The new Nine Elms: even uglier than expected

Let's hope that when the new Wandsworth Road tube station is built in the the foreground of this pic it will block out the view of that ugly bunch of apartment buildings behind. 

Some of that cluster of hefty buildings around the old Sainsbury's site at the eastern end of the Battersea-Nine Elms-Vauxhall development are nearing completion - and God help us, what a terrible blot on the landscape they are.

Take one look at these pictures, that's all you will be able to stand. The shapes and colours are just so dull, the positioning of each building in relation to its neighbours seems wrong. Imagine the poor buggers who are spending their life savings on an apartment on the 9th floor of one of these dingy erections (OK - no normal people have such life savings, only City rooks and crooks and speculators and you won't feel sorry for them).

You couldn't even call them towers; they are neither high-rise nor low rise. They are hunched, bad tempered, and they lean awkwardly towards each other, like a badly-posed group photo of people who loathe each other.

It has to be said they are wilfully ugly. In an age when computers allow architects to design buildings of almost any shape, and materials can be supplied in almost every colour, how on earth did they think these shapes and colours would do for this location? The facings are dark grey, tan, off-white and a sickly yellow. The tan is particularly horrible - the colour of the last shoes on the rack in a Clark's sale when everything else has gone.

One  thing is clear - there's not going to be any shortage of contenders for the 2017 Carbuncle of the Year awards, many with an SW8 post code.

Which is a shame, because I have been longing to be proved wrong on this development. It surely will all be wonderful when finished.

A singularly depressing bunch of buildings hits your eyeballs
as you head west down the Wandsworth Road and see this
new Barratt Homes development nextto the new Sainsburys.

The new Sainsburys has been open for a while. I went there, as I used to quite like the "old" 1980s Sainsburys at Nine Elms that attracted customers from an astonishingly wide hinterland, south east down to Camberwell, locals in Vauxhall and Stockwell, and most of Clapham, Battersea and beyond before "local" supermarkets popped up every few yards.

The new one - oh, I am sorry to have to say this - is underwhelming. For a start , it is all up two steep flights of stairs. When you enter that shiny gold and orange building, you walk into a bland car-park foyer with those annoyingly slow travelators going up and down. Who, in 2017, builds a supermarket designed chiefly with motorists in mind in such a central location?

The shop itself occupies the normal large space, which could just as well be used for offices, storage, a call centre...a mass dormitory....a rave venue; and who knows, if it last long enough it might see  all these uses.

It shares the floor with a couple of not convincing concessions. One is called Habitat but  it's hard to see much connection with the original yuppies' favourite furniture store in their offerings; not much sign of the Conran dedication to good, useful design is visible.

What a shame. No-one expects to love a supermarket, but there was a time when people admitted to some affection for the old Sainsburys, where you would keep bumping into people you knew. These days the store seems to be just an adjunct to the property developers; indeed, with all its inner city Local stores, it seems Sainsburys is a bit of a player int this field itself.

Something strange is happening on the Wandsworth Road

Trying but failing to hide itself behind the quirky 1900s facade, the boxy bulk of a new Premier Inn looms over the southern end of fast-changing Wandsworth Road.

Do you remember that scene in the original Alien when the vile creature burst out of John Hurt's chest? Pretty damned unpleasant. Now something very similar has happened at the Battersea end of the Wandsworth Road, where a strange old 1909 building seems to have been harbouring the sperm of a terrible 21st century parasite - and now it has erupted all over the skyline!

A couple of years ago I wrote about the beginning of the demolition of the old Rileys Snooker Hall, which was one of the strangest and most abused buildings down this (Queenstown Road) end of my local arterial route. A little research revealed that this was a historically significant building, completed in 1909  - one of 17 Temperance Billiard Halls built in South London  in the 1900-1910 period, all designed by the architect Norman Evans.

The idea, which began in the teetotal heartlands of England's non-conformist north-west, was to create big, attractive social centres that could lure working men away from the pubs and bars and gin palaces. Inside they got most of the entertainments of a pub, but without the alcohol. Ironic, looking at the building's subsequent history, but still.

Eventually they destroyed the entire, massive complex of old billiard halls, meeting rooms, a lounge bar and a later attachment of a pub/nightclub (anyone remember Inigo's? Often had some of the biggest bouncers I've ever seen, hanging around outside).

Over the course of the year, they destroyed the whole place - except for Norman Evans' distinctive ornate, mock-oriental facade, which was (as is the current way) kept up on a matrix of props and jacks and scaffolds. Then the building work began in earnest; the whole place was shrouded in green plastic netting, there was even more congestion at the always bad Queenstown Road junction, and a crane was erected.

It was widely rumoured that the budget hotel chain Premier Inn was building its latest branch right here on Wandsworth Road, but it seemed hard to believe. Why here? What's there to tempt tourists or even businessmen to this strange, forgotten bit of South west London that doesn't even know if it's Clapham, or Battersea, Nine Elms or what. It more or less straddles the border of the boroughs of Lambeth and Wandsworth, and is a good 15 minute walk to the nearest underground station (Clapham Common, or 10 minutes to an overground rail station (Wandsworth Road).

So we sort of forgot about it. Then one day  back in December, you look up and see this great bulky six-storey building looming over the old Temperance hall frontage, now tarted up of course. There are big hoardings up at street level still, but they are painted in those distinctive Premier Inn colours.

And, after Christmas, the final wrappers come off, and out pops - not a nasty, sharp-fanged space monster, but  a brand new Premier Inn. As you can see in the pic above, the clash of styles between the flamboyant, almost Disneyland look of the old Temperance Hall and the boxy industrial estate chic of the human storage facility behind it could not be greater.

And, on the Premier Inn website, you'll find an entry for their new hotel "opening soon" in Clapham: a "leafy green oasis in the heart of lively South London".

You can find out exactly how this bulky addition to poor old Wandsworth Road got planning permission here on the London Borough of Lambeth planning site. It's a long and interesting document; some of the objections to this plan are swiftly dismissed. Now we see the reality, we must wonder if our planners had a very clear view of what was being proposed.

Then again, compared with the glass, steel, concrete, gold, marble and bronze nightmare that is being acted out down the road at Nine Elms, you have to admit this is very small beer. It could have been so much worse.

You still have to wonder who will stay there.  I can't imagine the Clapham High Street weekend ravers will find it much use - a long stagger across the common in that state? Besides, they now have a night tube to get them back home.

Meanwhile, now that it has gone, more or less, it's great to read a good architectural history, and Historic England's account of the Temperance Hall movement is an excellent record.

It includes some great observations, eg: "The buildings often used the same decorative materials that pubs used, such as tiled facades and stained glass windows, to create the congenial atmosphere of a public house without the pitfalls of available alcohol. 

"The Temperance Billiard Company Ltd targeted the suburbs of south London, where many new pubs had been built in the late C19, as well as in the north-west of England where the firm originated. Thus, temperance billiard halls by the company are a distinctively south London and north-west England building type, although there are other temperance buildings elsewhere."

There are in fact several other Temperance Halls in this area - one on Battersea Rise, a smaller version of the same building, is now a pub (the Goat). And at Clapham High Street, there's a different, later design, but with the same distinctive tiles and turrets, now the offices of an architect.

Perhaps the best example is in Lewisham, and this building is covered in great detail here.

Meanwhile, poor old Wandsworth Road continues to carry its bus, car  and lorry loads into and out of the city centre, while the residents of the three big and many smaller council estates along its route continue to attempt to make ends meet in the shops, pubs, cafes, bookies, parks, gyms, colleges and charity shops of that long central swathe of the road that is still pretty much unchanged.

This road has long had a truly shabby charm all of its own. Over the past three decades, as surrounding areas gentirifed, it remained a bastion of the old, scruffy south London, with car breakers' yards, junk shops, scary boozers,

Now, at the Northern end it has been totally transformed by the Nine Elms development. Sainsburys, Tesco and now Premier Inn at the other end signal the beginnings of an inevitable change, which will surely accelerate as money from the Nine Elms development washes up this way.

Yes, look out, it's coming. They are nibbling away at both ends: watch out!

Opening windows on a love-hate relationship with Christmas

Terrible, to think we're only 12 days away from the 12 days - that we are now halfway through Advent.

It's several decades since I last opened the cardboard window of an Advent Calendar to reveal….well, in those days, it was a badly-drawn scene from the nativity story. I loved that ritual, each morning revealing the next episode. Each year I longed to reach the climactic moment where you looked through the stable door to see Joseph and Mary and a donkey and a crib and lots of golden hay. Coloured cellophane. The cut-out shape of the star of the East. The shepherds with their crooks and glowing lanterns. Hold it up to the light boy!

These days,  kids get sweets, chocolates, trinkets, and for all I know gold, frankincense and myrrh each time they pull back those little flaps.

This year I'm hooked again. No cardboard flaps, though. I've  become an addict of the Advent Calendar of podcaster, Daniel Ruiz Tizon. As he points out so well in the first episode,  for kids the excitement of Christmas is all about the countdown, the expectation - and not about the day itself, which was often a terrible let-down.

OK, we have already got to Day 12 but there's still time to catch up. You can binge on Advent Calendar podcasts on iTunes, instead of one of those boxed-set TV shows. It costs less (well, nothing actually) and it goes straight to the point of our existences on the surface of this planet. In all honesty,  what could be better?

These daily nuggets of storytelling share some of the bitter-sweet observational humour of  the weekly show on ResonanceFM, Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available, which has already had a few mentions on this blog.

The theme is familiar – can jaded, life-battered adults ever recapture the magic of Christmas? – but the treatment is entirely and absolutely Daniel's own. It's sad, it's funny, it's obsessive, it's moving, its addictive. And if you were brought up in England at any point between the 60s and the 90s it's going to get your memory-strings reverberating in interesting ways.

The presents you longed for but never got; the ones you dreaded being given. The visits to no-longer existing department stores. Christmas TV of the 70s and 80s. Christmas pop. Above all the pain, the fights,  the embarrassments and occasionally even the joys of being part of a family.

Each day's episode is only 10 or 12 minutes, so although we're already past the half-way mark of this advent season, you can quite easily catch up. And I recommend you do: you will very soon be as captivated as I am.

Bingo! Another slice of Wandsworth Road's history is about to disappear in a cloud of dust

Just a hundred yards west of the former Tearooms des Artistes, there was another hub of social life on the Wandsworth Road,  Rileys Snooker Hall, just opposite the Baptist Chapel on the corner of

As it was: Riley's snooker
hall in the Wandsworth Road,
complete with lovely cladding

Victoria Rise.

This place was always regarded as one of the ugliest buildings in a street that was not exactly beautiful.
And yet, once the demolition team got to work, they began to uncover details that made you stop and look and think - hang on, what the hell was that place?

According to a fellow blogger  this surprisingly large building was almost certainly a Temperance Hall.

Once the hideous facade had been pulled away (I always thought of it as corrugated iron, but it is actually some sort of plastic cladding), you see this elaborate stucco work, all very garish and mock-exotic. Surely this is all a bit much for what was supposed to be a former Temperance Hall?

No - a little more research soon turned up a load of information on the Temperance and Billiard Hall movement of the early 20th century. The images on this site are of buildings very similar in design to the one on Wandsworth Road which is now on the brink of demolition.

It's clear several very similar buildings were erected across south London in the early 20th Century. Maybe they were designed to be alluring enough to tempt wayward souls away from the pubs and gin palaces. Once inside they'd get a nice game of billiards and a glass of ginger beer, or a tea. And maybe a pamphlet or two?

Oddly enough, Rileys always seemed quite a sleazy place. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing Bingo Nights advertised there - I can remember discussing this with a friend who wanted to go along as she wanted to film it. Like an idiot I never went inside. You can sewe from the outside it was a big space - there's a second hall behind the first, and they appear to be interconnected.

In recent years,  I think - I am sure I remember this - it sometimes ran club nights, which would  be policed by massive bouncers wearing lots of gold chains. Can't imagine there was an awful lot of temperance in the air inside - just walking past you almost swooned in the exhalations of after-shave.

I knew this area had been famously teetotal - even poor Graham Greene noticed this when he had to cross Clapham Common to buy beer for his visiting guest, Julian Maclaren Ross, from the Windmill pub. It seems the heavily disapproving temperance  mood of the Clapham Sect - for all the good they did in parliament in  pushing through abolition - had a deep and lasting impact on the social fabric.

Ayway, the Temperance Halls, for all their worthiness, could not resist a distinctly racy, kiss-me-quick architectural details. Look at the photos below of the poor old building, before it is pulverised. Beneath that hideous facade lurked a bit of dandy, a man or girl about town with its exotic curves and curlicues.

Love it. Now it's on the way out - and I am sure the Travelogue (is that the right name?) that replaces it will be haunted by all manner of randy but alcohol free ghosts.

The Wandsworth Road itself is changing very fast, but at least two of its very well hidden treasures should be safe from the developers of Nine Elms. The Larkhall Estate close to Wandswroth Road  overground station, with its deeply shaded quadrangle gardens and steep pitched roofing -  is grade 2 listed - while ornate and flamboyant interior decoration of Khadambi Asalache's 575 Wandsworth Road is now in the hands of the National Trust.

Oh the horror! Roundabout succumbs to Nine Elms ravages

Watch out, Nine Elms Disease is coming your way.

It's spreading fast, its viral spores shunted around at speed by massive concrete mixer-trucks that rush up and down Silverthorne Road, spilling a little of their load as they go. If you're a cyclist, you are quite likely to get one of their little pebbles shot into your eye from under the fat tyre of a speeding car.

I'm astonished the council (Lambeth or Wandsworth?) hasn't stepped in to do something about the destruction of the road surfaces, particularly at the junction of Silverthorne and Wandsworth Road and down by the one-way junction of Silverthorne and Queenstown Roads.

This is where the trucks - which have just feasted on fresh ready-mixed concrete from the massive silos of McALpine's London Concrete Ltd - storm off in a cloud of dust to dump the material at some building site or other.

But the latest horror is the speed with which it has destroyed that perfectly harmless old floral roundabout hub at the south-east entrance to Battersea Park.

It's hard top cycle through any of this area at the moment because the air is so full of dust. When they were destroying the old MArco Polo House, it felt like sharp bits of marble were shredding the linings of your throat and lungs. Now it's the powdery cement dust sieved over everything by those speeding dumper-trucks and mixer-lorries.

God help us, residents of SW8, 4, and 11. God help us one and all.