Finally, we have something to thank the Nine Elms developers for...OK, only joking.

See what the developers of the Battersea - Nine Elms riverside estate for the super-rich have achieved! They have blocked the view of the helicopter-killer St George Wharf Tower from the south! Rejoice, rejoice! So long as you stay on line south-east from the towers to Brockwell Park,  you no longer have to gape at that rude duracell styled middle-finger of a residential cylinder. Just at the three lumpen blocks of steel, concrete and glass that have arisen to block our view. But here's the bad news: you can still see the sorry erection from all other viewpoints.

Over recent months, as yet another huge new tower of (putative) luxury apartments erupts over the Vauxhall Cross, a new and truly dismal passtime is born for pissed-off residents like self.

It's a great hobby for the years of pandemic. Moving around, alone, in every direction from this transport node,  to see if there is any single angle or perspective from which all these buildings coalesce into anything other than a repulsive and callous "f**k you" to the established local populations.

Today, after weeks when things were just seeming to get uglier and more brutal (not 'Brutal' in the 1960s sense, I must stress), stumbled across a view that was actually slightly improved. 

It was from the highest point in Brockwell park.  Those three lumpy new residential towers closest to Vauxhall are at last blocking out the south-eastern view of that vile middle-finger of a skyscraper, the (helicopter slayer) St George Wharf Tower, aka Duracell, or (my favourite nickname as it has grim ambiguity) The Plunger.

As the Northern Line extension to Nine Elms and Batttersea Power Station opens for business, so the area's developers are working on two new tower blocks just southwest of the Power Station - showing just how desperate they must be to ensure no one living in Battersea itself can actually see anything at all of the once unmissable local landmark. 

I think these will be part of the "Upper Park residences" area, with one tower planned to rise to 27 storeys - which is as high or higher than the top of the power station chimneys. It's odd, I don't remember seeing any high-rise towers to the west of the power station in the original plans.

So, how about this new transport link? 

Surely we should be licking corporate bottom for their beneficence in making the new two-station Northern Line branch possible? Well, yes and no.

It could be good for residents of the estates between Sainsburys Nine Elms and Wandsworth Road overground station, allowing them to get into the West End quickly (but, outside rush hours, the 87 bus already does that quite well). 

But it's also ironic that this incredibly expensive two-stop extension is creating a worse service for long-suffering passengers living further south. The number of Charing Cross branch trains going all the way to Morden has been cut, from about one every 6 minutes to 10 or 12 minutes. Leading to more crowding on the grim old platforms at Kennington.

Overall, then, returning to the original theme of this piece: whichever way you look at it - almost - the prospect is grim. As the last of the grand towers in this phase rise, it's clear that there's not a single building worthy of the location. And that the supposed cluster of graceful towers is in reality more like the threatening arthritic fist of a killer robot. 

Maybe it should please me that these gruesome erections are just as much an affront to the wealthy residents across the water in Pimlico, Westminster, parts of Chelsea and even Belgravia. So many of those grand stuccoed terraces or red-brick mansion block estates around Westminster Cathedaral and Vincent Square now have their southerly views polluted by these great hulking presenes in the sky. Even from the Centopah in Whitehall, you cannot miss the rude stiffness of One Nine Elms. 

The one project I find quite entertaining is the bit which forms an outer wall to the Power Station's encircling walls of residential cement and glass. This bit, which  folds itself around the osuth-western aspect of the now almost invisible power station, has the amusing feature - a couple of massive holes in the buildings. Gaps, voids, about three floors deep. Peepholes so that the plebs can still get a glimpse of the promised land within, perhaps. They're the  gsps that let thelight in. Why ever they are there, they are a good thing. Quite good. 

Nine Elms Disease: is there a cure?

So, if the development is to redeem itself and win over the hearts and minds of local residents, that long-promised linear park is going to have to be bloody good. But, looking on a recent map, they no longer call it the linear park, and it is not so linear. Just Nine Elms Park.

Oh well, plenty of room for freebies for visitors from the other side of the tracks (zone 2, you know, and not the smarmily-bought "zone 1" trick the developers have pulled). 

What say you to free champagne fountains and iced-vodka sculptures? No? Ok, let's see a few hundred luxuriously appointed shelters, each with its own bathroom, for the homeless. Free music every weekend, and 24/7 facilities including lighting and PA for buskers, all through the park.

Any other ideas, please add to comments below.

As for the skypool, fill it up every morning with something delicious (alcoholic, or maybe not, maybe hot soup on cold nights); drill 2,000 holes in the bottom; attach 2,500 pub-style tubes with taps; except these will need to be about 500m in length, and clipped to refreshment stalls around the US Embassy, with washing facilities; to keep the protestors in good spirits. Employ 100 bungee-jumping staff to keep said sustenance flowing freely and happily. 

Just dreaming.

Come on get your bloody fingers out and spend some of those ill-gotten gains on something good!

View from Vauxhall Bridge, six months ago. It's
less interesting now...

Think we have it bad in Battersea? See what they've done to the view from
the stuccoed streets of Pimlico. No wonder they're furious!

This view from a Battersea footbridge shows just how deceptive some views are. Two of those towers
are in fact great big piles of stepped boxes....

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 enters its repulsive fourth stage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, and neither did the Bubonic Plague 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Property jackals murdering the gay soul of London

There's a massive crime wave hitting London, and the chances are it's happening in a street near you.

All over the city, popular, cheap, accessible centres of community are being snuffed out, suffocated by rising rents and aggressive property speculators. Each day comes news of a new outrage. Last week, for example, we heard that the The Black Cap pub in Camden High Street is to close because the owners of the property want to convert the upper floors into luxury flats.

A little later that day - in that sort of newsroom coincidence that makes you want to scream out loud, what the fuck is going on?– we heard that campaigners are now having to fight to save the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which would - if anyone asked you - probably be the second LGBT pub you'd name after the great centre of all things drag in Camden Town.

I have fond memories of the Black Cap, spending a few evenings there with my dear friend Phil as she make her first steps into the lesbian world. I've never been inside the RVT but always enjoyed seeing the clientele milling around outside in minimal clothing of a summer Sunday evening as I made my grim way back from Cambridge.

In case you think they're picking on gays - well, probably not, but - who knows? Madam Jo-Jos in SOho has already gone the way of all lovely, anarchic, scruffy centres of joyous everything, to be replaced by wtf hideously expensive flats, god knows.

The sort of property developer we all suspect is doing these things is certainly the type who wants to attract clients who will not be best pleased by all-night partying, loud music and noisy, boisterous clientele emerging from the premises at 4 or 5 am in full voice.

To which the only possible riposte is, if you don't like noisy parties and antisocial behaviour, don't move into any of  London's party districts. Instead, just buy a flat in a docklands high-rise or go to your natural habitat, the Surrey-through-Berks-through-Bucks stockbroker belt.

Early and sustained resistance worked at the Elephant and Castle, where the Ministry of Sound managed to overturn a planning consent for luxury flats close enough for the exhausted traders living there (if anyone would have actually lived there) might be kept wake by the booming bass of the dance floor.

But elsewhere pub after club after music venue has gone dark  - whether in Soho, or Brixton, or Islington, they're all falling away. New Cross and Dalston and Deptford will be next, you can be sure.
Another place fighting for its survival is the beautiful community arts centre in Shoreditch, the Rich Mix, which is apparently losing its council funding. If that happens - and there's every sign a massive campaign will fight this one to the bitter end - then it takes little imagination to work out who the land will go to.

Similar developers are even planning the destruction of the very heart of London's music business, Denmark Streeet.

If, when that happens - and heaven knows what ghastly tribute to the  music industry heritage they are planning to knock up there to keep the council happy - then we'll know it really is all over, won't we?