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.