a first and final glimpse of the interior of the derelict power station.

Being 60 miles from the city this weekend, am feeling rather envious and sad not to be there. But then again, am beginning, in a very churlish way,  to dislike these admirable initiatives.

This year's , for example, has acted as a great piece of extra publicity for the developers of the Battersea Power Station site - offering a tantalising glimpse of what remains of the interior for two afternoons before turning the whole place into a property goldmine of luxury apartments. With or without plastic chimneys.

Surely this is just an old bugger's sour grapes? Open House London was and remains a brilliant idea, to persuade the owners of all manner of strange and wonderful buildings - from the grandest palace to the most humble council flat - to open doors to public for one weekend.


It started in 1992 and has become so popular and successful that it is an institution in itself, supported by loads of sponsors and copied in 20 or so other cities around the world.

Yes, it allows vogueish architects the chance to show off their gorgeous homes to aesthetically-avaricious audiences of Wallpaper* readers, so what?  It has also given the interested public the chnace to wander around in some of the strangest, most exclusive, most secret, most outrageous built spaces in the most arcjhticturally-bloated conurbation in the western world. Such as - the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Or the Blizard Building at Queen Mary's College in Whitechapel.

Wish it had been around in 1968!

Nine Elms disease

Each morning I look across London from the balcony at the back of my flat and each morning I see more cranes, and the first bones of skeletal skyscrapers,  sprouting out of the mudflats between me and the river Thames.

 I live at the top of an old house which overlooks, to the north and east,  the former swamps of Battersea and Vauxhall. Until recently there was a pretty clear view across to Westminster and beyond. Now,  where once I saw, in the distance, the towers of Westminster Palace, the Abbey, the dome of St Pauls, and on to the City, I now see the first growth of this latest and so-called  "biggest urban regeneration scheme in Europe".

It starts at Battersea Power Station (which is now brightly floodlit every evening) and it stretches all the way to the monstrosities of St George's Wharf at Vauxhall Bridge.

To judge from a couple of half-completed towers by the river, it's just going to be be much more of the same awful stuff we are getting all along the south bank of the river, from Rotherhithe down to Putney.
Stupid, show-off residential towers, with what they say will be a new leisure and business  zone around the old Power Station and a few embassies. For some odd reason the US Govt has decided to relocated its embassy here, from Grosvenor Square.

Given the bleak plastic blandness of the architects' plans so far revealed, I guess the Americans will feel quite art home here - it looks like just another US city with its flashy towers and carefully accounted for green spaces and shopping areas. All planned down to the last square centimetre, no doubt. Becuase each one of those is worth a lot of money.

Looking at the future for this last bit of industrial wasteland within zones1-2, it looks exactly like the
future for every other little bit of free space in London - sell it off as a new quarter, a new residential zone, affordable housing I think so! I should fucking think so, affordable.

Sitting by the concrete works down Silverthorne Road, watching those massive mixer trucks come in, re-fill with the liquid stuff, zoom off round those sharp bends, back onto Queenstown Road, back to the sites of SW8, or where ever else - this old old process, digging up the earth, making new buildings out of the earth. Carrying the earth around, bit by bit. Ant-wise.

Well I'm sure it will all be lovely for those who can afford these affordable flats under the (don't worry, they will be made of lightweight plastics by then) towering chimneys of Battersea.

No danger of those collapsing on you as you go for your 6am jog along the river before getting the new spur of the northern line to your city job.

Bah! Humbug.