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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These buildings now dominate the view from my toilet window.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough of this blogger's impotent rage! It's time to celebrate surviving another year in south London with cheap cake and our favourite local podcaster!

The year is nearly out. I know this because  Panettone is on sale in Lidl, and one of the most loyal readers of this blog is once again offering the best audible - as opposed to edible - Advent Calendar your ears will ever be lucky enough to be plugged into.

So before I embark on the standard moan about what an even lousier year it has been - let's just hear it for cheap Panettone and Daniel Ruiz Tizon's fantastic podcasts. These two seemingly unrelated phenomena must surely force me to think again before consigning the whole of the Modern World to fire and damnation.

I enjoyed the Advent Calendar so much that I wrote a post on this blog in praise of it, and, listening just now to the fabulous 16th December episode (The Kindness of Strangers), I would say, without hesitation, that you'd be crazy not to listen to all of it! It's also good to see that Daniel's also working on new material for his Café Chronicles on Resonance FM - a Christmas Eve special goes out at 8pm on the 24th.

This excellent south London podcaster is also one - possibly the only - regular reader of this blog. He often gives us a favourable mention on his twitter feed, and often enjoys pointing out how few and far between are the posts. He has even, on a couple of occasions,  referred to me as the Greta Garbo-like recluse of this hellish world of online writers.

He's right, of course - there's no way a blog can flourish on one post every four or five months.

The thing is, I write dozens of pieces for every one I publish. The abandoned majority are nearly always ill-considered rants. The impotent rage of an elderly remnant of a pampered generation: one who never moved on from the trauma of the 1979 General Election.

It happens like this. I go somewhere, I see something outrageous, something that really gets my blood boiling, and on the way home I compose a searing diatribe that will surely draw full attention to the menace in question (it is usually some form of motorised road-user).

Trouble is, when I'm finally staring at the laptop screen, those wonderful armour-piercing chains of words have all blown away, and become just a harmless puff of hot gas....and there's nothing worse than a half-baked rant. But I try, and the evidence is there in blogger archive: hundreds of unpublished outbursts.

The headlines of a few recent spiked stories give a flavour of my bile-fuelled year of rage:

– Nine Elms' Sainsbury tower block fails to win 2018 Carbuncle Cup:  we wuz robbed!
– F.a.o truck owners: if you really can't see what's between you and the pavement, how come your vehicle's allowed on the road?
– Nine reasons to regret US decision to build Embassy in Nine Elms
– The dismal decline of London's listings magazines
– Blinded by the light: why are modern car headlamps so dangerously dazzling?
– Anyone able to squeeze out a tear for the stalled developers of Chelsea Barracks?
– Out on the streets I'm calling it murder: souped-up cars are the new lethal weapons of choice
– SUV drivers! Since when did it stop being a crime to honk your horn merely to express your arrogance?
– Confusion every which way: the bonkers new cycle-superhighway systems at Stockwell, Vauxhall Cross and Elephant and Castle...
– and so on, blah, blah, bloody blah.......

It was while writing the last one - provisional headline, "To the bloke in a tight white shirt and red-and-grey tie, driving a metallic grey Audi A8, at Clapham Common at 5.05 yesterday afternoon, who honked at the Nissan Micra in front because it was waiting for an elderly disabled person cross the High Street: learn some bleedin' patience, fatso! " - that I realised that the headline itself said it all, and I should stop writing these things until I could control my rage a bit better.

So, I have spared you from even having the chance to glimpse these bitter words. Anger, I now realise, is not enough: it is not a useful basis for a blog or for any other form of expression. I never really much liked hard-core punk music for the same reason. The Angry Young Men of 1950s Britain? Just a bit too pleased with their own righteous manly bristling for my liking. As for The Who smashing their instruments - that was just plain stupid.

So even though it has truly been a terrible year for so many people,  and although I really have witnessed many, many more incidents of extreme and unprovoked anger and selfishness and even violence on the streets of south London this year than in any previous one, I think it is a good idea to swallow my bile for once.

Instead, please join me in enjoying a slice or two of Lidl's £3.29 De Luxe Panettone, a few glasses of cheap white wine (Prosecco, if you insist) and get listening to that Advent Calendar! No better way to get through these strange bleak days.

And one 2019 resolution: I will start writing more regular, less negative items for Microgroove. Oh yes I will.....

Cyclists killed on London's streets: a new Ghost Bike commemorates another death in Deptford

It feels like an undeclared war in London between drivers and cyclists has broken out again, with three cyclists killed in the last month - all in the Greenwich-Deptford area of south east London.

The first two cyclist deaths on London's roads in 2018 were both on the A206 between the Greenwich Naval College and the Blackwall Tunnel roundabout: that deadly route to Woolwich. According to the report in the Evening Standard, both were males, 46 and 37, and both were killed by lorries, on May 9 and May 18 respectively.

Cyclists' groups have campaigned for cycle lanes to be built here, but the authority - Greenwich - has failed to take action.

Then, last Sunday, June 3 - ironically, World Bicycle Day - a male cyclist in his fifties died in a shocking and puzzling incident at the junction of Childers Street and Rolt Street, SE8. This was a hit-and-run incident, at a junction where traffic-calming measures and a new supposedly cyclist-friendly route had only recently opened.

The case is under police investigation. A 37-year-old man was arrested on Wednesday on a charge of causing death by dangerous driving, then was released.

By Thursday, one of the white Ghost Bikes had been chained to the signpost at the scene of this death. I know this corner well, often cycling to this exact point, to visit the Acme studios in the former Propeller Factory on Childers Street. It's only in the last few months that many of the streets and pavements around here have been re-paved and traffic calming measures introduced.

It seems the bike became trapped under the car, which was then driven up Childers Street to the next junction. Unable to dislodge the bike, the driver was then seen to run off on foot, abandoning the car. You can see the scratches gouged into the recently-resurfaced road by the trapped bike. It is a chilling sight, when you realise that at the time these scratches were made the rider was dying on the street, despite efforts to help him from several passers-by.

Rolt Street is part of a well-known rat-run for drivers trying to beat the traffic in the Surrey Quays - Deptford - New Cross triangle. Locals say the new one-way system is often ignored by motorists, and that the council has often been told this: even after the death, cars and vans were shooting through that narrow one-way lane in the wrong direction.

There's no point in going on. Except to say - unfortunately - that no London cyclist will be surprised by this horrific event. The levels of car/van/lorry driver aggression have been increasing: anger seems to be in the foul air we all have to breathe. Cars screech to a halt at junctions, their nasty bumpers two or three feet out into the cycle lane - they can't wait for the cyclists to pass, they bristle.

Each one of these deaths, like any other unnatural, unnecessary killing, creates terrible ripples of grief which extend far beyond family.

We're in a city suffering creeping death by vehicle pollution. Air pollution, visual pollution, stress pollution, noise pollution. The power-brokers are trying to keep the motorists happy, even when they know it is essential to discourage private drivers,  and to shift the balance towards more sustainable public transport.

Each cyclist killed on London streets is a victim of political decisions and business decisions. Such as the decision to allow hundreds of ready-mix cement and tipper trucks on to the narrow streets of central London, as they rush to feed the greedy construction sites of the City, Nine Elms, Blackfriars, Elephant and Castle, Old Street, Waterloo, Chelsea Barracks etc etc etc...Yes, just to build more unaffordable luxury apartments in tower blocks which add more visual pollution to the skyline. And whose occupants - if they ever move in - will probably soon be blasting down your street in their obese Maseratis and Range Rovers.

For many years, the groups who fight for safer streets for all have marked each cycle death with a white bike - a ghostly reminder to all passing traffic of a horrific event.

I look out for these, knowing the locations of many white bikes within a few minutes ride from here. Recently, one has disappeared - the one on Lavender Hill, Battersea, opposite the Police Station. It marked the spot where 32-year-old Lucia Ciccioli was killed at 7.54am on October 24, 2016, by a massive truck, which appeared to be delivering plaster-board to building sites.

Maybe this memorial has been removed at the request of the family of the victim. But if not - why has it gone? To make life easier for somebody? If that's the case, I'd say it was a dismal move.

I wish these  Ghost Bikes would remain in situ for ever: concrete them in, reinforce them; make sure they get in people's way, make sure they cause drivers' heads to turn and consciences to start pricking them.

Maybe in 100 years people would look at them in disbelief that such fragile, elegant machines could have been so much at the mercy of speeding lumps of metal, oil and plastic, filling the air with their toxic stench and their hideous blaring horns and roaring engines. And so often carrying just one or a couple of people, unnecessarily, very slowly, to schools or shops.

"More bad news from Battersea" - Oh, really? what a massive surprise

Is that some affordable housing going up just to the south of the rebuilt Battersea Power Station? Probably not. The developers have just been given the OK by Wandsworth Council to cut the numbers of affordable homes in the development from 636 to 389. That's a 250 home shortfall on the promised total. Meanwhile some of the poorest people in the borough continue to suffer the disruption, the pollution and the congested roads caused by this absurd development, aimed at an international super-rich market which has already moved on. 

It has been a terrible few weeks for London, but a fascinating time to observe how the London Evening Standard, under the new editor George Osborne, has been covering the successive disasters and tragedies.

No opportunity has been missed to ridicule the prime ministerial qualities of Theresa May. That is entirely as expected. Slightly more surprising is its more cogently critical approach to residential property developers, and this recent headline - "More bad news from Battersea"  - is a case in point.

I've written lots - maybe too much - about the damage this unnecessary and vulgar development is causing, how it is blighting the lives of thousands of local residents from Vauxhall right through to Battersea. I used to prefix these entries with "Nine Elms disease" - but not any more, as that suggests a natural disaster, unavoidable. In fact it's a very human disaster, caused by human greed, and so highly avoidable.

The long-suspected impact on air quality of so much construction work in one area is given added credence by research published last month (see: South Bank construction boom sends London air pollution soaring, London Evening Standard, May 8 2017). There's also the noise, the congestion caused by endless roadworks and closures and the convoys of ready-mix trucks doing the circuits from Silverthorne Road to Vauxhall and back again. The chewed-up streets, the spilling of pebbles so dangerous to the eyes of cyclists, the way these bulky vehicles dominate the road space, just as the new buildings colonise the sky above us.

Now parts of the development are nearing completion, we get an influx of estate agents with their stupid pennants fluttering outside their "marketing suites". Of course they had some bad news too: in March 2016, well before the EU referendum, demand for the sky-high-priced flats (aka safety deposit boxes in the sky) fell back and prices slumped by 20 per cent and more. Demand is said to have recovered a bit since then due to the weaker pound, but it's still far from the 2015 level.

And this week there's further damning news about this place, again reported in the Standard: the developers now want to cut the number of "affordable" flats from 636 to 389, just 9 per cent of the total. This is because their profit expectations have fallen and they need to prop them up - presumably to keep shareholders happy.

They say the other 250 affordable properties could still be built later on - depending on the future state of the market.

Meanwhile they are still using the fact they have rescued a crumbling national icon - Battersea Power Station - as justification for their greed. Well, they might have rebuilt the chimneys very nicely, but unfortunately the whole building is now walled in by such massive banks of apartment blocks that its impact on the surrounding urban environment is totally lost.

The building of high-rise residential towers has gained a painful new topicality since the Grenfell Tower  fire. Last week the people building and buying apartments in the new "luxury" developments were the target of an excoriating attack by novelist Will Self, on BBC Radio 4's A Point of View.

Self, who lives in the Stockwell area, was audibly trembling with rage throughout his 10-minute talk. But he never let the anger get the better of the precision of his speech. Architecture, he said, was unique among the arts in that it had a direct social impact - and thus a moral dimension.

He saved some of his most deliciously withering language for the Nine Elms development: "The very sight of these infantile-looking structures being doodled into being now turns my stomach" he said.

The majority of  these new residential towers, he said, were "as ugly as they are bad, enshrining as they do not the civic virtue of providing housing for people on low incomes, but the corporate vice of profit maximisation".

Well said, Will Self!

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.

It's not just Nine Elms - even Mecca is suffering at the hands of property developers

View from the Abraj al Bait tower while it was under construction, looking down into the sanctuary of
Mecca's Holy Mosque. Note the areas cleared for more construction in the background.
Photo: Basil D Soufi via Wikimedia Commons

Unless you are a Muslim, your chances of visiting the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia are approximately zero. But a short film, shown at last week's BBC Arabic Film festival, reveals that even this most sacred of places is being ravaged by property developers - remarkably similar to the ones working their grim way along the south bank of the Thames.

What this film, Prayer for Mecca,  brings home so sharply is how rampant redevelopment - which has the full support of the government and presumably the religious authorities - has already wiped out parts of the medieval city, and in doing so has also destroyed a slice of communal memory. A recent Guardian article reports local anger at the way their neighbourhoods are being erased to make way for new roads and hotels.

Directed by Matteo Lonardi, the film follows the Saudi artist Ahmed Mater as he attempts to document the rapid change being inflicted on his city. This young man - clearly at some risk to himself - is photographing what he can of the old city, as well as the redevelopment.

Much of the film, like the city itself, is dominated by the gargantuan Abraj Al Bait hotel complex, a grouping of massive skyscrapers which loom over the most sacred part of the city, the Masjid al-Haram (Holy Mosque) and its courtyard where millions of pilgrims gather each year, to circle the Kaaba, the most holy cube-shaped shrine at its centre.

A famous ancient Ottoman fortress was demolished to make way for these new buildings, which contain shopping malls and office premises as well as ultra-luxurious hotel accomodation, car parks and even helipads.

The central tower, with its huge clockfaces and spire, looks a bit like a kitscher version of the already kitsch Big Ben, but for its height - at 601m about seven times as tall - and the crescent moon at the tip. The forest of cranes surrounding the central area is painfully reminiscent of the Battersea to Vauxhall riverside development.

Of course it's the massive increase in numbers of pilgrims which provides the main justification for this redevelopment, along with some tragic incidents when the old city's infrastructure could not cope with the crowds.

But it's the brashness and show-off style of these buildings that is upsetting for some locals, according to Ahmed, who notes that they seem entirely at odds with the spiritual nature of the place. Apparently there's even a Starbucks in there somewhere. The minarets of the great mosque are dwarfed, and the new sykscrapers throw deep shadows across the courtyard.

The area where he grew up - an old quarter, with a maze of narrow alleyways - has been bulldozed.

Makes you wonder what Canterbury might look like if they had 14 million pilgrim-visitors going there for the same week every year....

Oi, you! Property developers and your ilk - can we have our words back, please?

I can think of a fourth two-word phrase ending in "OFF" which might be the best response to these corporate language thieves, seen not long ago outside the former IPC building in Stamford Street, not far from Blackfriars Bridge

First they take your words, then they take your city.

This seems to be part of the strategy of the corporate property developers who are gobbling up huge areas of what used to be a fairly open city. They grab the land, then they put up big fences. Then they write big friendly lovely words all over these fences to make you think they are wonderful people!

But even as they decorate the barriers - sometimes employing very skilled artists and copywriters to do it - behind the hoardings, they are busily privatising and colonising not only the land but also the sky above it.

Yes, that's right: we must indeed be innovative, and highly collaborative.
Thanks for the advice, Battersea Power Station Development people!

Watch out for these smug and vacuous phrases that are being painted in tasteful colours and elegant fonts on hoardings all around us, as if the words actually bring the ideas into existence!

I mean, seriously, what the hell has Rachmaninoff and Blue Note got to do with a massive block of luxury apartments that has taken over what used to be IPC Magazines HQ in Stamford Street, near Blackfriars Bridge?

Yeah, what? As though by putting the words close to each other the goodness of the first two will somehow rub off onto the badness I at least associate with the others, such as "target market" and "luxury apartments".

Look at those words above written on the miles of fence on Nine Elms Lane; "innovative", "collaborative" ....oh, yes, of course.

OK, so the blame for this sort of nonsense cannot all be laid at the feet of estate agents. It started, as so much else rotten did, in the advertising industry and was then picked up by marketing and "brand" executives, especially in the 80s.

Remember the time when perfectly sensible company names were changed to vague, often made-up words, such as "Aviva" or  the Post Office's temporary pseudonym, "Consignia"? Or when the Philip Morris tobacco firm became "Altria?" (For other horrors of this nature, read this great article in Time Magazine).

In the late 90s, under the shining eyes of Mr Blair, this trend moved into the public sector, and suddenly schools around the land were changing their names and adopting gormless or worthy slogans instead of homely Latin mottos: "Excellence for all" was a favourite; "Embracing diversity" - yes, a great thing, but are you really doing it? "Integrity, Diligence, Civility" - yes, all of those please!

No doubt it's good to have lofty ambitions: you just wonder sometimes if those schools with their flashy new buildings and lurid new uniforms can live up to the hype of their marketing.

Politicians have always loved dreadful slogans, but even the least offensive of these optimistic phrases can turn your stomach when they are over-used. A case in point at a recent London Mayoral event. while the crowd waited patiently for the arrival of delayed Mayor Khan, they played a short marketing video about London at least 20 times. The theme, "London is open" in a whole range of carefully chosen accents, thus embracing diversity as well. The trouble is by the 12th or 13th hearing of someone like the ubiquitous Jarvis Cocker mumbling "London is open" you begin to question those words. Is it really open? To whom? People with enough money? Clever buggers only?

No, actually you are NOT improving the image of construction,
not even slightly. And yes I do mind if you don't smoke.

Which brings us back to property developers and that annoying phrase you see on building sites everywhere: "Improving the image of construction".

Oh yeah? Whenever I see that I think, "Oh no you're not". If you think the way you're building that horrible pile of expensive flats that no-one living around here can hope to afford is in some way an improvement on the people who built St Paul's Cathedral, then you should think again.

Maybe we should have some new by-laws about words on hoardings. Maybe like fag packets they should be forced to print some home truths, some "health warnings" in equally trendy fonts.

Something like this, perhaps:

"Buying a flat in this development will not only bankrupt you it will also make you the laughing stock of all your even richer friends and the enemy of everyone living in the estate over the road".

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!

Daniel Ruiz Tizon is even more available

Here's your chance to own a little bit of something very rare - and something that, as the glittering towers of Nine Elms continue to rise, will soon become as rare as  as an honest broker in the property business.

I'm talking about local, homegrown, SW8 talent, more specifically about a local writer, broadcaster, social commentator, stand-up performer, and podcaster supreme. I'm talking about a bloke who at the annoyingly young age of 42 has gone and published a book.

I'm talking about Daniel Ruiz Tizon, whose weekly radio show used to be a highlight of the Resonance FM schedules, and whose oblique, hilarious and sometimes tragic memoirs of life on the borders of the boroughs of Stockwell, Clapham, Brixton and Kennington have kept a growing band of fans and followers entertained and appalled for a decade or so.

I'm late arrival at the Tizon party and I see his output as  building up into a unique record of  life in communities that are on the verge of disappearing, or being dispersed to the edges of the metropolis, or expelled altogether from this disunited queendom. Daniel was the child of Spanish immigrants who settled in Lambeth in the 1960s. He's one of very few writers in this area fully qualified to talk about social change in the last four decades, and the impact of gentrification. And he does this in a way that is totally original, entirely his own.

Luckily for  us, and for future historians, the man himself has bundled together some of his best and most telling bits of writing, and made a book of it. Ok, it's an e-book, but that's still a book isn't it? It's called Me, Me, Me! - and you can get it for a mere £2.

I've said enough about Daniel, he's much better than I am at writing about himself and his strange but strangely familiar experiences. But, as a non-Kindle owner, I'm really hoping he'll produce a print version of this book, then he really will be Available, even to old sold farts like me.

Now you see it, now you don't…Isn't that where Battersea Power Station used to be?

May 2016, the view from the north-east side of Chelsea Bridge. Soewhere in there behind the flats is
Battersea Power Station.

On a misty morning in 2012, the developers are already preparing to start work on the first of the four chimneys.
That huge gas container to the left disappeared early in 2015. And, as the mists fall, so the power station itself slowly
disappears into the ether….

In all the advertising for flats in the redeveloped  Battersea Power Station area, there's constant reference to the building's status as a historic London landmark. In fact, as the developers are eager to point out, it is "iconic".

Those four great white chimneys rising out of the massive cathedral-like brick turbine hall are recognised anywhere on the planet, thanks to their appearance in numerous films and on certain album covers.

In recent months, however, you could do the classic drive south down Sloane Street and over  Chelsea Bridge and fail to notice that you've just passed what's left of this icon.

Heading east on the riverside path from Chelsea Bridge, you expect a fine close up view of the majestic facade of Battersea Power Station. Five years ago, yes. Today, this is what you see.

Obviously, three of the four chimneys are missing, awaiting replacement with the replicas which  the developers promise will be rebuilt to full height by late summer of this year. The one chimney in place is also a replica - the first one. It looks a lot like the old ones but the colour's wrong. All four new chimneys will be painted early in 2017, we're told.

So at least we'll be able to see those four off-white chimneys again, but that's about it for most of us. Whether driving past or on a train crossing the river into Victoria station, or from other parts of Battersea and south West London, the upper parts of those four chimneys are all we will see. Because the great bulk of the building will be screened by a densely-built labyrinth of enormous apartment blocks, to the west and south of the power station.

The writing's on the wall for the future of this place -
in this case a load of platitudinous developer-
speak about the importance of community, and how
they value this so much (see  pics below)

The biggest is already nearly complete - "Circus West", a great wall of 865 luxury apartments right next to the railway track, which is already blocking the view of the power station for road and rail passengers. From the riverside path you can just about see the top of the one remaining chimney.

In the final phase 6 of the redevelopment, a similarly huge barrier block will go up to the east of the station as well, completing its enclosure to all except views from across the river.

Words, words, words…so, the power station is going
to be "browsable" is it? Can't wait.

Of course you will get "wonderful views" of the power station if you can afford a flat in Prospect Place, the Frank Gehry designed area of five of his characteristically wonky, titanium clad apartment blocks just to the south of the Giles Gilbert Scott's monster. Or, perhaps you could take a top floor suite in the proposed "Art 'Otel" next to these. Or stroll along the high-level Foster & Partners designed Battersea Roof Gardens, which will surely be open to all. Or, if not, then snap up one of the one-bedroom apartments, "from £590k". If you are not happy with anything in your new dream home, remember that Foster & Partners are just across Battersea Park, so you can deliver your complaint in person.

Of course, if the power station had been even slightly looked after in the 30 years or so since it was decommissioned, the developers might not have had to do so much drastic surgery. This is a question which only structural engineers with access to this much fought-over building could ever answer.

Er, was it not a real place before?

Anyway, to get back to my initial point, isn't it odd, how with all this talk of the regeneration of the Battersea to Nine Elms riverside, with all those Asian billions invested into a forest of new high-rise luxury apartment blocks, that somehow we were hoodwinked into believing that at least the developers would be preserving and glorifying the power station itself.

By the time the development is complete - what, about 2025? – it seems likely that the re-fitted power station building will be almost completely hidden behind vast cliffs of luxury apartments. Just think of all those very rich people up on their roof gardens, floating in their infinity pools, sipping on their cocktails, worrying about their investments, then looking down on the building that used to dominate the skyline for so many people in and around London, and thinking….what a weird old pile of bricks. Why did they bother to keep it?

Here are a few photos showing how views of the "icon" have changed in the past two years.

The power station in May 2012, when the area in front of the facade was turned into a Chelsea Flower Show
overspill attraction. It was one of the last times the public could get this close to the building. 

6th November 2014: the SW chimney nibbled down to half-height, the cranes are gathering to prepare for building the Circus West blocks. And a full gasholder.

14 March 2014, Netherford Rd SW8. Typical view from the time when Battersea Power Station seemed to loom over  every street in Battersea, Clapham North and Stockwell.

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…)