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.

A walk on the vile side: underwhelmed by Nine Elms' hottest properties

Not so inviting on a dull winter's day, perhaps. The much talked about Sky Pool, 10 storeys above the Embassy Gardens zone of the Nine Elms, Battersea and Vauxhall development - seen here with its sun screen half extended. 

 
Work never stopped on the Battersea, Nine Elms & Vauxhall development over the long months of covid-19, and many of its supposedly headline projects are nearing completion. We've seen 'em (nearly) all...the Sky Pool, Frank Gehry's skew-whiff apartment blocks, Foster's voids, the rich doors, and the poor doors. The question which arises most often is: Why?

In the third lockdown, I started doing longer walks, sometimes with my support bubble friend for some mutual grumbling about anything or nothing.

Several times the stroll took us a mile north to that strip of oddly mismatched new buildings going up along the river, from Battersea Power Station to Vauxhall, aka the "Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea opportunity area" (VNEB).

Each time there are new things to gasp at. Yes, we had more to gasp about this time as well - though not so much in admiration, but in dismay and disbelief.

Affordable housing? Maybe not quite within your average budget, but nice and close to the
Portuguese cafés and Tesco on Wandsworth Road.

We approach from the large area of industrial units and scrapyards that border the Patmore Estate, Wandsworth Road to the south and Nine Elms Lane. 

Turning right from Stewart's Road we come up against the first bits of the redevelopment. 

The first, and to be honest the only entirely positive note of the whole journey is struck by the cheerfully re-painted rail bridge, which is a defact gateway separating old and new Battersea at this point. 

Sorry, this dark photo does not do the brilliant colours of 
Yinka Ilori's artwork, Happy Street, any justice whatsoever.
I'll revisit soon on a sunnier day (or with a better camera)

The underside of this - one of many very wide railway bridges in the area - was transformed by the artist Yinka Ilori as part of the 2019 London Festival of Architecture. 

The installation is called "Happy Street" and the vividly coloured panels and patterns do indeed inspire happier feelings in what used to be a dark and dirty tunnel.

It's worth remembering that this street once housed the Ramport Studios, an old church hall where many of The Who's singles and LPs were recorded. And that their then drummer, the late Keith Moon, once took it upon himself to become a temporary lollipop man at the zebra crossing, after a number of accidents involving local schoolkids. 

All that's left of that era is a green plaque on the wall of the former studios, now a health centre. But at least it's still there and being put to good use (I know of Who fans who try to get onto those GPs lists, just to enter the hallowed former recording areas).

Our joy was short-lived, however, as we encounter the half-built "affordable homes", nondescript low-rise apartment blocks at the southern edge of the development, as far as possible from the showpieces around the power station and along the river. They appear to be using cladding in a most unappealing lilac shade.

A windswept and dusty walk along Nine Elms Lane took us to the "Embassy Gardens" district, with its Waitrose, the scattered sculptures (a massive bronze courgette and an even bigger disembodied foot) and its canyons of glass and brick cladding, which feel more like walking in an architect's computer simulation than real life. 

All this has been there for several years now - but then there are some newer bits behind and to the east of the US Embassy building. There you are faced with two large blocks clad in what look like ceramic tiles in a very fetching bottle green. Closer inspection reveals these tiles to be large pre-fabricated panels.

As you walk between the blocks, look up and gawp at one of Nine Elm's star turns - yes, it's the  Sky Pool. About 150ft from the ground, a large transparent water tank stretches from one building to another. It is certainly an eye-catching feature; you just hope the acrylic material is as strong as it needs to be.  As we stare upward, a sort of sunblind slowly extedns along the bottom of the pool. Presumably this is to protect it, and to prevent the pool focussing  the sun's rays onto to some unsuspecting parked supercar below (as happened, notoriously, with the Walkie Talkie in it firsto autumn). 

Or maybe it's to preserve the modesty of some of the less exhibitionist super-rich bathers; imagine a crowd of long-focus paparazzi just waiting down below for some minor celeb or a footballer's girlfriend or whoever. A cheaper solution of course would be to swim in a different pool.

Meanwhile, pity whoever gets the flats just beneath each end of the pool. Imagine the dread of hearing that first drip, drip, drip sound. An interesting Guardian piece on the development includes interviews with just such early occupants of some of the more affordable apartments - which do not, of course, have access to the luxuries of the penthouse floors.

The US Embassy itself stands there silently, watching your every movement, behind its many layers of security and defence, including a full-blown medieval-style moat. The new Embassy had its unofficial baptism by protest last summer when the Black Lives Matter demo crossed the river from Westminster to take its message to the US front door. It was a peaceful and dignified demo, but the Embassy building seems so unreadable, impenetrable, and aloof that it was hard to tell if there was anyone in there to listen to the speakers.

One thing for sure - would be residents of the nearby apartments must get used to sounds of hovering helicopters and sirens, armed police and road closures on a regular basis.

We were hoping to move south from here to get to the nearly-complete Nine Elms tube station, then around to the huge towers that are rising across the road from the dreaded St George's Tower, aka the lethal Duracell.

But there's no quick access at this point at the moment. Eventually the "linear park" will link the two sides of the rail lines which divide this bit of the development, apparently.

So, back towards Battersea and another of the jewels in the developer's crown. As you approach the southern end of the power station, to your left are the near-complete, twisty looking apartment blocks designed by Frank Gehry of Bilbao Guggenheim fame. 

Frank Gehry's trademark wonkiness looks interesting close up, less so from 
any distance. No two apartments are the same, they say. 
Doubt I'll ever have the chance to check that out.

From some angles they look quirky, with apartments sprouting outwards like the segments of some exotic fruit. 

Seen from a little further away, however, these buildings have the bulky look of all the other blocks which now entirely enclose the old power station. 

The pattern of light and dark grey cladding which zig-zag over this set of buildings resembles, from a distance,  arctic camouflage of old warships, though a very undazzling version of it.

The great pièce de resistance of this part of the development - Gehry's titanium-clad Flower tower - is not yet visisble, at least not from the route we took. Early architect's impressions of this building were indeed more like what one expects from a "starchitect", and they featured in the hoardings lining Nine Elms Lane at one point.

Is it yet to be built, or is it hidden behind all these other bulky blocks?

Just to the west of the Gehry buildings is another huge, serpentine  construction, 15 storeys high with two large  voids acting as giant peepholes in a colossal barrier. This building, a product of the local Foster & Partners studio,  has echoes the famous Byker Wall in Newcastle, or in Sheffield's Park Hill estate. Or even closer to home, the Barrier Block on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton - though I doubt the developers would welcome these comparisons.

This forms another layer of the defences surrounding the Power Station, and is also the site of the much-lauded Battersea  roof gardens. Together the Gehry and Foster developments trace the route of a new "high street", all or part of which will be named "Electric Boulevard" - a nod to the former purpose of the power station, rather than a trbute to the famous shopping avenue in Brixton.

As for the power station, well this grand old dame has been given a thorough wash and brush up, a scouring and re-glazing, so that it looks as good - and as bland - as new. In fact it looks like the whole building has been replaced by a giant cardboard model. At the southern end, work is progressing on what seems to be small amphitheatre. 

I remeber my first visits to the Canary Wharf area in the late 80s, and feeling I was in a film set for a Dallas-based TV series: the people were all too smartly dressed and well-groomed to be real, everything was too clean and shiny. The VNEB area has the same feel only more so, and it also lacks something that Canary Wharf has in all too obvious abundance - a reason for being there. 

Radio show evokes ghosts of Nine Elms' colourful past (and drear visions of its shiny future)

Nine Elms now - a hell of speeding construction trucks and harsh architecture. A recent radio show cast
a lot of light on the district's distinctly more human past.

The re-development of Thames riverside from Vauxhall all the way to Battersea Park has been sending me into apoplexies for about eight years. You can read the spluttering evidence of this in many entries on this blog, often with the words "Nine Elms Disease" in the headline.

I stumbled on that silly phrase even before it was used in the Daily Telegraph. Now I think of it as shorthand for all those cynical building schemes, the massive zones of identikit "luxury apartment" towers on brownfields sites around the country. Yes, just like the original disease, this one spreads fast and is unstoppable - even by the Brexit-triggered property slump.

Fascinating, then, that Nine Elms was the chosen neighbourhood focus of BBC Radio London's nearly eponymous morning strand, the Robert Elms Show, on March 5. Once they'd got over the coincidence of the presenter's name and the fact the new elm tress have been planted to restore the "nine" in the name, this was an interesting programme.

However, almost all the interest related to the district's complex industrial past and its now rapidly dwindling working class population. The New Covent Garden  wholesale fruit and flower market was the exception - and their spokesperson Theresa was getting excited a big rebuild which would provide a new Flower Market, football pitches and something called a food exchange. Vague visions of Nine Elms becoming another Borough Market sort of evaporated when she admitted this area would never become a tourist attraction on the scale of the original Covent Garden.

Apart from that, the new development and the area's glorious future was somewhat shrugged off as disappointing but inevitable - even by a self-confessed property developer who wound down the window of his Bentley and spoke briefly to the show's resident architect and polymath, the Reverend Professor Maxwell Hutchinson.

The Rev. Prof - surely the best known and most loved architect-broadcaster in BBC history - had little good to say about the new developments along the river. The poor man had been deposited on Nine Elms Lane, just across the busy four-lane road from the new and generally disliked US Embassy. It is his job, every two weeks, to be "found" by listeners to this show: they exchange a few words on their neighbourhood with both the Prof and Mr Elms back in the studio, and get a badge for their efforts.

It says a lot about the current state of Nine Elms that the first of only two people to find Max was a property bod in a luxury car.

Prof Hutchinson tends to improvise at length about the architectural merits of the given location. On this occasion it was chiefly past merits - for example, the old Nine Elms railway terminal, used by anyone

Nine Elms, the London terminus for the London and Southampton Railway:
the newly built station in an engraving from Mechanics Magazine, 1838. Only
ten years later, the line was extended to  Waterloo and this station closed to
passengers. But it remained as a goods depot right up to 1968, and was then
demolished. Pic: Wikimedia Commons

(including Garibaldi!) on their  way to or from the ocean liners of Southampton in the 19th century. This handsome building survived bomb damage in 1941, and served as a BR goods depot right up to 1968, when it was demolished.

Looking at old maps, it seems the station was between the site of the big Nine Elms Sainsburys and the market: I've not been able to find any trace of it, however.

We heard about the  windmills, the Battersea New Town, the Ind Coope brewery....and Battersea Power Station, which is of course in Nine Elms, just as Clapham Junction is in Battersea.

Maxwell was more puzzled than delighted by the cuboid, shiny plastic-clad US Embassy (although Mr Elms quite liked it, mainly because of its moat) and shared my dismay at how the big residential blocks screen off most of the riverside views. It was compared, very unfavourably, with the previous US Embassy building - a modernist masterpiece - in Grosvenor Square. Just for once, aesthetes seem to agree with Donald Trump.

But Maxwell was also depressed by the dullness of most of the new architecture, despite the "awe-inspiring" investment. He complained of the anonymity of the design - "universal contemporary modernist blocks" set in "acres of tarmac".

As so often is the case in this feature, the best bits came later when listeners began calling in with memories. One of the last industries that flourished in this area was recorded music. One listener came in with vivid memories of her times at The Who's own Ramport Studio in Thessaly Road, on the Patmore Estate - where bands such as Thin Lizzie, Sparks and the Sex Pistols also cut some of their seminal works. There's a good feature on the studio on the Battersea Power Station Community Group site. The studio building is said to be still there, although there's a new NHS Health Centre on part of the site.

Perhaps less well known outside punk and new wave circles was the Mayhem Studio set up by singer/actor Toyah Wilcox above her flat in an ancient railways warehouse in Patcham Terrace - now the site of the peculiarly ugly (even by Nine Elms standards) "Exchange" blocks. One of the Robert Elms callers remembers going there with his band to record a single, and bumping into members of well-known bands on the stairs.

There's an excellent if very sad YouTube video about this place posted by a Toyah fan, bluemeaning, which makes great use of some of her music. You wonder if future residents will be haunted by the eerie yelping of the splendid flame-haired one - who I remember best as a naughty Miranda in Derek Jarman's film of The Tempest.

Not far from this site at the Queenstown Road end of the development are 14 very valuable acres of land formerly owned by us - the public - in the shape of the Royal Mail. It was flogged off to developers for hundreds of millions not long after Royal Mail was itself privatised in 2013.

Part of the old Royal Mail South London sorting office site,
flogged off to the developers to become more flats
 and a public park.

Part of the site is to be turned into a stretch of the much-vaunted "linear park" which will run through the development. Other bits have been snapped up by developers such as Greystar whose proposals reveal yet another group of those bland New London Vernacular style apartment blocks.

Note how the architect's impressions are so often full of stylish young people and neat small trees covered in blossom....

Well, to get back to Robert Elms and the eponymous trees - this planting ceremony was indeed a high point in the developer's admittedly very well orchestrated PR programme over the past couple of years.

Last summer I met my very first new Nine Elms resident whilst checking out the Art Night festivities - which included a marching band and procession of dancers with LED-illuminated hoola-hoops. The young French lady I spoke to had seen the procession from her riverside apartment. "My son wasn't sleeping, so I brought him down to here to see what's going on.

"Do you have any idea who these people are?" she added.

I told her and she was happy, evidently pleased at having such entertainments at her doorstep.