Nine Elms disease part 3 : a plague on all your houses!

It is spreading slowly, like a stain or a slick of vomit, along the south bank of the Thames between Vauxhall and Chelsea bridges.

Bad metaphors, though - a least stains are more or less flat. The skeletal buildings that are sticking their nasty lift-shafts into the air along the Nine Elms shore are simply not offensive enough to be called vomit. They are bland, they are out of the same mould as 1,000 other residential blocks that have gone up in London and other northern hemisphere cities over the past10 to 16 years.

The design is all about giving their richest customers the best views and the most sunshine.

These buildings always remind me of Guy de Maupassant's verdict on the Eiffel Tower. The only reason, he was supposed to have said, for going up the tower was so that one didn't have to look at the beastly thing.

Well, that tower has pretty well wormed itself into the world's affections in the intervening years. Will these new piles in the sky for people with piles to burn do the same? Will they even be there in 150 years?

Your guess is as good as anyone's.

Nine Elms disease

Each morning I look across London from the balcony at the back of my flat and each morning I see more cranes, and the first bones of skeletal skyscrapers,  sprouting out of the mudflats between me and the river Thames.

 I live at the top of an old house which overlooks, to the north and east,  the former swamps of Battersea and Vauxhall. Until recently there was a pretty clear view across to Westminster and beyond. Now,  where once I saw, in the distance, the towers of Westminster Palace, the Abbey, the dome of St Pauls, and on to the City, I now see the first growth of this latest and so-called  "biggest urban regeneration scheme in Europe".

It starts at Battersea Power Station (which is now brightly floodlit every evening) and it stretches all the way to the monstrosities of St George's Wharf at Vauxhall Bridge.

To judge from a couple of half-completed towers by the river, it's just going to be be much more of the same awful stuff we are getting all along the south bank of the river, from Rotherhithe down to Putney.
Stupid, show-off residential towers, with what they say will be a new leisure and business  zone around the old Power Station and a few embassies. For some odd reason the US Govt has decided to relocated its embassy here, from Grosvenor Square.

Given the bleak plastic blandness of the architects' plans so far revealed, I guess the Americans will feel quite art home here - it looks like just another US city with its flashy towers and carefully accounted for green spaces and shopping areas. All planned down to the last square centimetre, no doubt. Becuase each one of those is worth a lot of money.

Looking at the future for this last bit of industrial wasteland within zones1-2, it looks exactly like the
future for every other little bit of free space in London - sell it off as a new quarter, a new residential zone, affordable housing I think so! I should fucking think so, affordable.

Sitting by the concrete works down Silverthorne Road, watching those massive mixer trucks come in, re-fill with the liquid stuff, zoom off round those sharp bends, back onto Queenstown Road, back to the sites of SW8, or where ever else - this old old process, digging up the earth, making new buildings out of the earth. Carrying the earth around, bit by bit. Ant-wise.

Well I'm sure it will all be lovely for those who can afford these affordable flats under the (don't worry, they will be made of lightweight plastics by then) towering chimneys of Battersea.

No danger of those collapsing on you as you go for your 6am jog along the river before getting the new spur of the northern line to your city job.

Bah! Humbug.