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