Behold! The Nine Elms nightmare is becoming reality – and someone's put their foot in it

Nothing like a bit of public art to add the sheen of quality to the latest ghetto of luxury flats: but does Simon Fujiwara's colossal foot have a message for the wealthy occupants of the surrounding apartment blocks?

After years of watching the Battersea-Nine Elms development as it gradually blocked our views and filled our homes with dust,  there's now a little bit of this new heaven on earth that is more or less finished, so now we can see for ourselves what all the fuss has been about.

It's right in the middle of the two or more square miles of building sites that stretch from Battersea Park to Vauxhall Cross. As you ride west down Nine Elms lane, past the old New Covent Garden market and the commercial estates, you come to a small patch of wild grasses, very lush, and right in the middle of it is the sign, Embassy gardens.

This area, smartly abbreviated by its developer to Eg, will be the serious heart of the whole Nine Elms developments, even more so than Battersea Power Station. It will have both US and Dutch embassies. It will have super-luxury flats with walk-in access to the well-hyped "Sky Pool" (a glass bottomed swimming pool suspended between the  10th floors of two apartment blocks).

In the background you see the bulky cuboid building which looks like it might be the new US embassy.
A few yards further on you find the essential markers of any new luxury urban development: some obscure and  expensive-looking public art, and a lovely great big brand spanking new Waitrose supermarket.

The art is curious: a colossal disembodied foot, which seems to have trodden on a sharpened wedding ring before being violently removed form its unfortunate owner. This piece, called Modern Marriage 2015, is by a well-known artist, Simon Fujiwara.

It's not clear what it's made of: marble? No. Concrete? Maybe. Plastic? Most likely - it has that bland, smooth look as though it had come out of a 3D printer. One struggles to find  meaning in this piece: it definitely seems to be a warning, but a warning of what? Wedlock? The mind boggles.

A bit further on, between the Waitrose block and the next block, is what a first sight looks like a huge tin turd on the ground, or a massive discarded party balloon of the type used by The Mask to create balloon-poodles.

 Look again, it's a giant vegetable - possibly a courgette or cucumber, or maybe even a gherkin? Well, actually, it's a marrow, rather a skinny one, and it's in fact a bit of a tribute to the fruit and veg traders using the New Covent Garden market down the road. The artist is even more famous - Sarah Lucas, one of the Sensation YBAs, well known for shocking the establishment with fried eggs, frozen chickens, etc.

This piece? Well, it's lovely, made of bronze, ever so expensive. Very shiny, nice reflections.

Impressive.

It turns out there's a third piece of sculpture somewhere around here - but it wasn't immediately obvious where. This area had been designated as a "Destination by design" sculpture park by the developers of the Embassy Gardens area, The Ballymore Group.

The installation was curated by Norman Rosenthal, late of the RA, and apparently there will eventually be six permanent works there.


This is just across the road from the first completed residential area, the Riverlight development,  a set of six trapezoid blocks, about 12 to 15 storeys high.  These buildings sit like a wall or some sort of defensive barrier, a gigantic tank-trap, all

Riverlight apartments: this is a real photo, not a computer-generated architect's wet dream….

 along the river. For some reason they are colour-coded with bright green, yellow, orange, red and mauve panels. They're not particularly ugly, just brash and a bit silly, like those semi-finished holiday apartment blocks you see all along the coastline of southern Spain. Or those lurid green and orange office blocks, so dismal in their total lack of any interesting qualities,  that have ruined the area between St Giles and New Oxford Street, these from the distinguished architectural practice of Renzo Piano

According to the Nine Elms  developers, these apartments are now all sold, but there's very little sign of the proud new owners. Of course it's too early in the day: they'll all be at their desks in the City or Canary Wharf.

Walking up the stone-paved "street" between these blocks you get the feeling you're actually in one of those computer simulated images so beloved of property developers: it's all so clean and new and shiny!

But instead of the glamorous young yuppies in their yoga pants and Hugo Boss suits there are pairs of builders and surveyors in hi-vis jackets on their fag break.

They blocks - described in the developer's blurb as "pavilions" - are all ranged north-south, apparently to maximise access to the views across to Chelsea and Westminsters enjoyed by the occupants. Unfortunately, for everyone else living along the Wandsworth Road corridor,  these buildings are now the view, where once we could also see Westminster.

 Oh well.

Move just a little further west and there's a big hoarding around what used to be the massive Royal Mail south London depot, which was itself partly built on the old gas works. This area, according to one of those helpful boards put up by developers, is undergoing "remediation" by the BAM Nuttall group. It will eventually be a lovely park and …err….some more flats.

Remediation is a not a word I'd been familiar with, but when I look it up in the Merriam Webster dictionary, I have a "duh" moment. It is of course "the act or process of remedying" something - especially making something undesirable, desirable, or something unsafe, safe.

Squinting through the dirty plastic window so thoughtfully provided, you see mountains of
churned-up mud, some of it presumably polluted by all those old gas-making chemicals. It might make a good track for mountain biking or dry skiing.

So that's it. There are a couple of "streets" you can walk down,  a bit of grass, and all surrounded by many square kilometres of mud, dust, rubble and skeletal skyscrapers in waiting. And the massive trucks rushing up and down Nine Elms lane all day long.

Keep on trucking, as they used to say.

In fact, would you mind not keeping on trucking, please?

Why is so much of London's recent public sculpture so horrible?

Poor old Charlie Chaplin, knocked off his
place in Leicester Square and now demoted
 to  entertaining the queues outside the Prince Charles Cinema, London

Wandering through Broadgate yesterday - as, if you have much sense, you do not do very often - was
struck by two or three things.

First, just how much of this corporate architecture has gone up in this area in the past decade or so. Broadgate is like a little town all of its own, with its barren streets and squares and shopping areas and  even a little park.

Second - what a sad contrast between the stately Victorian architecture of the old  Liverpool Street Station canopy, and the mock-classicisim of all that flashy 1990s stuff.

Third - the completely repulsive piece of public sculpture, the massive 5-ton bronze nude Broadgate Venus.

In fact this work by a Colombian artist is absolutely perfect for the place; a grotesquely fat, featureless, personality-free female floating pointlessly in the middle of a space surrounded on three sides by identikit office blocks and on the fourth by the rail terminal at  Liverpool Street.

 It's a real cheek calling her Venus - she's got about as much to do with love or sex as an over-inflated barrage balloon. But as symbol of the ugliest sins of the city around her - avarice, cupidity, sheer greed, excess  - she is perfect.

Which is more than you can say of much of the recent public sculpture in this town.

It seems to range from the brash but competent show-off - such as Rudy Weller's  Four Bronze Horses of Helios (1992) rising out of a fountain at the corner of hideous 1980s building near Piccadilly Circus - to the totally naff.

That flashy new development in Knightsbridge overlooking Hyde Park - often referred to as having the most expensive apartments in the world - comes complete with some equally tasteless public sculpture.

I've no idea who it's by but it's a fairly extreme example of what seems fairly dismal public sculptures adorning various commecrial and residential developments in this  city of obscene wealth.

Sadly, even publicly-commissioned work to celebrate the great and the good somehow seem to always go bland. The horribly cliched Charlie Chaplin is one example, now mercifully moved from a prime site in Leicester Square to a dark turning off Lisle Street, as if relegated to the naughty corner.

The strange Oscar Wilde tribute behind St Martins -in-the-Fields is another. But to find the truly horrible modern sculpture you have to turn to the private sector - the stuff that now seems to be obligatory on every posh new residential apartments development anywhere in London.

Every cynical new block of "desirable" riverside apartments snow seems to have to have its own bit of dismal art. Look at these ghastly characters down by Battersea Bridge adorning one of a thousand similar recently-built Thameside estates for the very rich.

WHy, you wonder, can't these very wealthy people not commission something good - like Elisabeth Frink's work in Piccadilly, or the one great bit of modern sculpture in the CityRichard Serra's Fulcrum  (1987)  at the back entrance to  Liverpool Street Station.
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Even if not great art, it knocks you sideways. Meanwhile, there's virtue in comedy - and who cannot but laugh or at least smile when meeting the three-dimensional déjeuner sur l'herbe in Soho Square.

OK, I have to admit - it has to be better to have some naff art, some horrible public art, than to have no public art at all.