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.

The day Theresa May stole Clapham's big radio moment

Clapham High Street - here and now, but not on the BBC Radio London Robert Elms show last week thanks to Mrs May's election announcement...but where, oh where, was the wonderful Maxwell Hutchinson?

Was listening to Radio London Tuesday morning.

As, to be honest, I often do....working at home, you know, self-employed teacher....freelance writer and editor...you know, well I will get back to jobseeking when I've had one more coffee. And listened to the wonderful and Reverend Professor Maxwell Hutchinson on the Robert Elms radio show on BBC Radio London - a local radio station that is often more interesting and intelligent than many of the national channels.

That man - the very Rev Prof Max - is quite a wonder. He's a great entertainer and educator on his many and various special subjects - architecture and the built environment, music, the Church and all manner of ecclesiastical matters....and much more. I think he is a world authority on Frankincense. And myrhh.

He's been doing this for ages, alongside running a successful architectural practice and being president of the RIBA, as well as a lay deacon. A couple of years back he had a bad, serious stroke. He was off air for months. But Mr Elms and his very loyal, very solid band of listeners, kept the idea of Max alive. By his own account, Mr Elms and his many listeners helped to keep Max alive. And Max came back and again turns up on the show every week, often on location as a sort of Kolly Kibber character - find Max in your Manor!

This week, the Rev Professor was supposed to be in my manor. I did not know this til 10am Tuesday when I tuned in my dodgy transistor to 94.9fm.

Poor old Robert Elms was having to deal with people from Clapham; he could hardly conceal his distaste for the place. He cheered up when someone pointed out Clapham Junction was in Battersea and it was only through snobbery they changed the name to Clapham.

A crescent moon over the bell-tower of Clapham's Holy Trinity
church: maybe Maxwell Hutchinson was somewhere around
this historic building, marooned like a ship on Clapham
Common.

You could sort of tell from the way he enunciated "Clapham" (and even slipped in a naughty "Cla'am" which was bound to annoy some SW4 listeners) that he did not have his usual enthusiasm for this Manor: too posh by 'alf, too silly, was what he  perhaps was half-secretly thinking. ALso it has the disadvatage of being south of the river, and just south of Chelsea.

I sort of agree with Mr Elms ...but I also agree with the caller who said Clapham had always been up-and-coming. But it never actually arrived. Which is (in my view) its saving grace. The High Street is still pleasingly scruffy. It's quite a horrible place but it is also mixed enough to remind you that the Henrys and Banker-wankers and so on are only the most recent and actually quite thin layer of this suburb's social geology.

There is still enough social housing in Clapham to ensure that the Henry&Henrietta brigade never completely colonise. Nor any other group of transients, my own lot of of 80s chancers included.

Then Mr Elms was talking to some chap who represented Clapham Common, a preservation society. He was in fact in Spain as he spoke. He did a so-so job, hardly exciting much interest in the long and outrageous history of this odd open space. Instead he kept telling us there were lots of fun runs. 'Fun run' is surely oxymoronic. He mentioned also 'Australian rules' football and dog-walkers. Yes, alas he was right - that is now what the Common is about. Sport, fitness, dogs and their owners. And in summer, young people eating huge picnics and drinking lots of champagne or prosecco from Sainsburys then leaving all the rubbish on the grass afterwards.

What about the 1985 (?) AntiApartheid free concert? Dr John? Alternative Miss World? Sunsplash? Archaos? Desmond Dekker at the Bandstand? Remember that, do you? etc?

Look, you know I am  a big critic of what has happened around here, and I wouldn't trust myself to defend it now, to be honest, even though it has served me well over three decades - but when we're on a global radio show, we need to stick together, right?

Well, I was waiting with some trepidation to find out what would be said.

Or maybe he was here, Old Clapham Library on the North Side of the
Common. This building was eventually saved and became what is now
the Omnibus, a well-used arts centre which is currently showing
Jim Grover's excellent photos of Clapham High Street life,
low, high and higher.

I was waiting for the chance to ring and tell Mr Elms about the Bread and Roses pub, almost the last place in Clapham I still feel very positive about. A trade union pub with music, free music, theatre and more! The Studio Voltaire contemporary art organisation also seems like a very good thing, deserving of much more praise than it gets. I'd have tried to mention that as well.

But I was also waiting for Jim Grover, the photographer of 48 hours on Clapham High Street, who was due to appear on the show to talk about his book and photo-exhibition at the Omnibus Arts centre.

And above all - I was waiting to find out where in Clapham the Rev Prof had chosen - and even more trepidation as to who he might meet. I began to fantasise. Maybe he will be outside the Holy Trinity Church on the Common - home of the Clapham Sect, one of the key places where the abolition of the slave trade gained momentum.

I think that would be the obvious place for Maxwell Hutchinson to set up shop - a church (albeit not that interesting, architecturally) - with some powerful history, and right by the popular paddling pool and temperance statue to boot.

Or maybe he was at the the new Library. Flashy noughties public-private rip-off architecture. No café any more!

This would have been a good place for the Prof Maxwell Hutchinson to hang out
with his Radio London crew: outside the new Clapham Library, half way down
 the High Street. Andrew Logan's mirrored artworks spelling out "Library"
are popular with all age groups and are arguably more interesting than
the building they stand in front of. 

Or perhaps in one of the leafy upper-crust streets or squares...or in Venn Street, a pleasant enough place. Or maybe he was at the Old Library, now the Omnibus Arts Centre - that would have made sense, especially as those High Street photos are on exhibition there right now.

So yes, I was waiting....and then Theresa May said she wanted a general election, and that was that! The rest of the show was devoted to political analysis and speculation, inevitably and properly, of course.

Ah well, maybe it was for the best.

Clapham is such an odd place now. I don't think it fits Robert Elm's idea of the sort of place real "one of us" Londoners live. Maybe it was once. It does not seem that sort of a place any more, even though, in reality, it of course is.

Clapham. Marginal but not edgy. Common, yes, very common. But not cheap, and certainly not very cheerful. Unless you have a city bonus to spend.