Rejoice - the Nine Elms Vauxhall Partnership Open Days begin today: yay!

The Nine Elms development by night, from the south west

And here it is by day (a couple of months ago…there's even less view now!)

Oh joy unparalleled, we are to have a chance to ask questions about the Battersea-Nine Elms - Vauxhall developments at two open days this week!

Yes, those lovely folk who are nibbling away at the chimneys of Battersea Power Station, and erecting a sort of Berlin Wall of apartment blocks along the southern banks of the Thames from Chelsea to Vauxhall bridges, are giving local residents the chance to hear how their lives are about to be made even more blissful.

I adore the Nine Elms website, especially this bit which makes the very fair point that "We're the most central part of London that nobody knows about … yet!"

Yes, indeed, take that "yet", Robert Elms! Put it in your big BBC Radio London pipe and smoke it!

Oh lord, for sure, we are all nobodies, we live here, but nobody knows about us or how close we are to Parliament!

It's great to know that the multi-national team who are re-developing this big strip of brown fields land are slugging it out in our corner.

Anyway that's enough cynicism for this week.  Later today I shall be heading for the ROSE Community Centre off Stewart's Road for a chance to look at models of the finished development, and to hear about job opportunities - and talk to some of the folk involved in building this new utopia on the  Battersea marshlands.

Nine Elms Vauxhall Partnership Open Days
Tuesday July 14, 2015  3pm - 8pm
Wednesday July 15, 2015 8am - 6pm
ROSE Community Centre, Ascalon Street, London SW8 4DJ
www.nineelmslondon.com/opendays

Clapham Old Town: A good place for single people who wish to remain single

This bit "of urban regeneration" around the Pavement/Polygon area of Clapham has already come in for some stick here - most of all for its murderous, Alice-In-Wonderland approach to bike lanes.

There's another aspect which only became startlingly clear right at the end of the project. This charming "piazza" where Claphamites (not Sodomites or Catamites, you understand) can stroll around showing off their very expensive designer gear and haircuts to each other.

We are single and we will damn well stay single: Clapham Old
Town's new public space  boasts seating arrangements are great
for the aggressively anti-social: don't invade my space, OK yah?

Sure, the mustard yellow surfacing of large areas of this "piazza" will not flatter many skin tones, but at least it's a big open space with no cars; well not many cars - going over it.

But if it's wonderful for good old-fashioned Clapham yuppy posturing, it's definitely not meant to encourage socialising.

Look at the seats the council has so thoughtfully provided for our rather onanistic population.

Yes, they are all one-seater affairs, placed at weird angles to each other. As though wanting to stop people reading newspapers over your shoulder or whatever.

Just far apart enough to make conversation difficult.

You see, if you want to socialise in SW4 you are meant to go to one of the designated places - a bar or restaurant or "patisserie" or "brasserie" or whatever - and pay through the nose for it.

Of course, there's the Common for the Common folk, like me.

Toilets to let as Clapham Old Town "regeneration" nears completion (we hope)

Last year it was Clapham Junction - this year, its Clapham Old Town getting the local authority regeneration treatment, which, as was discussed elsewhere on this blog, seems nowadays to be largely a matter of paving, street furniture and curbstones.

The current refurbishment of the area  - written about recently on the Love Clapham blog - aims to liberate some of the space around the area known as the Polygon.  Right now it is a hell of mess - you have to pity people living in that charmed pentangle, which is now a mud bath surrounded by hideous green and orange and white and red plastic barriers, with workers' loos housed in curious zebra-striped huts-on-wheels.

It seems an enormous disruption for what, looking at the plans, is a chiefly cosmetic operation. OK, the Polygon was a wasted space - a lovely bit of the Old Town, a gently sloping triangular space ruined by the busy roads bounding it on all sides with a bus stand taking up much of the apex.

Check the (lovely shiny all-new) Lambeth Council site for what the finished project will be like. Clearly, the traffic side is improved, but it looks to me like the pleasingly scruffy patch of grass - the last gasp of the Common - just south of the pub - is to be sacrificed on the altar of tidiness and conformity, to the deity of tasteful paving slabs.

It's truly entertaining to look at the architect Marks Barfield's computer-generated images of the completed project. It's a clever montage of photos of real people - a perfectly  representative sample of the men and women and children on the Clapham omnibus - clearly amazed by these vast new wandering areas! Some of them look quite stunned to be there, to the point where they don't notice the person they're about to bump into.

Strangely, we don't ever quite see what is going to happen to the notorious old public toilet block - once a hotspot on the south London cottager's personal A-Z (I know this for certain as I once wander in there innocently in about 1986 and was astonished by how crowded it was, and how many men seemed never to finish their peeing).

Passing there today I noticed that what was once a public toilet is now "to let" - yes, the old schoolboy

A lovely cottage on the Common, yours for a price. The old public
loos at the Polygon, Clapham Old Town, are now up for rent as
another big Lambeth regeneration project nears completion

vandal joke lives on. They're also trying to get some interest in the even smellier lavs by  Clapham Common tube station - if only our lovely council would realise why these places were created with so much love and care in the first place. Humans need to get out of their homes, they need to move around, and about every  two or three hours they need to drop some liquids or solids. It's simple.

BUT - let me end on an immensely positive note. Maybe as part of all this work, the council contractors have done something beautiful. In a stroke, they have liberated an area imprisoned by iron railings for decades.

The removal of the railings around those sad patches of grass between the tube station and the Common is a revelation - suddenly;y, we have real space. Please, don't bother to landscape this - just think of it as
a bit of the Common that never managed to cross the road. Love.

Is crazy paving Wandsworth's answer to community cohesion and urban regeneration?

All around Clapham Junction the streets are being paved - not in gold, but in some rather expensive-marble-looking multicoloured patchwork quilt effect.

Yes, urban regeneration is afoot, street furniture is being torn up and rep[laced with more street furnitutre. The old, bloodstained riot-age pavings and railings are being torn up in hugely disruptive stages.

That whole area - St John's Road, Battersea Rise, Lavender Hill, Falcon Road - is undergoing a very thorough post-riot tarting up. Except that I think it all started well before the riots. But that would spoil my entry.

So what they - Wandsworth Council - are doing is covering the pavements and roads in that sort of marble paving, three colours, different sizes, the un-crazy paving of a million architect's impressions.

It looks quite nice at first, and then you see more and more it it, and you start to wonder why - what is this saying to us all, post riot?

That this is now a nice place, like those desirable residential developments in provincial towns or new-build gated retirement resorts on the Algarve, or the patios of gangster-villas in Marbella or Bishop's Stortford, all the better for burying dissenters beneath?

The new paving stretches several hundred yards from the epicentre of the August 2011 events, up to the LIbrary on Lavender, all the way up St John's Road, and large tracts of the worst-hit street are now getting this harlequin-check treatment.

Two or three uncharitable thoughts: first,  it must cost.

Second, is it worth it? Already, where this new paving has been in use for a few weeks, the staining is  just the same as  the old pavements, the unmistakeable chewing gum blots and McDonald's grease spots. The vomit-splashes and urine trials.

Third - most urgent - where are the new bike racks? They've taken down all the old railings around Arding & Hobbs, etc - and so far only a dozen or so new individual bike stands have appeared. These are mostly of the dismal 'n' design, hopeless for attaching more than one bike. And this at a time when the numbers of cyclist-commuters in London  is growing at record rates.