Nine Elms disease: so not even the super-rich want this two-mile strip of ugliness

Battersea-Nine Elms development: Spot the remains of Battersea Power Station amidst this swamp of architectural mediocrity

Fascinating to read in yesterday's Evening Standard that the boss of builders Taylor Wimpey, Peter Redfern, is warning developers not to expect vast profits from speculative investments in the new Battersea - Nine Elms development.

By which he means that ribbon of hideously bland luxury apartment blocks going up between Battersea Park and Vauxhall Cross - a great flood of mediocre architecture which had already swamped the remains of Battersea Power Station and is blighting the view for about 80 per cent of people living in south west London.

The development, which has made life hell for anyone living within vibration distance of the main artery roads used by the ready-mix cement tricks which have been thundering around this circuit, one a minute, all day long, for the past five years or so….well, it seems it has all been a bit of a waste of time.

Property developers, it seems are no longer confident of making sky-high profits on these luxury units of accommodation. The currency of the Thameside apartment block has slumped. They'll still make money, but not enough, it seems, to satisfy their infernal greed. They'll go elsewhere.

From the way he was talking, with his mentions of a "glut of expensive flats in south London",  it seems this two-mile stretch will become London's next ghost town slum, a sort of Thamesmead for south west London.

Actually, that would be fine. Then at least those blocks could be commandeered by Lambeth or the next mayor to provide shelter for the increasing numbers of homeless people we see all around us every day….or they could be squatted. The power station could be returned to its proper use as a location for raves and parties and art happenings.

All the artists and dreamers priced out of Shoreditch and Hackney and Bow and Peckham could come and squat in the penthouses with Thames views. Tens of thousands of refugees from the camps of Calais could be housed here; give them Eurostar tickets now. Together, they could all throw parties in that 8th floor infinity pool they are so keen to show us. Then this new development might have some value: it might become a new tourist attraction, knocking Camden Market, Brick Lane and co into a cockenry hat.

There could be non-stop car-boot sales all along this linear park they are boasting about. The new  Northern Line extension would never be switched on, and those tunnels could be used to grow top quality weed and other vegetable delights.

 What a glorious thought. A dream. It would almost make the loss of the view of London worthwhile.

Microgroove33 and a third quiz fun time: 

Mark the spot on this photo where you once would have seen the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. Answers on a postcard, please. The person who is closest will win our splendid first prize!

First prize: one year's free subscription to this blog.
Runners-up: lifetime free subscriptions to this blog for yourself and all your friends and family.
Terms & conditions apply*

* Terms & conditions: there are no prizes at all, obviously. But the question is real so if you want to do it just for the joy, then please ….

Turning anger into action: what happened when they built the Westway in W10

Golborne Road : a heady history of social
activism, art, cous-cous, jerk chicken,
brutalist architecture and custard pies

Apologies for some of previous bit on Nine Elms. Got carried away with sheer impotent anger, and anger, in written form, is not much use unless it happens to be written by Jonathan Swift.

As a balm to the soul, and as a source perhaps of hope - what do I do? Look back to the recent past, the one made so easily accessible by the damnably clever present.

You know it as: YouTube.  I watch one short video - in this case Giusi Vittorini's excellent 2003 short documentary on London life, The Morning Song - and immediately it throws up a list of related things that look irresistibly interesting.

This was the film that featured Clapham High Street's oldest established second-hand dealer Peter, along with  eight other Londoners from a wide range of backgrounds. Peter lent me a VHS of this, so I looked it up on YouTube - and there it was.

Next  thing I know, I am watching an enjoyable documentary about the history of Notting Hill, from the race riots of 1958 to the eponymous Hugh Grant movie and all that it stood for - above all accelerating gentrification.

This film,  Grove Roots, includes an account of the (often debated) genesis of the Carnival. There are some entertaining cameos, including Jeremy Corbyn's brother  Piers on the W10 squatters and their UDI for the republic of Frestonia on Freston and Bramley Roads.

It finishes and YouTube recommends another video, and this goes back over the same ground but from a tighter focus - the Goldborne Road area at the north end of Portobello. The film was called Wild West 10 - Golborne Stories of Struggle and Resistance.

This was the film that really hit me, showing as it does how in the 70s, it seemed normal to mobilise large sectors of the local population - tenants, squatters, black people, white people, hippies, punks - to resist the destruction of their amenities and their communities.

It's a glimpse of a very different view of what living in London could be about - community, compassion and creativity - one that was nearly wiped out in the 1980s.

The residents of W10 couldn't stop the authorities building the Westway back in 1964-70, but they did manage to secure the mile-long strip of land beneath it for community use.  They succeeded in making  Powis Square Gardens a public space with a big children's playground.

They couldnt stop the clearance of  the old "slum" terraces for the building of  Trellick Tower and the estates lining the Westway, but they did ensure that the council provided a nursery. It was only  by organising and taking direct action that they ensured the land next to the canal near Trellick Tower become a public park, Meanwhile Gardens, for which my old and much-missed friend Jonathan Phipps designed and helped created a Zen garden.

Some of the people most involved in these successful, hugely influential campaigns are interviewed. For example, John O'Malley of the Notting Hill People's Assiciation: "We encouraged people like Notting Hill Housing Trust to buy houses that they wouldn't otherwise have bought" he says. There was a realisation that " people living in properties don't have to be evicted…we don't have to hand these properties over to speculators..."

Instead, they organised and resisted, at one point, "locking the councillors up in All Saints Hall, overnight" until they came to a decision…which luckily was on the side of the campaigners.

We still have protests and demos and campaigns and sometimes they succeed, but more often not - partly because there's no longer the sense of solidarity and security, of strength in   numbers that a large and sympathetic trade union movement can provide…partly because the atmosphere of society has changed so much.

But then another  group of videos rise to the surface, covering the anti-road building protests of the 1990s, notably Claremont Road, E11 and the festival of resistance in 1994. It's worth checking out the Undercurrents films as well, too see the direct line from the Mutoid Waste Company stuff in W10 - through the rave scene, Glastonbury and Stonehenge travellers, and so back to east London and Leytonstonia.


As with the Westway, the thousands of people protesting here, for weeks on end, were a mix of local people and activists…in both cases, people were losing their homes, everything they knew was being swept away. And for what? To create roads which, as was clear then and is clear now, are insidiously killing us all with their pollution.

SO now - 2015. Nine Elms. A different set-up, it's not so much a case of destroying existing homes, nor beloved woodlands…but the longer-term effects will be just as damaging. 

In (reluctant) defence of Clapham

Murder on the Common: some of my best SW4 friends are crows. 

Heartily in agreement with all the Crap Towns stuff about how awful London is published earlier this week (See Daily Mail, etc). But a much better demolition job on the capital can be found on the Vice magazine website.

Not only did this say everything we all hate about London in a far cleverer,  funnier way than I could ever have managed - it also distilled another of my feelings: that if London is the worst place in the UK - no, the world - then Clapham is definitely the worst place to live in London.

So these days, when I say I live in Clapham (and sometimes I even lie and say I live  sort of in Stockwell/Vauxhall/Battersea borders) - I find myself adding things like, well it 's very convenient for transport or, well when I moved here it was still quite bohemian - etc.

Because all the things  in that Vice piece are true - especially the bit saying that, above all, what makes Clapham so, so ghastly is the people.

Not just the banker families with their SUVs parked nose-to-nose in Lilieshall Road, nor the scrubbed infants being dragged to the private schools on the common by their nannies, not just the stupid city boys renting their £600 a week shitty flats in identikit new build blocks on "Wingate Square",  not just the perfectly-formed gaggles of posh girls jogging and braying in their lustrous pink lycra, not just the shouty ex-squaddies running their profitable boot camps on the Common, not just the posh middle aged ladies with their three or four pedigree dogs moaning about their East European workmen....no, there are loads of other ghastly types living in this once unremarkable and now totally insufferable suburb.

But - and god I know hard this can be - we should remember these appalling characters are merely the most noticeable stratum of the local population, not the whole lot of us. These people are like the vile skin on a rich custard.  But I would also like you to believe that, crushed beneath this foul layer are  many perfectly good people who are indeed in need of your sympathy.

But not too much sympathy, because the area is in fact not too bad to live in, once you learn how to filter out or avoid the above-mentioned annoyances.

So here goes,  here are 10 not quite so awful things which perhaps make it possible to live in Clapham, all the above notwithstanding:

1. The charity shops, including a great Save the Children shop  near Clapham North tube, the FARA shops in Northcote Road and Lavender Hill, and the four Trinity Hospice charity shops. The latter vary greatly reflecting the social mix of their locales - cheap and cheerful on the High Street, a bit posh and pricey in Old Town, yummy mummy-rugby daddy in Northcote Road, and a wee bit Up the Junction on Lavender Hill.

2. Rectory Grove/ Rectory Gardens -  the last of the Clapham's old bohemian residentsfight repeated attempts by Lambeth council to evict them. Do read this brilliant entry on the Faded London blog, and especially the fascinating comments by jakartaass etc. See also some amazing photos on Sam C.'s Mixbook
of life in this tiny L-shaped street of early 19th century cottages. Arriving as squatters in the early 1970s, they gained short-life housing tencies from Lambeth, but are having to fight for their survival here as the stench of fat fat profits insinuates its way in the nostrils of their local authority landlords.

3. Clapham Common itself - a great place to get mugged on, to be gay-bashed on whether you are gay or not, to to be hit in the face by rugby balls and frisbees, to tread in dog shit, to be barged out of the way by joggers or shouted at by cyclists. Oh yes, that's just the start of it.
Still a nice place to lie down on and undress on a hot, a rare hot day. And it is home to some of Clapham's least offensive residents - a fine murder of crows.

4. The Clapham Sect  - the group of wealthy Christians who drove the movement for the abolition of slavery in the late 18th century used Clapham's Holy Trinity church as a base. They were also not great believers in alcohol, which is apparently explains the lack of pubs in many of the area's oldest residential areas.

5. Vivienne Westwood: apparently she still lives here, and has always said how much she likes Clapham, unlike so many famous people who once they make it get out. Wonder if Thunderclap Newman still breathes the air of SW4?

6. The new Clapham library: after years of expecting the worst, many of Clapham Public library users agree that the new building, inspired by the spiral-ramp design of the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, is
actually rather good. Andrew Logan's installation of broken mirrors and  bric-a-brac is also popular.
Another possibly good thing to come out of this is the  new Omnibus  community arts venutre being created in the old Library building on Clapham Common Northside.

Andrew Logan's mirror-mosaic-bric-a-brac
 sculptures outside the new Clapham
Public Library

7. Transport:  good that it has three tube stations, shame that they are all on the Northern Line. Buses are good and trains from the Juntion to anywhere in the universe - unless you want to get to Clapham High Street.

8. Angela Carter, Natsume Soseki, Graham Greene, etc, lived in Clapham for a while. OK, they are all dead and at least one of them hated living in Clapham - but at least the place has some literary connections. Amazing how often it appears in novels as the default place for lonely, failing types to live in bedsits, in the early 1960s.

9. Which leads straight on to Trinity Hospice  itself - the oldest hospice in the UK, and occupying a beautiful house  with even more beautiful gardens on the north side of the Common - which might seem more like a good reason, not  so much to live in Clapham, but to die there.

10. Finally, perhaps the best thing of all about this place - it's only about 10 minutes away from Brixton.

Rest in peace, Lease Lend Cottage

September 2012: The last days of the Lease-Lend Cottage, Clapham. 

I need to find out more about a house which no longer exists,  about 100 feet below the balcony at the back of my flat in Clapham, south London.

The Lease Lend Cottage - built on a plot of land behind the houses and flats on four converging residential streets on the borders of Clapham and Battersea in south London, was a beguiling, green oasis, overgrowing with trees and flowering shrubs and vines that seemed to stick two fingers up to the yuppie-fired property boom that was taking hold of this area in the early 1980s.

It was not just a secret garden, but a secret house as well.  And now it is gone, replaced by three - or is it four -  new houses for people with a million or two to spend. 

Back in the summer of 1985, my mother, who lived on the Sussex Coast, still loved coming to London to see a play or a film.  It was a good summer, and she liked to sit out on the roof terrace and watch the planes coming in. She especially enjoyed the Concordes, which would whistle overhead on their way down to Heathrow, twice a day. As they passed over the house the sound would change into an doom-laden roar which made the windows rattle and the walls vibrate.

But something more earthbound caught her imagination above all - it was directly beneath our flats, a quirky country-cottage style house with pitched roofing and a huge conservatory, surrounded on three sides by densely-planted gardens.

The house had an an eccentric, slightly bohemian look - each window seemed to be different, there were round porthole-style openings on the landings. It occupied an irregularly diamond-shaped space between the Victorian terraces of The Chase and Hannington Road,  and the back of a large block of mansion flats on the corner of Macaulay Road. We looked down and tried to imagine what it must be like living in this strange, secret place.

A few years later I bought a car - a Citroen BX16 - which my brother-in-law had found for me in Eastbourne. I loved the car from first sight, but it was full of problems. I looked for a local Citroen garage and was pleased to find a good one very close by  - the Polygon Garage in Old Town Clapham.

After two or three expensive visits to this garage I found out that its owner - Timothy Kinross - lived with his wife in the hidden cottage.  He was in the process of selling the garage, and told me that from now on he'd be working on cars in the garages of his own backyard. I went round, and was given a quick tour of the house.

He was a delightful man, and often joked that he felt guilty taking so much money from me just to keep this rather ridiculous car with its crazy hydro-pneumatic suspension system on the road. He was  even trying gently to consider buying a new Citroen from him.

The house was just as beautiful as my mother had imagined, a hidden paradise for a lucky family. But what I remember most is his description of how each bit of the house had been built from the bricks and slates and wood from various bomb sites, mostly local, but also from others across London.

And, as I have discovered since, the land that it was built on was itself a bomb-site (a big clue would be the block of modern flats to its west on The Chase). No wonder my flat is in such rickety condition).

I am not sure when he came to the house, or whether he'd had any role in ts building. Soon after the Citroen died, in about 1999, I bought a diffferent car and no longer had any excuse to contact the Kinrosses.

At some point in the late 1990s they left the house, and for a while it seemed to be abandoned. The garden grew and overgrew and foxes flourished.

One year, maybe in 2000,  it was taken over by what seemed like a bunch of young kids, possibly squatters.

Or maybe, definitely squatters.

For a long summer they seemed to be having non-stop parties in the beautiful conservatory and garden.

I can remember lying in bed on a summer's night listening to their parties and wishing I was there with them. Some days there'd be the sounds of a band practising, a drummer and guitarist,  and I loved these sounds.

To my surprise, I've found this short video on YouTube which seems to confirm these strange, half-dreamed memories:



All these years later, this short video makes me even more jealous of this riotously bohemian household, surrounded as it was by houses and flats chiefly occupied by a new influx of bonus-fuelled city types.

Then it all stopped.

The garden grew thicker and wilder. I used to see foxes walking tightrope-style along the ridges of the walls, probably looking for cats or other pets to eat.

And then I got a letter from Lambeth council's planning people. It was a planning application, inviting responses to a proposal to knock down the cottage and build four houses in its place.

As the local preservation group, the Clapham Society pointed out, this application  proposed

"a rather dense scheme to redevelop the site with some large new houses, ingeniously laid out so as not to disturb neighbours, but at the expense of their own poor quality of outdoor space".


And now, it is almost finhsed - the four houses are almost complete and are about to go on the market under some ludicrous names, chosen , of course to appeal to snob-values.


But then I unearthed another nugget - in 2012 a photo taken for an American press in 1946 was sold on eBay.


The photo was of Lease-Lend Cottage, and on the back of the print, these words:

 "Housing solution - This house in the London suburb of Clapham was built of 20,000 second hand bricks salvaged from bombed sites all over London. Faced by a shortage of new materials, Charles Hancock, a master builder, constructed it - and at a cost of only $425."

The house is recently been subject to a planning application which would have to its demolition."

So, I wasn't  dreaming. 

But I might as well have been.

I should have tied myself to the trees in that beautiful garden. Instead, I let it happen.

You can still see this photo on a site called worth point.com . It all seems terribly sad to me, especially when you see what they have done with the plot of land.

See here.....