Nine Elms: Top marks for consistency in creating dismal-looking buildings

Funny how friendly and civilised the Vauxhall Bus Station now feels when compared with the murderous multi-lane
racetrack adjoining it, and the encroaching hell of the Nine Elms development. Here comes the next monster tower - the
DAMAC building.

You have to hand it to the Nine Elms developers: they are remarkably consistent.

In a decade of building on this previously neglected strip of inner-London riverbank, they have yet to erect a building which passers by might stop to look at and say, "Oh yes, that's not so bad".

The least-worst building in the whole Battersea
-Nine Elms-Vauxhall development? It's 30-plus
storeys of student accommodation.

Ok, hang on. Once, last year, from the top deck of an 87 bus heading north on Wandsworth Road, I caught a glimpse of that red-brick-look tower just behind the cylindrical block opposite Sainsbury's (the cylinder, it turns out, is called Sky Gardens).

For a few seconds, I really did think, "oh, that's quite pleasing".

I was looking at the narrow end of a 35-floor tower which, from that angle, seemed to mimic the shape of New York's  Flatiron building.

As the bus moved on the full blandness of this structure, a big nest of student accommodation, became apparent.  That said, it is one of the least worst structures thrown up on this tormented landscape so far. The  proportions are fair enough. It's not embarrassingly quirky like some of the stuff the other side of Wandsworth Road.

And it's not as lumpishly ugly as its new monster neighbour, the 50-storey "DAMAC Tower" , (aka the Aykon Building) now nearing completion. This tower boasts "Versace Home designed interiors" (presumably not,  however, in the 90 "affordable" homes promised in the 450-flat project).

An "interesting" combination of boxes aka the DAMAC
tower, furnished by Versace Home. A 1-bed appt yours
for around £980k

Can't help wondering what Gianni would have made of this unlovely construction. He famously rejected the idea of "good taste", so that wouldn't be the problem. But it's an awkward thing - not at all elegant, nor even very shiny – as it looms over the doomed Vauxhall bus station. There's some cladding which, in good light, evokes the colour of the Poundland store front.

Overall, it looks as if five or six mediocre office blocks had been swept up and squeezed together to create a rather lumpy, vaguely h-shaped totem pole, around which to worship greed.

All that can be said is that it's not as outright offensive as the One St George's Wharf tower - Le Plongeur, someone tried to nickname it, the helicopter-slayer, as I think of it - but it does make a reasonable try.

These buildings now dominate the view from my toilet window.

Very soon two even bigger buildings, already rising out of the mud,  will block this view of at least the rude up-yours finger of One St Georges Wharf. Work has re-started on the biggest tower of the whole development.  The architect's impressions show bog-standard luxury apartment stacks; but maybe they will help to pull this disparate group of sprouting steel and glass into some sort of cluster.

 You see, I like tall buildings, if they're well designed. They can be elegant, like the Shard. Or exciting, like those ultra-thin (size zero) blocks shooting upwards of 1200 feet in New York.

Even here - on the other side of London - there's a tiny sense of that thrill available from the first sighting of good high-rise buildings. I remember it in Hong Kong and Manhattan - now there's a hint of it in Docklands, if you choose the right vantage point.

The lumpy old Canary Wharf towers are surrounded, engulfed by lots of strange, shiny newcomers, many almost as tall; One Canada Square itself is losing its domination of the East London skyline. The view from across the river near Surrey Quays is as close as you can get to a New York-style cluster. Go there on a quiet, clear day at sunrise or sunset to see what I mean, when those two new tall buildings closest to the river are reflected on the water in afternoon sunshine.

Back at Vauxhall, it's not a cluster, just a scattering of nasty tall buildings.

Meanwhile, the only buildings that looked good on paper are going up around the disastrous remains of anyone's view of Battersea Power Station.

There's a large chunk of Frank Gehry studio blocks going up now, with the characteristic twisted, slightly wonky look, now a cliché, it has to be said.

How strange to think that, in 60 years time, people living in, growing up in these buildings will be enjoying or loathing their lives in SW8, just as much as we all have, hardly giving a thought to how their dwellings changed the landscape.