A walk on the vile side: underwhelmed by Nine Elms' hottest properties

Not so inviting on a dull winter's day, perhaps. The much talked about Sky Pool, 10 storeys above the Embassy Gardens zone of the Nine Elms, Battersea and Vauxhall development - seen here with its sun screen half extended. 

 
Work never stopped on the Battersea, Nine Elms & Vauxhall development over the long months of covid-19, and many of its supposedly headline projects are nearing completion. We've seen 'em (nearly) all...the Sky Pool, Frank Gehry's skew-whiff apartment blocks, Foster's voids, the rich doors, and the poor doors. The question which arises most often is: Why?

In the third lockdown, I started doing longer walks, sometimes with my support bubble friend for some mutual grumbling about anything or nothing.

Several times the stroll took us a mile north to that strip of oddly mismatched new buildings going up along the river, from Battersea Power Station to Vauxhall, aka the "Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea opportunity area" (VNEB).

Each time there are new things to gasp at. Yes, we had more to gasp about this time as well - though not so much in admiration, but in dismay and disbelief.

Affordable housing? Maybe not quite within your average budget, but nice and close to the
Portuguese cafés and Tesco on Wandsworth Road.

We approach from the large area of industrial units and scrapyards that border the Patmore Estate, Wandsworth Road to the south and Nine Elms Lane. 

Turning right from Stewart's Road we come up against the first bits of the redevelopment. 

The first, and to be honest the only entirely positive note of the whole journey is struck by the cheerfully re-painted rail bridge, which is a defact gateway separating old and new Battersea at this point. 

Sorry, this dark photo does not do the brilliant colours of 
Yinka Ilori's artwork, Happy Street, any justice whatsoever.
I'll revisit soon on a sunnier day (or with a better camera)

The underside of this - one of many very wide railway bridges in the area - was transformed by the artist Yinka Ilori as part of the 2019 London Festival of Architecture. 

The installation is called "Happy Street" and the vividly coloured panels and patterns do indeed inspire happier feelings in what used to be a dark and dirty tunnel.

It's worth remembering that this street once housed the Ramport Studios, an old church hall where many of The Who's singles and LPs were recorded. And that their then drummer, the late Keith Moon, once took it upon himself to become a temporary lollipop man at the zebra crossing, after a number of accidents involving local schoolkids. 

All that's left of that era is a green plaque on the wall of the former studios, now a health centre. But at least it's still there and being put to good use (I know of Who fans who try to get onto those GPs lists, just to enter the hallowed former recording areas).

Our joy was short-lived, however, as we encounter the half-built "affordable homes", nondescript low-rise apartment blocks at the southern edge of the development, as far as possible from the showpieces around the power station and along the river. They appear to be using cladding in a most unappealing lilac shade.

A windswept and dusty walk along Nine Elms Lane took us to the "Embassy Gardens" district, with its Waitrose, the scattered sculptures (a massive bronze courgette and an even bigger disembodied foot) and its canyons of glass and brick cladding, which feel more like walking in an architect's computer simulation than real life. 

All this has been there for several years now - but then there are some newer bits behind and to the east of the US Embassy building. There you are faced with two large blocks clad in what look like ceramic tiles in a very fetching bottle green. Closer inspection reveals these tiles to be large pre-fabricated panels.

As you walk between the blocks, look up and gawp at one of Nine Elm's star turns - yes, it's the  Sky Pool. About 150ft from the ground, a large transparent water tank stretches from one building to another. It is certainly an eye-catching feature; you just hope the acrylic material is as strong as it needs to be.  As we stare upward, a sort of sunblind slowly extedns along the bottom of the pool. Presumably this is to protect it, and to prevent the pool focussing  the sun's rays onto to some unsuspecting parked supercar below (as happened, notoriously, with the Walkie Talkie in it firsto autumn). 

Or maybe it's to preserve the modesty of some of the less exhibitionist super-rich bathers; imagine a crowd of long-focus paparazzi just waiting down below for some minor celeb or a footballer's girlfriend or whoever. A cheaper solution of course would be to swim in a different pool.

Meanwhile, pity whoever gets the flats just beneath each end of the pool. Imagine the dread of hearing that first drip, drip, drip sound. An interesting Guardian piece on the development includes interviews with just such early occupants of some of the more affordable apartments - which do not, of course, have access to the luxuries of the penthouse floors.

The US Embassy itself stands there silently, watching your every movement, behind its many layers of security and defence, including a full-blown medieval-style moat. The new Embassy had its unofficial baptism by protest last summer when the Black Lives Matter demo crossed the river from Westminster to take its message to the US front door. It was a peaceful and dignified demo, but the Embassy building seems so unreadable, impenetrable, and aloof that it was hard to tell if there was anyone in there to listen to the speakers.

One thing for sure - would be residents of the nearby apartments must get used to sounds of hovering helicopters and sirens, armed police and road closures on a regular basis.

We were hoping to move south from here to get to the nearly-complete Nine Elms tube station, then around to the huge towers that are rising across the road from the dreaded St George's Tower, aka the lethal Duracell.

But there's no quick access at this point at the moment. Eventually the "linear park" will link the two sides of the rail lines which divide this bit of the development, apparently.

So, back towards Battersea and another of the jewels in the developer's crown. As you approach the southern end of the power station, to your left are the near-complete, twisty looking apartment blocks designed by Frank Gehry of Bilbao Guggenheim fame. 

Frank Gehry's trademark wonkiness looks interesting close up, less so from 
any distance. No two apartments are the same, they say. 
Doubt I'll ever have the chance to check that out.

From some angles they look quirky, with apartments sprouting outwards like the segments of some exotic fruit. 

Seen from a little further away, however, these buildings have the bulky look of all the other blocks which now entirely enclose the old power station. 

The pattern of light and dark grey cladding which zig-zag over this set of buildings resembles, from a distance,  arctic camouflage of old warships, though a very undazzling version of it.

The great pièce de resistance of this part of the development - Gehry's titanium-clad Flower tower - is not yet visisble, at least not from the route we took. Early architect's impressions of this building were indeed more like what one expects from a "starchitect", and they featured in the hoardings lining Nine Elms Lane at one point.

Is it yet to be built, or is it hidden behind all these other bulky blocks?

Just to the west of the Gehry buildings is another huge, serpentine  construction, 15 storeys high with two large  voids acting as giant peepholes in a colossal barrier. This building, a product of the local Foster & Partners studio,  has echoes the famous Byker Wall in Newcastle, or in Sheffield's Park Hill estate. Or even closer to home, the Barrier Block on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton - though I doubt the developers would welcome these comparisons.

This forms another layer of the defences surrounding the Power Station, and is also the site of the much-lauded Battersea  roof gardens. Together the Gehry and Foster developments trace the route of a new "high street", all or part of which will be named "Electric Boulevard" - a nod to the former purpose of the power station, rather than a trbute to the famous shopping avenue in Brixton.

As for the power station, well this grand old dame has been given a thorough wash and brush up, a scouring and re-glazing, so that it looks as good - and as bland - as new. In fact it looks like the whole building has been replaced by a giant cardboard model. At the southern end, work is progressing on what seems to be small amphitheatre. 

I remeber my first visits to the Canary Wharf area in the late 80s, and feeling I was in a film set for a Dallas-based TV series: the people were all too smartly dressed and well-groomed to be real, everything was too clean and shiny. The VNEB area has the same feel only more so, and it also lacks something that Canary Wharf has in all too obvious abundance - a reason for being there. 

Radio show evokes ghosts of Nine Elms' colourful past (and drear visions of its shiny future)

Nine Elms now - a hell of speeding construction trucks and harsh architecture. A recent radio show cast
a lot of light on the district's distinctly more human past.

The re-development of Thames riverside from Vauxhall all the way to Battersea Park has been sending me into apoplexies for about eight years. You can read the spluttering evidence of this in many entries on this blog, often with the words "Nine Elms Disease" in the headline.

I stumbled on that silly phrase even before it was used in the Daily Telegraph. Now I think of it as shorthand for all those cynical building schemes, the massive zones of identikit "luxury apartment" towers on brownfields sites around the country. Yes, just like the original disease, this one spreads fast and is unstoppable - even by the Brexit-triggered property slump.

Fascinating, then, that Nine Elms was the chosen neighbourhood focus of BBC Radio London's nearly eponymous morning strand, the Robert Elms Show, on March 5. Once they'd got over the coincidence of the presenter's name and the fact the new elm tress have been planted to restore the "nine" in the name, this was an interesting programme.

However, almost all the interest related to the district's complex industrial past and its now rapidly dwindling working class population. The New Covent Garden  wholesale fruit and flower market was the exception - and their spokesperson Theresa was getting excited a big rebuild which would provide a new Flower Market, football pitches and something called a food exchange. Vague visions of Nine Elms becoming another Borough Market sort of evaporated when she admitted this area would never become a tourist attraction on the scale of the original Covent Garden.

Apart from that, the new development and the area's glorious future was somewhat shrugged off as disappointing but inevitable - even by a self-confessed property developer who wound down the window of his Bentley and spoke briefly to the show's resident architect and polymath, the Reverend Professor Maxwell Hutchinson.

The Rev. Prof - surely the best known and most loved architect-broadcaster in BBC history - had little good to say about the new developments along the river. The poor man had been deposited on Nine Elms Lane, just across the busy four-lane road from the new and generally disliked US Embassy. It is his job, every two weeks, to be "found" by listeners to this show: they exchange a few words on their neighbourhood with both the Prof and Mr Elms back in the studio, and get a badge for their efforts.

It says a lot about the current state of Nine Elms that the first of only two people to find Max was a property bod in a luxury car.

Prof Hutchinson tends to improvise at length about the architectural merits of the given location. On this occasion it was chiefly past merits - for example, the old Nine Elms railway terminal, used by anyone

Nine Elms, the London terminus for the London and Southampton Railway:
the newly built station in an engraving from Mechanics Magazine, 1838. Only
ten years later, the line was extended to  Waterloo and this station closed to
passengers. But it remained as a goods depot right up to 1968, and was then
demolished. Pic: Wikimedia Commons

(including Garibaldi!) on their  way to or from the ocean liners of Southampton in the 19th century. This handsome building survived bomb damage in 1941, and served as a BR goods depot right up to 1968, when it was demolished.

Looking at old maps, it seems the station was between the site of the big Nine Elms Sainsburys and the market: I've not been able to find any trace of it, however.

We heard about the  windmills, the Battersea New Town, the Ind Coope brewery....and Battersea Power Station, which is of course in Nine Elms, just as Clapham Junction is in Battersea.

Maxwell was more puzzled than delighted by the cuboid, shiny plastic-clad US Embassy (although Mr Elms quite liked it, mainly because of its moat) and shared my dismay at how the big residential blocks screen off most of the riverside views. It was compared, very unfavourably, with the previous US Embassy building - a modernist masterpiece - in Grosvenor Square. Just for once, aesthetes seem to agree with Donald Trump.

But Maxwell was also depressed by the dullness of most of the new architecture, despite the "awe-inspiring" investment. He complained of the anonymity of the design - "universal contemporary modernist blocks" set in "acres of tarmac".

As so often is the case in this feature, the best bits came later when listeners began calling in with memories. One of the last industries that flourished in this area was recorded music. One listener came in with vivid memories of her times at The Who's own Ramport Studio in Thessaly Road, on the Patmore Estate - where bands such as Thin Lizzie, Sparks and the Sex Pistols also cut some of their seminal works. There's a good feature on the studio on the Battersea Power Station Community Group site. The studio building is said to be still there, although there's a new NHS Health Centre on part of the site.

Perhaps less well known outside punk and new wave circles was the Mayhem Studio set up by singer/actor Toyah Wilcox above her flat in an ancient railways warehouse in Patcham Terrace - now the site of the peculiarly ugly (even by Nine Elms standards) "Exchange" blocks. One of the Robert Elms callers remembers going there with his band to record a single, and bumping into members of well-known bands on the stairs.

There's an excellent if very sad YouTube video about this place posted by a Toyah fan, bluemeaning, which makes great use of some of her music. You wonder if future residents will be haunted by the eerie yelping of the splendid flame-haired one - who I remember best as a naughty Miranda in Derek Jarman's film of The Tempest.

Not far from this site at the Queenstown Road end of the development are 14 very valuable acres of land formerly owned by us - the public - in the shape of the Royal Mail. It was flogged off to developers for hundreds of millions not long after Royal Mail was itself privatised in 2013.

Part of the old Royal Mail South London sorting office site,
flogged off to the developers to become more flats
 and a public park.

Part of the site is to be turned into a stretch of the much-vaunted "linear park" which will run through the development. Other bits have been snapped up by developers such as Greystar whose proposals reveal yet another group of those bland New London Vernacular style apartment blocks.

Note how the architect's impressions are so often full of stylish young people and neat small trees covered in blossom....

Well, to get back to Robert Elms and the eponymous trees - this planting ceremony was indeed a high point in the developer's admittedly very well orchestrated PR programme over the past couple of years.

Last summer I met my very first new Nine Elms resident whilst checking out the Art Night festivities - which included a marching band and procession of dancers with LED-illuminated hoola-hoops. The young French lady I spoke to had seen the procession from her riverside apartment. "My son wasn't sleeping, so I brought him down to here to see what's going on.

"Do you have any idea who these people are?" she added.

I told her and she was happy, evidently pleased at having such entertainments at her doorstep.

Farewell old friend: Battersea Power Station disappearing behind more new apartment blocks

A pair of medium-sized apartment blocks have been rising for the past few months just south of Battersea Power Station. Now they've reached the point where they're ruining the view of what had been the best-loved local landmark for thousands of SW11/4/8 residents.

These two new blocks - one of which is still swathed in scaffolding - already appear to be just as dull as most of the other stuff that has risen out of the mud of Nine Elms since 2011. All that most of us will be able to see of the renovated power station are the chimney-tops - and these of course are not the originals! (But - it doesn't do to carp - they'e made a damn fine job of replicating them).

Oddly, very little mention is made of these two new blocks in the flashy online brochure for the Battersea - Nine Elms development.

Those sweeping great aerial views of the whole zone, with their computer-generated impressions of all the new towers, simply don't show anything that far from of the river.

You have to look at their interactive map to find out that this is the so-called Battersea Power Station Development Zone 4a - otherwise known as the Battersea Exchange site. It's separated from the rest of the development by Battersea Park Road, and seems to be the main location for the much reduced number of so-called affordable homes, plus a primary school and a health centre.

It's hardly mentioned on the main glossy marketing sites. But if you look closely at the photo above you can see they've put a great big ad on the side of the bigger block - batterseaexchange.com
.

Go to this site and you find it's part of the TaylorWimpey firm. You'll also see an impression of the finished buildings - looks like the bigger tower will also be white with those deep fins you can see on the smaller one, making them look a bit like electrical transformers. This might be relevant as there is also a major electricity substation being rebuilt on this site....but probably isn't. Some remarkably similar blocks are going up right now along York Road opposite Waterloo Station as part of the old Shell building redevelopment.

These two blocks in themselves are no worse than any of the rest of the development, and less ghastly than some of them. Looking at the brochure, it looks like these towers will not actually be the "affordable" flats (prices seem to be in the £550k - £1m region) - so they must be in the smaller brown blocks fronting the road?

What is sad is that the mile or more of these stubby towers, strung out along both sides of Nine Elms Lane, simply do not work together; they don't coalesce, they don't complement, they don't form anything like an interesting cluster. Even Canary Wharf is beginning to get that 'Manhattan' effect where the sum of the parts is much better than most of the individual buildings.

Around here, the reverse seems to be true. Perhaps it will be better when the massive new towers  at the Vauxhall end go up. I'm personally hoping they will block out my view of the most-hated tower of the lot - that killer cylinder, I think they call it St Georges Tower - the one that downed a helicopter a few years back.

Longer term of course, all this stuff will return whence it came. Like so many worm-casts thrown up on a mudbank, it will all sink back into mire. Maybe sooner than we all expect.

Taking a view on redevelopment....Battersea and Nine Elms, 2012 -2017

The first cranes appeared in 2012

There used to be a good view from the back of the small block of flats I live in.  It's in north Clapham, near the Wandsworth Road, and is on the last bit of the higher ground that forms Lavender Hill. So there's nothing but the Battersea marshes and the river between here and central Westminster.

But where once we had views of the old city, now what we see most of are the nasty little boxy blocks and towers scattered along the river, the increasingly baleful evidence of the Battersea - Nine Elms redevelopment. I've watched as the  four chimneys of Battersea Power Station came down, then went back up again. Now the huge building is being engulfed by equally huge blocks going up around it. The old gasholders have gone to be replaced by holders of billionaire owners' tax avoidance schemes.

Battersea Power Station from a fourth floor flat in Clapham: left, on July 6 2012; right, April 2017

Westminster and London Eye from Clapham; left, July 2012, right, April 2017

No point complaining of course...it's not as though we have a protected view. Not that even that status carries much weight in this world of vulture-gangster property developers. Look at the Richmond Park affair.

The funny thing is, I suppose, that all these new buildings are losing value as England commits its xenophobic hari kiri. Perhaps one day soon a penthouse apartment in Nine Elms will be as cheap as it looks.

Sneak preview of Battersea-Nine Elms "village" life as river frontage opens to public

Good news (or so it seemed) last week, to hear that the river frontage by Battersea Power Station was open to the public for the first time since that brief glimpse we had back in 2013 (when there was a sort of alternative Chelsea Flower Show staged on the land about to be transformed into luxury flats).

So on Sunday, after a happy hour or two in Battersea Park, including a visit to the Pump House Gallery (re-opened after being flooded in January) I thought I'd check it out.

It's good that you can get from the park to the new bit without having to cross Queenstown Road, via a walkway under the first span of Chelsea Bridge.

So you walk under the road, and emerge in front of those lumpy flats which went up in the 1990s and now seem rather jaded, set as they are against a backdrop of the splendours oF Battersea - Nine Elms extravagance.  So now, you can walk on, until you get to the wide Grosvenor railway bridge carrying all the Southern rail lines into Victoria Station over the river.

This bit of the walkway has been transformed using lots of Scandinavian-look timber. It's all very nicely-built. There's a new Santander bike rack and large timber-framed exhibition room, plus several shop/bar/restaurant and kiosk spaces. And lots of festive lightbulbs. Just round the corner it leads to what they are calling a "village hall" for the first of the new residential areas ("Quarters" I mean)  at this end of the massive Battersea-Nine Elms development.

With people supposed to be moving into the first flats very soon, this bit - Circus West Village - is a sort of sneak preview of what this vast development might feel like. I never did find the idea of London's urban villages very convincing or  attractive, and to describe this encampment for multi-millionaires a village is stretching the concept a bit, isn't it?

The folksy map shows some of the first occupants of the retail and restaurant
spaces: looks like you won't have to far for a cocktail or an artisanal toasted
sandwich with a cold-pressed flat white, if that's your thing...

On this day, it felt a bit odd, a bit sad, a bit of everything really. Smartly dressed security guys clutched walkie-talkie phones and did their best to smile at the occasional pedestrian or cyclist visitors, the inquisitive passers-by and lost joggers.

Not sure how many serious potential buyers there were there.

The new residential buildings are very showy, very smart and cold.
There's one clad entirely in copper sheeting, another a great glass snake that follows the railway line, said by the developer to be as long as the Shard is tall.

One of the rooms under the bridge is hosting a display about the development. It includes one of those wonderful old wooden models of Battersea Power Station as it was in 1935, complete with neatly stacked piles of coal by the quayside.

This room contains big panels of texts and diagrams informing us of what to expect. Not too many surprises. The developer is making  efforts to win over the more influential local residents. For example there will a programme of free cultural events over the summer, involving among others, Battersea Arts Centre. Which is a good sign, isn't it?

The "village hall", which is being built under one of the massive arches, will include a large performance area.

Then there will of course be shops, bars, restaurants galore. Not - we are promised - from the big international chains. Oh no. But neither, judging from the descriptions given here, will they be terribly affordable to the passing public. Well, at least not to the old menaces like me who like to float around with a Sainsburys bag usually containing a couple of charity-shop bargain books and a camera or two.

The view east: any resemblance to San Gimignano or Trebizond is entirely
a figment of this author's fevered imagination.

It should have been great to see what's left of the power station close up again. Of course it never fails to take your breath away - even now. And the scale of the whole redevelopment is also breathtaking, if in a rather different way.

But, seeing the stumps of the chimneys and the non-existent walls and roof of the main hall was also like walking into an operating theatre and seeing an old friend all opened up and bloody on the table.

You just know that when it's finished it will be all scrubbed up and lovely, like a CGI image in a Hollywood movie. It will be hard to tell which are the new bits and which the original. And, it won't matter. Will it.

They've built a neat little viewing platform so you can gaze across the whole development towards Vauxhall.

The new concrete cores of high rise towers, the lift and service shafts, stick out of the churned up soil of Nine Elms. On some they've painted the number of each floor in case they forget where to stop.

 If you screw your eyes up you could almost be looking at the medieval towers of San Gimignano in Tuscany. They were built by wealthy barons, initially to defend themselves, but really to show off their wealth and outdo their neighbours in a macho, phallic display. So what changes?

Well, at least those medieval barons didn't drive SUVs.

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.

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?

Nine Elms disease: so not even the super-rich want this two-mile strip of ugliness

Battersea-Nine Elms development: Spot the remains of Battersea Power Station amidst this swamp of architectural mediocrity

Fascinating to read in yesterday's Evening Standard that the boss of builders Taylor Wimpey, Peter Redfern, is warning developers not to expect vast profits from speculative investments in the new Battersea - Nine Elms development.

By which he means that ribbon of hideously bland luxury apartment blocks going up between Battersea Park and Vauxhall Cross - a great flood of mediocre architecture which had already swamped the remains of Battersea Power Station and is blighting the view for about 80 per cent of people living in south west London.

The development, which has made life hell for anyone living within vibration distance of the main artery roads used by the ready-mix cement tricks which have been thundering around this circuit, one a minute, all day long, for the past five years or so….well, it seems it has all been a bit of a waste of time.

Property developers, it seems are no longer confident of making sky-high profits on these luxury units of accommodation. The currency of the Thameside apartment block has slumped. They'll still make money, but not enough, it seems, to satisfy their infernal greed. They'll go elsewhere.

From the way he was talking, with his mentions of a "glut of expensive flats in south London",  it seems this two-mile stretch will become London's next ghost town slum, a sort of Thamesmead for south west London.

Actually, that would be fine. Then at least those blocks could be commandeered by Lambeth or the next mayor to provide shelter for the increasing numbers of homeless people we see all around us every day….or they could be squatted. The power station could be returned to its proper use as a location for raves and parties and art happenings.

All the artists and dreamers priced out of Shoreditch and Hackney and Bow and Peckham could come and squat in the penthouses with Thames views. Tens of thousands of refugees from the camps of Calais could be housed here; give them Eurostar tickets now. Together, they could all throw parties in that 8th floor infinity pool they are so keen to show us. Then this new development might have some value: it might become a new tourist attraction, knocking Camden Market, Brick Lane and co into a cockenry hat.

There could be non-stop car-boot sales all along this linear park they are boasting about. The new  Northern Line extension would never be switched on, and those tunnels could be used to grow top quality weed and other vegetable delights.

 What a glorious thought. A dream. It would almost make the loss of the view of London worthwhile.

Microgroove33 and a third quiz fun time: 

Mark the spot on this photo where you once would have seen the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. Answers on a postcard, please. The person who is closest will win our splendid first prize!

First prize: one year's free subscription to this blog.
Runners-up: lifetime free subscriptions to this blog for yourself and all your friends and family.
Terms & conditions apply*

* Terms & conditions: there are no prizes at all, obviously. But the question is real so if you want to do it just for the joy, then please ….