Finally, we have something to thank the Nine Elms developers for...OK, only joking.

See what the developers of the Battersea - Nine Elms riverside estate for the super-rich have achieved! They have blocked the view of the helicopter-killer St George Wharf Tower from the south! Rejoice, rejoice! So long as you stay on line south-east from the towers to Brockwell Park,  you no longer have to gape at that rude duracell styled middle-finger of a residential cylinder. Just at the three lumpen blocks of steel, concrete and glass that have arisen to block our view. But here's the bad news: you can still see the sorry erection from all other viewpoints.

Over recent months, as yet another huge new tower of (putative) luxury apartments erupts over the Vauxhall Cross, a new and truly dismal passtime is born for pissed-off residents like self.

It's a great hobby for the years of pandemic. Moving around, alone, in every direction from this transport node,  to see if there is any single angle or perspective from which all these buildings coalesce into anything other than a repulsive and callous "f**k you" to the established local populations.

Today, after weeks when things were just seeming to get uglier and more brutal (not 'Brutal' in the 1960s sense, I must stress), stumbled across a view that was actually slightly improved. 

It was from the highest point in Brockwell park.  Those three lumpy new residential towers closest to Vauxhall are at last blocking out the south-eastern view of that vile middle-finger of a skyscraper, the (helicopter slayer) St George Wharf Tower, aka Duracell, or (my favourite nickname as it has grim ambiguity) The Plunger.

As the Northern Line extension to Nine Elms and Batttersea Power Station opens for business, so the area's developers are working on two new tower blocks just southwest of the Power Station - showing just how desperate they must be to ensure no one living in Battersea itself can actually see anything at all of the once unmissable local landmark. 

I think these will be part of the "Upper Park residences" area, with one tower planned to rise to 27 storeys - which is as high or higher than the top of the power station chimneys. It's odd, I don't remember seeing any high-rise towers to the west of the power station in the original plans.

So, how about this new transport link? 

Surely we should be licking corporate bottom for their beneficence in making the new two-station Northern Line branch possible? Well, yes and no.

It could be good for residents of the estates between Sainsburys Nine Elms and Wandsworth Road overground station, allowing them to get into the West End quickly (but, outside rush hours, the 87 bus already does that quite well). 

But it's also ironic that this incredibly expensive two-stop extension is creating a worse service for long-suffering passengers living further south. The number of Charing Cross branch trains going all the way to Morden has been cut, from about one every 6 minutes to 10 or 12 minutes. Leading to more crowding on the grim old platforms at Kennington.

Overall, then, returning to the original theme of this piece: whichever way you look at it - almost - the prospect is grim. As the last of the grand towers in this phase rise, it's clear that there's not a single building worthy of the location. And that the supposed cluster of graceful towers is in reality more like the threatening arthritic fist of a killer robot. 

Maybe it should please me that these gruesome erections are just as much an affront to the wealthy residents across the water in Pimlico, Westminster, parts of Chelsea and even Belgravia. So many of those grand stuccoed terraces or red-brick mansion block estates around Westminster Cathedaral and Vincent Square now have their southerly views polluted by these great hulking presenes in the sky. Even from the Centopah in Whitehall, you cannot miss the rude stiffness of One Nine Elms. 

The one project I find quite entertaining is the bit which forms an outer wall to the Power Station's encircling walls of residential cement and glass. This bit, which  folds itself around the osuth-western aspect of the now almost invisible power station, has the amusing feature - a couple of massive holes in the buildings. Gaps, voids, about three floors deep. Peepholes so that the plebs can still get a glimpse of the promised land within, perhaps. They're the  gsps that let thelight in. Why ever they are there, they are a good thing. Quite good. 

Nine Elms Disease: is there a cure?

So, if the development is to redeem itself and win over the hearts and minds of local residents, that long-promised linear park is going to have to be bloody good. But, looking on a recent map, they no longer call it the linear park, and it is not so linear. Just Nine Elms Park.

Oh well, plenty of room for freebies for visitors from the other side of the tracks (zone 2, you know, and not the smarmily-bought "zone 1" trick the developers have pulled). 

What say you to free champagne fountains and iced-vodka sculptures? No? Ok, let's see a few hundred luxuriously appointed shelters, each with its own bathroom, for the homeless. Free music every weekend, and 24/7 facilities including lighting and PA for buskers, all through the park.

Any other ideas, please add to comments below.

As for the skypool, fill it up every morning with something delicious (alcoholic, or maybe not, maybe hot soup on cold nights); drill 2,000 holes in the bottom; attach 2,500 pub-style tubes with taps; except these will need to be about 500m in length, and clipped to refreshment stalls around the US Embassy, with washing facilities; to keep the protestors in good spirits. Employ 100 bungee-jumping staff to keep said sustenance flowing freely and happily. 

Just dreaming.

Come on get your bloody fingers out and spend some of those ill-gotten gains on something good!

View from Vauxhall Bridge, six months ago. It's
less interesting now...

Think we have it bad in Battersea? See what they've done to the view from
the stuccoed streets of Pimlico. No wonder they're furious!

This view from a Battersea footbridge shows just how deceptive some views are. Two of those towers
are in fact great big piles of stepped boxes....

Kate Hoey MP attacks "shocking" Nine Elms development

A new reason to be grateful to live in the constituency held by Kate Hoey, an old-school Labour MP with some oddball ideas but her heart in the right place.

The constituency is called Vauxhall but it takes in a long thin slice of north and west Lambeth, including all of Stockwell and Clapham Town, most of Brixton and the mysteriously-named Vassall ward.

At an outdoor hustings in Kennington last weekend, Ms Hoey spoke out against the monstrous development of luxury housing alongside the river between Chelsea Bridge and Vauxhall, the development I have (yawn) very tediously tried to rebrand as Nine Elms Disease.

Interestingly, it seems most of this development is actually just outside her constituency, as the Vauxhall boundary (according to the OS constituencies map) runs more or less along the Wandsworth Road as far as Queenstown Road, then heads up Cedars Road to the north side of Clapham Common.

But in all other senses this development will have - is already having - a massive and baleful impact on

her constituencies. It's not just the transport and infrastructure pressure that all those new rich people's homes with their SUVs in their underground car parks will create on the surrounding streets, not the visual pollution already hideously apparent from the lego-style apartment blocks going up along the river front. You also have to look at the damage done to roads by the constant stream of tipper trucks on all the surrounding trunk roads for a start. Or, try breathing as you cycle up past Battersea Park on a windy day, and fill your lungs with acrid dust.

Ms Hoey kept her words short but to the point:

"I think what has happened along the South Bank and along Vauxhall has been shocking...We have lost out on so much value of that land. It has not gone into affordable housing but private developers."


Hear, hear, Kate! Good on you. So what will you do about it?

"I want to see a top band of council tax brought in for all those multi million developments along the river."

Yeah well, so do we all, it might help a bit.

Maybe you wonder why Kate hasn't made a bit more noise about this before now? Well, she had, but MPs have no role in planning decisions, and anyway, as already pointed out, the majority of the land is in the neighbouring Battersea constituency.

And what about some more drastic legislative action at a national level to remove planning consent powers from individual local authorities for schemes  which are so massive they will disrupt the lives of residents in all the surrounding boroughs as well?

The apologists for this development continue to extol the virtues of a new tube extension - to the Northern Line of all over-crowded lines, for god's sake! And the linear park, which in architects drawings looks like something out of a very scary video game. You can almost imagine the poor and the beggars and the scruffy kids clambering up the walls and fences to gawp at the rich within, and to dodge the plastic bullets and tasters of the private security guards….

Ok, a maybe not too distant fantasy… which in part could depend a bit on who one votes for next month. If I hadn't already decided, this latest speech would have reminded me there's really only one option.

New flying pig square, anyone?

Oh how I love Rachel Holdsworth! Her latest post on the Londonist regarding the Battersea Nine Elms project and its latest release of plans for Malaysia Square (or flying pig square, as she suggests as an alternative name) is both glorious and shocking at the same time.

Yes, that £800,000 studio flat is a strange notion - but maybe it will be just right for some of the young students attending this week's Nine Elms Career Expo, organised by London SouthBank Univeristy and the Nine Elms Vauxhall contractors.

As the press release  so helpfully points out, "Nine Elms Vauxhall is a 195 hectare redevelopment area in the London boroughs of Lambeth and Wandsworth and is set to be the biggest construction site in Europe".

I still prefer my own name for this development - Nine Elms Disease. But I am biased - it is blighting my life at the moment, and slowly but surely ruining the view from all vantage points to the south and  west of Vauxhall.

Still, let's not be unfair, and give these guys their due: they are building our future, after all.  And it's true there'll be plenty of new jobs down around the old power station. The fair, held today and tomorrow (2nd and 3rd December)  will include "demonstrations and workshops by the main contractors working on the development, giving the students the chance to learn about the future opportunities at Nine Elms Vauxhall".

"Contractors attending the event include companies such as Whitbread, Transport for London, John Lewis Partnership and the Berkley Group Foundation." 

Good news, then , for jobs in the retail, hospitality and construction sectors - but for those really big bucks, I'd head straight for the property developer booth - that's probably the only sort of employment that will get your name on the waiting list for one of these lovely new studio apartments.