Thessaly Road, The Who, the wonderful wizard of Battersea murals, and the Yellow Brick Road to profit

The luxury apartment development of Nine ELms and Vauxhall seen as a high-rise Emerald City in Brian Barnes' latest mural, on Carey Gardens Estate, Batttersea. The reality - which is horribly visible from the site of this work - is less of a mirage than an architectural and social nightmare, and it's getting worse.
Maybe an all over green colour scheme would help....

*PLEASE READ THE SAD UPDATE TO THIS POST IN THE FOOTNOTES*

Once you start wandering around Nine Elms, you realise the area is far from being just the industrial wasteland the developers would like to write it off as (mind you, cities sometimes need a bit of wasteland anyway, fertile territory for many things).

Not the Yellow Brick Road, but the multi-coloured Happy Street!

There are rich historical seams in this stretch of the former Battersea marshes, as covered in a previous post.  But the most recent visit wound me up so much that I forgot to mention the positive aspects of our long walk, with echoes of the surprisngly rich history of the area, from lavender fields to pioneers of aviation, and the occasional rock star. Plus some warnings of what the future might hold.

The good stuff begins on Thessaly Road. The cheerfully repainted railbridge underpass marks a division between old Nine Elms and the new development up to the river. Maybe the work - funded by Wandsworth Council - could be seen as an attempt to smarten up the neighbourhood for its new and much wealthier residents, but that would be overly cynical. 

It's there to be enjoyed by all, and unlike some of the public art scattered around the Embassy Gardens luxury development, this one was designed for, and with the help of,  existing residents.

Yinka Ilori's work - which in art-world parlance is an installation rather than a mural, using 56 painted panels as well as the structure of the bridge - remains amazingly bright and clean and the title, Happy Street, is well chosen. Local communities including children from St Georges primary school helped  design and choose the colours for this project, which also reflect Yinka's Nigerian heritage.

Quite how happy Thessaly Road is now and was in the past is debatable, but it had its moments. There were certainly some happy faces around in 1973 when The Who's drummer and notorious prankster Keith Moon donned the uniform of a lollipop man and stopped the traffic to allow schoolchildren to cross the road, which in those days was a dangerous rat-run (so, what has changed? Ed.).

Moon was taking time out from recording at The Who's Ramport Studios, an old church hall on the corner of Thessaly Road and Corunna Road. 

The building is still there, part of the NHS Battersea Fields health centre. There's a green Wandsworth Borough plaque on the wall to commemorate its former life. It was put there in 2011 after a campaign by the Battersea Power Station Community group, led by prolific local community artist Brian Barnes.

Brian's work brings colour and alternative narratives to many south London walls. One of his best-known pieces, Nuclear Dawn, covering a full-height wall on the former Cavendish Mansions in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, is now protected by law and is under restoration to its former glory as I write. 

If only that could be said of one of his earliest and biggest pieces - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - which stretched from the southern end of Battersea Bridge all the way Battersea Church Street, on hoardings put up by the developers around the old Morgan Crucible factory prior to its demolition. 

I only saw this work once, in passing. Next time I crossed the bridge it was gone, smashed to pieces by the developers in a night-time act of vandalism for which, so far as I know they were never successfully prosecuted.

Looking at the photos on another brilliant website, For Walls With Tongues , makes me sorely regret that I didn't make the effort to look at it properly: there was a lot of brilliant and powerful art there.

Barnes's most recent mural, from 2017, is a couple of blocks away from the Ramport Studios plaque, and among much else it immortalises Keith Moon's zebra crossing duties.

This painting is literally in the heart of the community it celebrates - covering the entire end wall of one of the blocks of flats on the Carey Gardens Estate, just off Stewarts Road. 

The mural is filled with clues to the history of this area, but the huge hourglass at the centre of the painting shows that time is running out for old Battersea, while a glimmering mirage of the future is a high-rise Emerald City. Those shiny green towers are the stuff of fantasy - the Land of Oz, which would make Nine Elms Lane the Yellow Brick Road. And maybe the US Embassy is the lair of the wicked witch...but hang on, they're not fantasy or sci-fi, they are just over the railway tracks, looming down at us all. 

There's a great article about this mural on the Inspiring City website, which provides a thorough explanation of all the imagery he uses. The mural's title is A Brief History of Time, and the spirit of Prof Stephen Hawking floats at the top of the wall, dancing with the planets in his wheelchair, and looking down on other high-flyers including the US Embassy's eagle, the Sopwith Camel WW1 biplane, and the Pink Floyd pig floating between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station.

My favourite bit of the painting is the man down on the ground at the right, a white-haired bloke holding what appears to be a

CND-style peace symbol. At first I thought this might be a self-portrait, but this is in fact Nick Wood, the modest but visionary local authority architect who designed the Carey Garden Estate. The peace symbol is also a plan view of part his design, the circular green spaces at the heart of the estate, surrounded by the low-rise housing. What a great tribute to another unsung hero of social housing!

The Inspiring City site also has an excellent interview with Brian, made in September 2020 as part of  Battersea Arts Centre's Radio Local project. It's a rewarding 30 minutes.

As so often, looking at a couple of great pieces of streeet art - both so different, but both uplifing - provokes a thirst to see more. In fact on a a good day and a decent bike you are less than 10 minutes from yet another Brian Barnes co-production, the 1988 "Battersea in Perspective ", filling a whole end wall of the former Haberdashers Arms pub in Dagnell Street. Like other works including Nuclear Dawn, this takes a bird's (or aviator') eye view of the area, a birdseye perspective from a great height, with landmarks receding from the great centrepiece of Battersea Park and its Peace Pagoda.  

This is a comprehensive celebration of Battersea's radical recent past, with portraits of social reformers such as John Burns MP, suffragettes, the great campaigning (and still very active) MP, and now Lord, Alf Dubs, and many others including artists and aviators. Battersea's place in aviation history is recognised, with the early workshops of the A & V Roe and the Short Brothers in railways arches, and a stately balloon hovering over this great sweep of south London  landscape. 

Battersea Perspective - still in great shape over 30 years since it was painted, and full
surprising details, including, if you look very hard, a tiny version of this
mural. 

Luckily many others examples of Brian Barnes' work survive, most but not all in south London. He usually works with other artists and always involves local communities in designing the paintings. The Stockwell War Memorial mural, for example, was painted by students from a local school where Brian ran a community arts project.

You can check them out on the excellent London Mural Preservation Society website, and next time you go along Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, take a look at the progress on restoring Nuclear Dawn, which many regard as Brian Barnes' master-work! 

Sad, sad footnote: Shocked to learn that Brian Barnes passed away on November 28, just five months after this story was posted. He was 77, and suffered with COPD which was the eventual cause of his death. The Guardian's obituary is by his friend Steve Lobb;  and there's a good obit on the MyLondon website, which also shows that Brian's campaigning continued right up to the end, with his fabulously laconic twitter post about the lack of affordable housing in the Battersea Power Station redevelopment. This post includes a photo of a self portrait  standing in front of his version of Breughel's Mad Meg (updated for Corona Virus). God, what are we to do without these wonderful humans?

Finally, watch a lovely brief tribute to Brian  from his family, on YouTube.

Getting high on South East London's crowning glories

When the city's too hot - head for the hilltops of south-east London. Head for Dawson Heights!

So I said I was going to change, and write lots of positive, morale-lifting stuff in 2019. Of course that was a New Year's resolution and those things have to be broken.  But this one starts off on a very positive note: it is about South East London, which – as a resident of a dreary SW postcode for far too long, has always seemed to me to be the infinitely more exciting, romantic, creative and simply all-round decent half of south London as whole.

I'm not going top justify that statement - but this piece and many that have gone before, and more that will follow - tell you that story.

It was about 20 years ago, strolling through Brockwell Park late on a rare brilliant January day, sun low in the western sky, dramatically floodlighting the hills above Dulwich and beyond.

There, right at the highest point, were twin, golden, towers rising out of a pair of stepped buildings, dominating the landscape beneath them like the fortifications of some Italian hill-town built by 20th century modernists rather than medieval masons.

I'd been vaguely aware of these buildings for a long time, and became increasingly fascinated. What was this place: the headquarters of some sinister intelligence organistion, looking down on us all, monitoring us from its multiple elevations?

Of course it took only one search to find out that this was social housing from the golden age: an example of truly progressive policy of the 1960s, on the part of Southwark Council. Even the name of this council estate - Dawson's Heights - has a romantic ring. It could be the title of a thriller or some boy's own adventure yarn.

The story gets better, the deeper you dig. The design of this big, extremely conspicuous project was entrusted to one of the borough's youngest architects - the 26-year-old Kate Macintosh. In 2019 we have so-called "starchitects" working for multi-billionaire clients and the richest governments worldwide.  Half a century ago we had incredibly talented, socially-committed, idealistic architects working full-time for local authorities on public sector schemes.

More recently, working all around this area, I was getting almost daily doses of the place. Stopping for a rest in Horniman Museum gardens - at the top of Forest Hill, just to the south - you get an excellent view of the ziggurat-like quality of these flats, as they hang off the side of the steep slope.

Seen closer up, and from below, the buildings lose a bit of that dramatic quality, and after a while they become just another part of the south London landscape, affected like everything else by one's own gloomy moods.

But hearing of a photo exhibition about this development as part of the RIBA's "Six Experiments in Social Housing" season, revived my interest. This was a small, free show of 20 photos of the then recently completed estate taken in 1973 by the photographer Sam Lambert, commissioned by The Architect's Journal for its archive. They have never been shown in public before, and they give a real sense of how thrilling it must have been to be one of the original tenants living in what was a truly modern, even futuristic, housing scheme.

The modest exhibition includes some lovely interior shots, and also some interviews with current residents. One describes how, every New Year's Eve, residents congregate on the "streets in the sky" aerial walkways to enjoy one of the best views of the firework displays in London. A nicely-timed slap in the face for prevailing orthodoxies on social housing design.

What's also great is that this estate is still social housing: it has not gone the way of other modernist icons such as Trellick Tower in North Kensington, where flats are now selling on the private market for millions. Despite efforts by the 20th Century Society and others, the estate has not yet received  the protection of Grade 2 listing - which seems odd. But, by all accounts, it is not in imminent danger of destruction or redevelopment - itself a rarity in these shoddy times.

Back in Brockwell Park, look west, and you see another example of well-designed 1970s social housing - the Cressingham Gardens estate on Tulse Hill Road. This one also tried and failed to get grade 2 listing - but unlike Dawson's Heights, this estate is still having to campaign for its existence. It has been under threat of demolition and redevelopment by the landlords, Lambeth Council, since 2015.