Nine Elms disease part XX: Skyline campaign brings good taste to the debate

At last, someone comes to the debate over London's resurgent skyscraper plague with matters other than money and politics in mind.

Writing in the Architect's Journal, former City of London planner  Peter Rees poured scorn on the quality of the new residential towers going up across London - but especially those in the Vauxhall/NineElms/Battersea developments.

He rather weakens his case by contrasting these "dumbed down" "investment towers" with some of the new buildings in the City that he was involved with - the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater, sure, but what about the repulsive "Walkie-Talkie"? Did the plans for that one not pass under his highly sensitive nose?

That apart, you just have to applaud the campaign's aims, but it looks like it's just too late. Certainly for those of us watching our lovely views across London being daily narrowed down by the shiny boxes of various shapes rising out of the old Battersea marshes.

In a separate article in the same magazine, Robert Bevan  singles out the hideous St George's Tower at Vauxhall, which is best known as the location of a helicopter crash last year. Great the way an architectural expert can really lay in to a nasty building - he attacks its joylessness, and the "cheap grey glass and steel" finish, at odds with the "cheap green glass" of the equally hideous winged towers next door/beneath.

Oddly, another recent and quite loud bit of architectural statement at Vauxhall is the subject of a preservation campaign. That's the shiny "ski jump" shelter at the massive bus station, all of which is now to be swept away under Lambeth's plans. Good luck, Kate Hoey MP et al!

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.