Much-loved charity shop falls victim to Brexit

Farewell, Children of the Mekong on Lavender Hill - one
of the friendliest and most distinctive charity shops in
 the Battersea-Clapham-Stockwell area

Occasional postings on this site rating charity shops in the SW2, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12 (and other) postcodes gave increasingly high praise to the tiny Children of the Mekong shop on Lavender Hill in Battersea.

Run by a charity based in France, this shop was  a treasure-trove for people looking for unusual, good quality clothing, interesting accessories, toys, and obscure CDs, amongst much else. A fair number of the donations were of French origin, perhaps given by the many French families who were resident in the catchment area of the big French/English bi-lingual primary school on Wix's Lane.

The shop has now closed, and will soon be replaced by an "artisan" craft beer shop. According to the shop's manager, the reason for clousre was not Covid-19, but Brexit. 

The shop not only raised funds to improve the living conditiions, health and education of deprived children in south-east Asia; it also offered internships for young people from France and other countries to get some work experience in an English language environment.

Over the seven years of its existence, 97 interns from France and other francophone territories worked in the shop, usually on five-month placements. 

Apart from boosting their language and business skills, these volunteers also gave the shop a great atmosphere - and of course a chance to try out your own shaky French if you had the nerve (they were usually encouraging).

After the covid lockdowns, the shop re-opened briefly this spring - but very soon it had signs up announcing its permanent closure. 

As the manager, Eugenie Munakarmi explained, the reason for this decision was all to do with bureacracy and the costs of obtaining work visas following the UK decision to leave the EU in 2016.

"Despite the challenging year we just had, it is not COVID that forced us to close the shop, but Brexit," she said. "How sad it can be, the new immigration law does not allow European students to carry out unpaid internships in the UK. 

"Our business model won’t sustain without the interns, and this is why we are closing down today."

Little did we know in 2016 just how apt this Edvard Munch
themed poster was. For now is surely the time to scream,
 scream scream!

So it becomes one of hundreds or thousands of small ventures, relying on the EU's rights to freedom of movement around member states, that have had to restrict or abandon their projects - with an immeasurable impact on the education and life chances of  countless people of all ages.

Yes, I was a vehement remainer and still haven't come to terms with what seems like the sheer self-inflicted vandalism of the 2016 referendum vote. So yes, I am biased, and no, I won't get over it. 

And it's not just the fast rising prices of any decent cheese or wine in our supermarkets, but the ghastly new atmosphere of nationalism in the country, and the dulling-down of the variety of day to day social interactions anyone could enjoy in London while it was packed with Europeans from 27 other nations.

So this shop was just another example of how the freedom of movement enriched the lives of so many people in the "UK".

Including mine. I loved this shop so much I could not leave it without at least two or three items. I had to limit my visits. 

I decided to go there  only after having a hair cut over the road at the barber's I  finally chose following the loss of another great European community amenity in this area - Andy's in Landor Road. The Lavender Hill cutting shop, formerly Jazz Barbers and painted a nice shade of orange, was good - and I still use it, even though its name has changed to the corny London Barnet, and its decor has gone a bit blingy.

Meanwhile for the cheerfully diverse communities around Lavender Hill, the opportuntity to bag some great bargains in a strongly French-accented, Vietnamese-flavoured charity shop is to be replaced by yet another opportunity to buy and drink beer - undoubtedly of the rather pricey "artisanal" variety, at least according to to local reports.

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.

New US Embassy in Nine Elms nears completion: but will it be blingy enough for Trump's lot?

Well, this is it - the shiny new US Embassy building in the Battersea-Nine Elms-Vauxhall property developers' sand-pit seems to be nearing completion.

Reports suggest the move from Grosvenor Square to the new site south of the river will happen in 2017 - and already you can imagine that the new president and his minions will be having mixed feelings about the shift, not to mention many of his London-based officials who are actually going to have to work south of the river.

Unsurprisingly they will not include ex-pres Obama's choice, Matthew Barzun, who resigned in January. The job of representing Trump's admin in the UK will fall to a new, much older face. The 45th president has named fellow billionaire Woody Johnson, the 69-year-old sports fanatic, owner of the New York Jets NFL team, and heir of the baby-powder and pharma products firm Johnson & Johnson as his man in London.

Of course, this very rich man will not actually live here - he will have the super posh Winfield House in Regent's Park for his private life and his parties, and no doubt he could buy somewhere even grander if this did not suit him. Winfield House, by the way, is named after the founder of Woolworth's. It was owned by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in the 1930s, and she gave it to the US government.

But what about Nine Elms? Well, the Americans are getting a big, super-safe, new building surrounded by lots of other big and blingy buildings. But the postcode - oh my dear, SW8!

The photo above shows the semi-translucent cladding that is going to cloak three sides of the cuboid structure. At first sight it looks like the sort of cheap and cheerful tie-on decorative facades favoured by some of the downmarket shops on Oxford Street. It looks temporary, like a strong gust of wind could send it flying.

But according to the architects this stuff performs vital functions in keeping the building cool and shaded in the summer, and also in deflecting the downdrafts of wind that can make life for pedestrians so bad. And the translucency is also meant to symbolise a transparency of government - apparently!

The architects, KieranTimberlake of Philadelphia, also wanted to avoid the fortress-like designs of many other US embassies: not sure if the big watery moat-like pond at the front of the building does much for that ambition. In fact the old embassy in Grosvenor Square was a very smart 60s building - have you ever seen so many windows in one facade? ANd all those rising bollards and so on only went in after 9/11. The old Grosvenor Square made a convenient rallying place for demos: the bleak wasteland of Nine Elms Lane is a much less attractive prospect for all, whether lovers or haters of the new regime.

However, it is no longer the 60s: you imagine Trump might quite the break from this Kennedy-era extravagance. The new Embassy, inits value-for-money postcode,  is said to be one of the most environmentally-friendly embassies ever built. OK that's not the sort of claim that's going to impress the new boss, who doesn't care two hoots about the environment. He'll like the fact that it's cheap to run, but you wonder whether he wouldn't rather stay in Mayfair, protected by huge bollards and close to the gold-plated denizens of the Dorchester and the Hilton and the high-end nightclubs of Shepherd Market.

Well, the old embassy - a 1960 building designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen – is going to be turned into a luxury hotel, so he could always hang out there anyway. Or he could just commandeer the Regent's Park house. There's room for two or three couples there, it seems.

Meanwhile, the staff of the new embassy will have plenty to explore in their lunch breaks and their after-work bonding sessions. There's the famously intense nightlife of Vauxhall itself, for example, plus some lovely (relatively) cheap eating places on Kennington Lane and Wandsworth Road. Maybe the secret gardens and lovely café of Bonnington Square will not be to every G-Man's taste - but of course it's about midway between the US Embassy and MI6, so they could arrange little meetings there.

In the summer a short walk or official car ride will take them to Battersea Park, one of south-west London's most beautiful open spaces. And already they have their very own Waitrose right on the doorstep.

But perhaps these dear Embassy folk will be discouraged from leaving their workplace, and will be kept happy in their sealed environment with Google HQ-style distractions. You know, non-stop free smoothies, a model railway to deliver authentic American burgers and/or sushimi to every work station, bean-bag-filled breakout areas, pool tables, Coke-fountains, wii screens, etc....and a pool of scooters on which to whizz around their new glassy home.

There's talk of a new pedestrian bridge, but where will that take them? Dolphin Square in Pimlico, approximately. Another place favoured by spies, apparently.

Talking of spies, if I had a high-powered telephoto lens I could spy on this new building all day and all night. Its massive bulk has blocked what used to be rather a pleasant distant view of Westminster's Victoria Tower from my bedroom window.

Dammit!

Something strange is happening on the Wandsworth Road

Trying but failing to hide itself behind the quirky 1900s facade, the boxy bulk of a new Premier Inn looms over the southern end of fast-changing Wandsworth Road.

Do you remember that scene in the original Alien when the vile creature burst out of John Hurt's chest? Pretty damned unpleasant. Now something very similar has happened at the Battersea end of the Wandsworth Road, where a strange old 1909 building seems to have been harbouring the sperm of a terrible 21st century parasite - and now it has erupted all over the skyline!

A couple of years ago I wrote about the beginning of the demolition of the old Rileys Snooker Hall, which was one of the strangest and most abused buildings down this (Queenstown Road) end of my local arterial route. A little research revealed that this was a historically significant building, completed in 1909  - one of 17 Temperance Billiard Halls built in South London  in the 1900-1910 period, all designed by the architect Norman Evans.

The idea, which began in the teetotal heartlands of England's non-conformist north-west, was to create big, attractive social centres that could lure working men away from the pubs and bars and gin palaces. Inside they got most of the entertainments of a pub, but without the alcohol. Ironic, looking at the building's subsequent history, but still.

Eventually they destroyed the entire, massive complex of old billiard halls, meeting rooms, a lounge bar and a later attachment of a pub/nightclub (anyone remember Inigo's? Often had some of the biggest bouncers I've ever seen, hanging around outside).

Over the course of the year, they destroyed the whole place - except for Norman Evans' distinctive ornate, mock-oriental facade, which was (as is the current way) kept up on a matrix of props and jacks and scaffolds. Then the building work began in earnest; the whole place was shrouded in green plastic netting, there was even more congestion at the always bad Queenstown Road junction, and a crane was erected.

It was widely rumoured that the budget hotel chain Premier Inn was building its latest branch right here on Wandsworth Road, but it seemed hard to believe. Why here? What's there to tempt tourists or even businessmen to this strange, forgotten bit of South west London that doesn't even know if it's Clapham, or Battersea, Nine Elms or what. It more or less straddles the border of the boroughs of Lambeth and Wandsworth, and is a good 15 minute walk to the nearest underground station (Clapham Common, or 10 minutes to an overground rail station (Wandsworth Road).

So we sort of forgot about it. Then one day  back in December, you look up and see this great bulky six-storey building looming over the old Temperance hall frontage, now tarted up of course. There are big hoardings up at street level still, but they are painted in those distinctive Premier Inn colours.

And, after Christmas, the final wrappers come off, and out pops - not a nasty, sharp-fanged space monster, but  a brand new Premier Inn. As you can see in the pic above, the clash of styles between the flamboyant, almost Disneyland look of the old Temperance Hall and the boxy industrial estate chic of the human storage facility behind it could not be greater.

And, on the Premier Inn website, you'll find an entry for their new hotel "opening soon" in Clapham: a "leafy green oasis in the heart of lively South London".

You can find out exactly how this bulky addition to poor old Wandsworth Road got planning permission here on the London Borough of Lambeth planning site. It's a long and interesting document; some of the objections to this plan are swiftly dismissed. Now we see the reality, we must wonder if our planners had a very clear view of what was being proposed.

Then again, compared with the glass, steel, concrete, gold, marble and bronze nightmare that is being acted out down the road at Nine Elms, you have to admit this is very small beer. It could have been so much worse.

You still have to wonder who will stay there.  I can't imagine the Clapham High Street weekend ravers will find it much use - a long stagger across the common in that state? Besides, they now have a night tube to get them back home.

Meanwhile, now that it has gone, more or less, it's great to read a good architectural history, and Historic England's account of the Temperance Hall movement is an excellent record.

It includes some great observations, eg: "The buildings often used the same decorative materials that pubs used, such as tiled facades and stained glass windows, to create the congenial atmosphere of a public house without the pitfalls of available alcohol. 

"The Temperance Billiard Company Ltd targeted the suburbs of south London, where many new pubs had been built in the late C19, as well as in the north-west of England where the firm originated. Thus, temperance billiard halls by the company are a distinctively south London and north-west England building type, although there are other temperance buildings elsewhere."

There are in fact several other Temperance Halls in this area - one on Battersea Rise, a smaller version of the same building, is now a pub (the Goat). And at Clapham High Street, there's a different, later design, but with the same distinctive tiles and turrets, now the offices of an architect.

Perhaps the best example is in Lewisham, and this building is covered in great detail here.

Meanwhile, poor old Wandsworth Road continues to carry its bus, car  and lorry loads into and out of the city centre, while the residents of the three big and many smaller council estates along its route continue to attempt to make ends meet in the shops, pubs, cafes, bookies, parks, gyms, colleges and charity shops of that long central swathe of the road that is still pretty much unchanged.

This road has long had a truly shabby charm all of its own. Over the past three decades, as surrounding areas gentirifed, it remained a bastion of the old, scruffy south London, with car breakers' yards, junk shops, scary boozers,

Now, at the Northern end it has been totally transformed by the Nine Elms development. Sainsburys, Tesco and now Premier Inn at the other end signal the beginnings of an inevitable change, which will surely accelerate as money from the Nine Elms development washes up this way.

Yes, look out, it's coming. They are nibbling away at both ends: watch out!

The Battersea end of the Nine Elms nightmare: is there an uglier road in London?

Look what they've done to our road, ma! Look what they've done to Queenstown Road.  This long final strip of Queenstown Road, from Battersea Park roundabout up to Chelsea Bridge, was always a sort of runway or ramp, a diving board from which south London likely lads and lasses launched themselves into the monied worlds of the King's Road, Chelsea, Westminster and beyond.

Mods, rockers, boy racers used that half-mile of tarmac as their catwalk or drag strip. Bikers would meet at the tea hut on the south side of the bridge en route for their Friday night runs out to Heston Services and back.  That bridge, with its Christmas tree lighting,  was always a potent symbol of the gap between north and south London. Posh and arty on the north side, industrial and a bit rough on the other.

Now, it's getting bland on both sides.  The money-zombies have taken it for themselves. They've taken over the Queenstown bit, the whole length of the bit that faces dear sweet Battersea Park. And soon the road that continues on the north side will be overshadowed by the Chelsea Barracks re-development. The views into Battersea Park are still there, but that knockout close-up view of the great looming power station has gone completely.

Look at this photo - how on earth has this happened? People joked about how absurd the old
Observer/QVC building, Marco Polo House, was. This place - occupied briefly by the supposed rival for Sky TV, BSB (later BSkyB as Murdoch added its scalp to his knapsack) - was a veritable cathedral of restraint and good taste compared to what we see now.

Looking north towards the bridge from the Battersea Park roundabout, it seems that three or four bulky, mass-market holiday cruise liners have backed up against the road. Those horrible blunted curves. Wrap-around balconies in some dismal white stone-look material.

It seems they have used every available inch to shove their bulbous bodies as close as possible to each other and to the public realm, the street.

Are these the "affordable" bits of this monster development? Or are the people paying their £850,000 plus happy to stroll around their balconied decks, looking straight across at another block which is identically ugly to the one they live in?

Tell me, please, I really don't get it.

The death of another cyclist, this time on Lavender Hill, hits home like nothing before

A young woman cyclist has been killed near this terrible junction where Lavender Hill meets Elspeth Road: three lanes into one as drivers ignore the left and right filters and use it like a drag-race grid to be first at the next set of lights. Re-design
this junction, tame the traffic, ban the six-axle lorries, police it!

Ever 15 minutes or so on Monday, BBC Radio London's traffic news warned drivers to steer clear of the Battersea-Clapham area because of a serious accident, and that part of Lavender Hill had been closed by police for investigations.

Later that day the accident moved from traffic to mainstream news: it became clear that a cyclist had been involved in an incident with a large truck, and that the cyclist had died at the scene.

A bit later the news websites changed the word "cyclist" to "woman".

A woman had died - been killed - in an accident on Lavender Hill involving a truck leased by a company known as British Gypsum, a big supplier of plasterboard and related building products.

Early reports included quotes from a witness who'd seen the truck with a bike stuck under the front wheels, driving along, with the driver apparently not realising anything had happened, until waved down by pedestrians. According to the Evening Standard the lorry eventually pulled up about 150 yards on from the point of impact, which was close to Battersea Police Station.

So why am I writing about this horrific incident? Because I have become so aware of the danger of huge trucks being driven so fast along these roads in recent years, I have just been dreading something like this happening.

-  Because I live less than a half a mile from where this accident happened.

-  Because I am a cyclist and have cycled up and down Lavender Hill most days over the past 35 years.

-  Because I must have past the point where the 32-year old Lucia Ciccioli was killed on Monday, literally thousands of times. I passed there twice today, which is when I took these photos. 

And because on one occasion, I avoided being hit by a lorry by such a small margin that I know I will never forget that sensation of a brush with death.

It was 8 years ago, at a point just after the crossroads with Elspeth Road. In fact, within a few metres from where this poor young woman died. I was cycling west towards Clapham Junction. I pulled away from the junction, where three lanes of traffic suddenly become one. Traffic at this point is competing for position in the queues that always build up on Lavender Hill.

As I crossed the junction a big refuse truck from the company that does the bins for Wandsworth Council stormed up behind me. It wasn't merely close to me, the flange of its white painted front wheel arch touched my right arm. If I had continued on my course I would have been hit by the front wheel of that lorry.

Instead I made myself fall to the left, into a set of railings that have now, I think been removed. At the same time I rammed on the brakes, and sort of collapsed into the railings, without  any serious injury, but bruised and shaking like hell. The truck surged off into the distance, at what seemed like a speed well above the 30mph limit, and the driver clearly hadn't noticed me. I was so freaked out that I started to shout out obscenities at the top of my voice, but no cars or trucks stopped. A couple of pedestrians asked if I was OK and I realised that I was OK.

I was so lucky. A few years later I was knocled off my bike by a car in the same road, near the Queenstown Road junction, broke some bones but I survivied. I am so lucky.

No-one can really help the family and friends of this young woman, killed on her way to work at a new job on a cold south London morning. It is heart-breaking, as is every death on our hopelessly congested roads. But this one, it just got to me, and to many others, it seems.

The only thing we can try to do is to try to convert this tragedy into an energy to change things, to make such tragedies less frequent in future.

And yet, even now, after 10 years or more of efforts to make these gigantic trucks safer for other road users in heavily populated, mixed-traffic areas, these hideous incidents keep on occurring. What can we do, what can those with power do? Well, here are some ideas:

• Look at the size of these trucks, measure their speeds.
•  Check out the drivers' delivery schedules and  how they are paid. They have to get through dreadful traffic on congested streets in unreasonably short spaces of time. 
• Crack down on the firms - and they are often suppliers to the construction industries - who impose these schedules and penalties.
• Re-route heavy trucks - a vehicle this size shouldn't be on this road. And certainly not at 7.54am rush-hour time. It's absurd. What's the point of the Mayor and those powers if he never uses them?

Today (Thursday), Evening Standard journalist Rosamund Irwin writes about this tragic incident, as a fellow cyclist who also uses this street on her way to work. She's compassionate and, when it comes to trying to stop this carnage, she makes some very sensible suggestions. The Mayor Sadiq Khan's proposals to ban the most dangerous lorries from London streets is fine - but it will takes several years to implement. She wonders if this could be speeded up, perhaps by incentivising haulage companies, perhaps offering a discount on the congestion charge if they modify their trucks.

I understand her point - but it is coming form the wrong direction.  These companies are making huge profits from supplying the vast numbers of building and regeneration and transport projects in central London. We need a much tougher stance to protect the interests of all road users from these thundering, murderous vehicles. I say this as a car driver (and road-tax payer) as well as a pedestrian, cyclist and local resident, sick of the stink and the damage caused by this relentless procession of huge lorries.

What is  such a huge truck allowed on Lavender Hill anyway? Surely the parallel route along the north side of Clapham Common would allow more space and less congestion? But no, strangely, this road - the one you might think would be the logical trunk route towards the A3 at Wandsworth - is the one with traffic calming measures. Is that to do with all those grand houses and posh private schools
that line the edges of the common? There you have the space to widen a road; maybe build a bridge for pedestrians. Get these speeding monstrosities off Lavender Hill!

Breathless in Nine Elms, more shocked than awed

Have to agree, it is truly breath-taking. I want my breath back, please!

I am guilty of under-selling the creative skills of  the One Nine Elms developers'  marketing people.

Couple of weeks back, posted a joke item on the slogans on the big fences surrounding the site.

Item showed the words: ONE NINE ELMS: JAW DROPPING

So yesterday I walked past the site again and realised they'd come up with a whole family of two-word adjectival phrases, for example: ONE NINE ELMS: BREATH TAKING

and

ONE NINE ELMS: AWE INSPIRING

Breath-taking? Yes, they're right. The massive amount of pollution caused by the tens of thousands of truck-miles the must've been clocked up as bits of these monster buildings are brought to the site is quite enough to take our breath away, thanks.

All through the summer the air was full of dust and grit. It was truly breath-taking, lung-irritating stuff.

As for awe-inspiring, well the architect's impressions of the finished development rather suggest not. Shocking, maybe, but not much awe.

It looks like a great deal more of  the same old staggered filing-cabinet style apartment towers, rising up to 56 storeys - a bit higher  than the existing St George's Wharf tower. I mean, how could that inspire "awe"? It would need to reach up at least twice that height, up into the clouds, to make anyone used to craning their poor old necks towards the Shard to feel anything other than bored.

I like tall buildings, I just hate bland architecture and towers full of bland "luxury" flats that are designed specifically to inoffensive to any potential buyers, who nearly always are not going to live there but sell them on.

One Nine Elms says it will be offering "Luxurious riverside living". There will also be a "luxury 5-star hotel" to service the apartments (whatever that means). The promotional video is a slick bit of computer animation with the statutory tall blonde lady gliding around an apartment admiring the views…which include the not-too-distant prospect of the Canary Wharf towers, where maybe she works.

Anyway, as those Nine Elms people are so keen on phrases to describe their work, here are a couple more possibles to write in big script up on the fence: daylight-thieving, view-ruining, wind-tunnel-effect-creating, yawn-inducing, stomach-churning…oh, there's plenty more.

But don't get the impression Microgroove33 just loves to snipe and groan: where there's good news, we are ready to blast it out, full volume. And so today it's great to report they have provided a cycle-path of sorts on the otherwise closed northbound side of Wandsworth Road. It's a bit of an obstacle course,  with plenty of cheery blokes in orange waving you through. But it beats trying to dodge the oncoming trucks on the other side.

Clapham: it looks so much nicer when you can't see it properly….

Tired of words for the moment. Last week there were two or three foggy mornings. I got my arse in gear and took some misty autumnal shots of my regular routes (yes I am like a rat, I have runs, well-worn paths through the undergrowth….)

Here's what I saw (and better still, what I didn't see…)

Just for once, I agree with the Nine Elms marketing folk...

Yes, thank you, Battersea-Nine Elms developers, I couldn't have put it better myself…

Sometimes, further words are unnecessary.

Nine Elms disease enters its repulsive fourth stage

Now look what they've done to our quickest route into central London (the Wandsworth Road, 77/87 bus routes)….and it looks like another dismal cylinder of silly yuppie-boxes is being erected, a dud Duracell AAA battery, 
sister to the stupid helicopter-killer of a building further down the road.

For the last few years I have been calling it Nine Elms Disease, but now I realise this is far too soft and benign a description for what's happening along the south shore of the Thames between Vauxhall and Chelsea Bridges. 

It's now looking much more like the the plague - the one that stole or ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of Londoners back in the the seventeenth century.

This cheerful thought came to me on the top deck of a 77 bus last week. It used to be the quickest, easiest and most entertaining way for people living around here to get into town -- a 77 or 87 bus along the Wandsworth Road, then over Vauxhall bridge and into Westminster, or along the embankment to Waterloo and the South Bank Centre.

Look what they've done to our river, ma….a view of the Nine
 Elms-Battersea development from Vauxhall Bridge.
Why do the words 'suppurating open sores' come to mind?

Trying this route last week for the first time in ages, we hit the same "Road closed" signs at Lansdowne Road that I remembered from about a year ago, and the hellish stop-start began again and continued all the way to Vauxhall.

As the bus turned right at the diversion, we glimpsed the closed stretch of Wandsworth Road ahead, and had to do a double take: it was unrecognisable. 

The last time I'd gone down this road, the former Sainsbury's superstore had been flattened, there were some low-rise new blocks going up, and a flashy marketing suite had been built.  

There was loads of that annoying highly colourful fencing around all the building sites, daubed with moronic and meaningless phrases.

At that time, they said the road had to be closed for improvements to the sewage pipes. No wonder, thinking of all those fat cats living in their high-rise luxury apartments. Just think of all that expensive shit being added to the system.

No, and neither did the Bubonic Plague 

But now the road's closed again, until the end of November, they say. And this time - it is clear - it's partly to allow massive trucks to unload bits of pre-fabricated luxury flat, which seem to be winched straight from a lorry, lifted high over the road by crane, and bolted onto the steel frame of the building there and then.

Yes, it is a high-end example of the plague of luxury-apartment building that is sweeping London and the south east of England. Right now, at Nine Elms, the parallels with bubonic plague are obvious - a deadly infection spread by fleas living on the furry bodies of rats.

And in this significant outbreak,  the disease has entered its most virulent stage: the bursting of the buboes: "At advanced stages of the infection the inflamed lymph nodes can turn into suppurating open sores".

Where we used to shop - food at Sainsburys, bargains of all sorts in the Sunday car-boot markets – is now one such suppurating open sore.

Oh yes, they say, but look we are giving you all two new tube stations! People of the Larkhall Estate, and the Patmore estate - fear not, you will be able to get to Kennington in less than five minutes! We'll give you a linear park and all manner of leisure and employment opportunities!

So when the plans first came out, we all thought, why are they linking it to the Northern Line, and not the much more obvious, closer solution of building a branch of the Victoria Line out from nearby Vauxhall, or even under the river to the transport node of Victoria itself?

A suppurating open sore…or in this case, a nasty
open saw of stupidly-shaped balconies

But think - where will the people living in the new million-pound-plus apartments need to get to quickly, and back from, quickly, without having to mix too much with the bumbling locals? Why, the City of London of course, and Canary Wharf! 

And this Northern Line extension will enable them to do that far more quickly. Except that the City branch of that line is already well over its saturation point at 8am weekdays….there's a train every 2 minutes and there's never room to get on. But maybe the Battersea Power Station gang will get priority through trains to Bank….nothing would surprise us.

So - as we've said before - let's at least hope that the two boroughs, Wandsworth and Lambeth,  whose populations are most badly affected by all this construction world violence, this daily mugging by men in hard hats and hi-vis vests, get some decent wads of cash out the developers. Wads that are repeated at monthly intervals over the next half-century or so.

Lambeth, for example, must be compensated for the damage to roads, to the quality of the air we all have to breathe, to the added congestion on the roads, and the danger and even death caused by those enormous lorries rushing around from building sites to cement depots all day long.

How many hundred thousand human hours have been wasted sitting in buses stuck on Lansdowne Road this year?

And what about compensation for loss of amenity? Permanent loss of beautiful views across the river? The Disneyfication of Battersea Power Station? The loss of an area we liked, no matter how scruffy it was.

It's encouraging to see the old car scrap dealers around Pensbury Place and Stewart's Road are still there. Long may they survive to provide a visible reminder that this was Battersea Marshes, considered uninhabitable until the stench of money lured  developers onto the mushy, deeply polluted alluvial soil. 

Surely these developers would hardly notice the few million it would take - for example - to ensure Lambeth could continue to provide decent public libraries to all its citizens in all wards of the borough (as opposed to gyms with a few books around, which seems to be their latest plan).

And - if they want a little quick PR coup - why not pay to put on a free firework display for everyone, to make up for the lost Brockwell Park show?

Well finally, a few more shots of this fascinating new neighbourhood. No doubt in 2022, if I live that long, I'll be enjoying the lovely linear parks of Nine Elms, jumping on the tube in Wandsworth Road, and shopping in a fab new Sainsburys superstore. But I will still be a grumpy old fucker.

A certain irony in this photo, but it could be true that refugees with a spare £2million will be very welcome in those
new high-rise blocks. Also sad to reflect that this is the spot where, in 2012,  a helicopter crashed, having struck nearby 50-storey luxury flat tower, killing both the pilot and a man walking along Wandsworth Road.

What remains of Battersea Power Station, now gift-wrapped for property developers

I can see for (a good few less) miles ….than I could before they built this weird meccano toy town

Rejoice - the Nine Elms Vauxhall Partnership Open Days begin today: yay!

The Nine Elms development by night, from the south west

And here it is by day (a couple of months ago…there's even less view now!)

Oh joy unparalleled, we are to have a chance to ask questions about the Battersea-Nine Elms - Vauxhall developments at two open days this week!

Yes, those lovely folk who are nibbling away at the chimneys of Battersea Power Station, and erecting a sort of Berlin Wall of apartment blocks along the southern banks of the Thames from Chelsea to Vauxhall bridges, are giving local residents the chance to hear how their lives are about to be made even more blissful.

I adore the Nine Elms website, especially this bit which makes the very fair point that "We're the most central part of London that nobody knows about … yet!"

Yes, indeed, take that "yet", Robert Elms! Put it in your big BBC Radio London pipe and smoke it!

Oh lord, for sure, we are all nobodies, we live here, but nobody knows about us or how close we are to Parliament!

It's great to know that the multi-national team who are re-developing this big strip of brown fields land are slugging it out in our corner.

Anyway that's enough cynicism for this week.  Later today I shall be heading for the ROSE Community Centre off Stewart's Road for a chance to look at models of the finished development, and to hear about job opportunities - and talk to some of the folk involved in building this new utopia on the  Battersea marshlands.

Nine Elms Vauxhall Partnership Open Days
Tuesday July 14, 2015  3pm - 8pm
Wednesday July 15, 2015 8am - 6pm
ROSE Community Centre, Ascalon Street, London SW8 4DJ
www.nineelmslondon.com/opendays

Choked, crushed, blinded by the dust - London's property gold rush is killing us in so many different ways

These massive mixer-trucks drive in and out of the Battersea depot at the rate of about one every three minutes throughout the working week

Cycling down Silverthorne Road, almost lose it hitting a ridge of what looks like concrete in the road. At the same time the Range Rover Evo in front fires a couple of small pebbles at me from its fat back tyres.

Approaching Queenstown Road, it's hard to see a thing. It's about the 101th windy day in a row, and the wind around here - anywhere in fact in the SW8 area - is always full of grit from the massive building sites of Nine Elms Lane.

The people responsible for erecting that monstrous barrier of high-rise, low-on-architectural-merit apartment blocks are getting at us local residents in so many different ways.

But we also have a major cement works to add to the fun - the big Lafarge Tarmac place at the junction of Queenstown and Silverthorne Roads.

The huge six-wheel cement mixer trucks seem to be on some endless convoy, roaring in from the north, filling up with ready-mix concrete or whatever, then charging off in all directions, presumably serving many other big construction sites in  west and south London, such as the old Chelsea Barracks site, as well as Nine Elms itself.

They're messing up our roads - particularly Silverthorne Road and parts of Queenstown Road, at junctions where the huge trucks often clip the kerbstones in their eagerness to get in and out of the cement depot extra fast. The newly-filled lorries often spill  bits of their load - hence all those lethal pebbles and the growing ridges of cement in these streets.

So for most of the local population, who will never be able to afford one of these new flats (and most of us probably wouldn't want one anyway), the developers are bringing a lot of pain and no joy whatsoever.  Look at the list of our woes:

• They're destroying our views of the river and central London
• They're clogging our roads with a constant stream of massive trucks taking away debris and delivering building materials.
• They're closing down pubs, clubs,  shops and colleges.
• They're killing and maiming cyclists and others with their high-speed dumper trucks.
• They're blinding and choking us with the dust thrown up by the constant pile-driving, demolition, digging, and so on during this unusually dry and windy spring.
• They're shattering our peace with the constant crashing and hammering and drilling and thundering of trucks emptying materials.
• When all this is finished what do we get? Another influx of a few thousand super-rich types with their hideous armoured cars,  a couple of new tube stops on a spur of the already overcrowded Northern Line, and a linear park which looks like it will be  yet another of those closely observed (by cctv) manicured public spaces a la Canada Water.

Call me a cynic. Everyone else does.