Regurgitation alert: page 52 of today's Homes and property supplement in the Evening Standard

If you live in the SW8 area and you are eating your tea (or your supper, dinner, breakfast or just another bucket of wings from KFC) I would advise you to look away, now.

It's in today's Standard, the property section of which has become something like the in-house newspaper for London's wonderful, warm-hearted and fast-growing community of developers, estate agents and speculative buyers.

This fat wad of full-colour printed hymns of praise to all the latest developments within commuting distance of Liverpool Street has become a prime source of inspiration for grumpy old sods like me.

Usually it just makes me angry. Today it nearly made me vomit, just with one headline.

I could hardly believe they were using this headline, here, now in 2016, about 35 years after I first heard of "Clapham" being referred to as "Cla'am".

At around the same time, people were half-jokingly referring to Battersea as "Ba-TER-see-ya" and Stockwell as "St. Ockwell".

Today the Standard topped all this with a headline which they must surely have been keeping on ice for all those 35 years.

(Look away, now)

"Stockwell: the new Clapham"

Sorry. I did warn you.

When I was just a snotty wageslave on the third floor of your luxury apartment block

BBC TV Centre on Wood Lane, London W12 - as it was, just before the BBC vacated it back in 2012. Now it is embarking on a new life as the centrepiece of a new "Live, work, play super-hub" with luxury apartments going for upwards of half a million for a studio flat (not that sort of studio, fool!)

You might have noticed recently how one big new property development in west London has grabbed loads of headlines - the rebirth of the former BBC TV Centre at White City as a so-called  "live-work-play super hub" .

Yep, that 1960s snail-shaped building, home of Blue Peter, Top of the Pops, Dr Who  and a host of other 1960s, 70s and 80s TV blockbusters, is now the big round jewel in the crown of an £8 billion development of luxury flats, hotel, restaurants, shops, gyms, cinema, etc. Like Nine Elms or Stratford, but on a smaller scale, it's another of these "city within city" projects we're having to get used to.

As I read this article, I felt a bit sad as I spent a lot of time in this building back in the mid-80s. And unlike its future occupants, I was being paid to be there.

And then it dawned - it was not just TV Centre, half the places I have ever worked in are now - or are being turned into - luxury apartments.

By some odd coincidence that's actually probably quite normal in this town, at least four of the buildings I worked in over  a long and undistinguished non-career are now seen as the most desirable of residencies for these groovy new Londoners with loads of dosh.

Bonkers, or what?

Last time I went into the BBC TV Centre in W12 was a few days before I walked out of a very strained and painful job as a reporter on the BBC's staff newspaper, Ariel.

Spring 2014: the retreating BBC and incoming developers
 advertise public meetings to outline the proposals for the
big change of use of this building, which seemed so modern,
even futuristic, in 1961 and seems so quaint now....

It was a weird job, being a sort of parish pump hack for an organisation packed with award-winning journalists. They liked to refer to Ariel as Pravda, and all who worked there were obviously management-fed apparatchiks.

At the time of then director-general John Birt's first round of cuts, I can remember attending a programme launch up on the hallowed 6th floor of TV Centre. I bumped into a well known reporter on a flagship current affairs programme, who asked me what I did.

 "I'm a reporter for Ariel", I said.

"You should be ashamed of yourself", he replied.

Well, soon after that (but not for this reason) I was out of there.

It was not the first or the last job I've walked out of, and I always have regrets. The BBC then was a fascinating, ghastly place, full of internal agonies, but TV Centre was a sort of 20th century Gormenghast. You could disappear in there, into the depths, where there were workshops and labs and people creating the most extraordinary things.

Meanwhile, the new lords of this Birtist era, the explicators of the world, the not always that young marble giants of youff  TV, strutted around in their Jean Paul Gautier creepers and red linen jackets and leather miniskirts and crumply dark blue Armani suits on the 6th floor gyratory system, the inner circle of BBC heaven.

The Erno Goldfinger designed Alexander Fleming

 House at Elephant & Castle is now a block of

private and very desirable apartments, known to
some as "Metro Central Heights". 

Now, presumably, that dreaded sixth floor circle of hell, that corridor of lost dreams for most, no longer exists. Instead that whole floor will have been carved up into a handful of the most desirable apartments in the development.

The occupants will be able to gaze over the rail tracks to the Westfield  Shopping Centre and ponder which luxury items will be next on their shopping lists. Just like lead characters in an unwritten sequel to JG Ballard's High Rise.

So odd - but then it struck me that this is not the only place I've worked that is now a desirable
residence.

Former DHSS building: Alexander Fleming House

My first proper job, after doing A-levels at the local tech college, was as a Clerical Officer in the DHSS headquarters in Elephant and Castle.

I worked on the third floor of Alexander Fleming House - a modernist block designed by Erno Goldfinger.

At the time it seemed enormous,  but now it looks tiny, dwarfed by the garish monster-blocks sprouting all around this once cheerful, cheap, scruffy transport hub of south London.

The building where I spent 18 months or so as a lowly clerk in a cheap brown chalk-stripe C & A polyester suit, is now Grade 2 listed. I enjoyed my time there, even though it meant traipsing up and down to the sixth floor with missives for the Oxbridge-graduate fast-track trainees who buzzed around minister Keith Joseph's office.

The office in which my boss, an amiable ginger-bearded Glaswegian, would offer me a Friday afternoon swig of malt whisky from a brown paper-bagged bottle, is now probably the cherished, minimally furnished living room of a million-pound plus apartment.

Once an overheated forcing-house for IPC's weekly
magazines, the former King's Reach Tower in Stamford
Street has now grown another 12 storeys and is open to
all bidders with a million or two to spend on a new flat.

Poor old AFH. Its name has changed to something far less distinguished: Metro Central Heights. Yuk, how feeble can a name be? Perhaps the developers were correctly forbidden to suggest any connection with someone as great as the discoverer of penicillin. But they've still won, by getting their mitts on a building designed by Erno Goldfinger in London SE1 - that is, in the gasped-ver Zone 1.

But as a recent visit confirmed, the conversion of former office space to high-end residential has been reasonably sensitive, with little or no change to the outside appearance.  In fact it all looks a bit like Goldfinger's other big tower blocks - a nice piece of social housing. Except the people living here have paid through the nose for their flats.
Which is presumably all a testament to the power of the Grade 2 Listing.

The towering inferno: IPC Magazines, SE1

Later on I got a job with IPC Magazines in Stamford Street. I worked in Dorset House, opposite the IPC magazines HQ, Kings Reach Tower.  We sometimes went in there for meetings and lunches.

Last year, it underwent more than the usual transformation. Not only did it turn from business to residential, but the developers added a dozen or so new floors on the top. The whole lot is now up for grabs, with the usual developer's bollocks on the hoardings at street level.

Fortress Wapping

Then, much later on, and with a certain shame, I went to work in Wapping for a certain Rupert Murdoch.

He sold us lot off down the river in 2006, and soon after sold the whole of that unsavoury site which - however fascinating its pre-Murdoch past - will forever be known as Fortress Wapping.

Probably the most hideous dump of all those early 1980s buildings in London, the News International hq was fascinating for having its own print works and a raised newspaper distribution centre on the second floor.

Huge trucks circled and penetrated the building, loaded up with copies of the Sun and the News of the WOrld, then zoomed off down the Highway to connect with the M25.

In 2012 Murdoch finally sold the entire 15-acre site to Berkley Group, for a reported £150 million.

Back in 2014, the Evening Standard gleefully reported how people were scrambling to buy up the first
of around 1,800 flats on the site, going for upwards of £740,000 for a one-bedroom flat. Well, I worked in their bedroom for 10 years. In total I might have earned £280,000 in that period. It was good money at the time but it wouldn't have bought half the flat now.

Now you see it, now you don't…Isn't that where Battersea Power Station used to be?

May 2016, the view from the north-east side of Chelsea Bridge. Soewhere in there behind the flats is
Battersea Power Station.

On a misty morning in 2012, the developers are already preparing to start work on the first of the four chimneys.
That huge gas container to the left disappeared early in 2015. And, as the mists fall, so the power station itself slowly
disappears into the ether….

In all the advertising for flats in the redeveloped  Battersea Power Station area, there's constant reference to the building's status as a historic London landmark. In fact, as the developers are eager to point out, it is "iconic".

Those four great white chimneys rising out of the massive cathedral-like brick turbine hall are recognised anywhere on the planet, thanks to their appearance in numerous films and on certain album covers.

In recent months, however, you could do the classic drive south down Sloane Street and over  Chelsea Bridge and fail to notice that you've just passed what's left of this icon.

Heading east on the riverside path from Chelsea Bridge, you expect a fine close up view of the majestic facade of Battersea Power Station. Five years ago, yes. Today, this is what you see.

Obviously, three of the four chimneys are missing, awaiting replacement with the replicas which  the developers promise will be rebuilt to full height by late summer of this year. The one chimney in place is also a replica - the first one. It looks a lot like the old ones but the colour's wrong. All four new chimneys will be painted early in 2017, we're told.

So at least we'll be able to see those four off-white chimneys again, but that's about it for most of us. Whether driving past or on a train crossing the river into Victoria station, or from other parts of Battersea and south West London, the upper parts of those four chimneys are all we will see. Because the great bulk of the building will be screened by a densely-built labyrinth of enormous apartment blocks, to the west and south of the power station.

The writing's on the wall for the future of this place -
in this case a load of platitudinous developer-
speak about the importance of community, and how
they value this so much (see  pics below)

The biggest is already nearly complete - "Circus West", a great wall of 865 luxury apartments right next to the railway track, which is already blocking the view of the power station for road and rail passengers. From the riverside path you can just about see the top of the one remaining chimney.

In the final phase 6 of the redevelopment, a similarly huge barrier block will go up to the east of the station as well, completing its enclosure to all except views from across the river.

Words, words, words…so, the power station is going
to be "browsable" is it? Can't wait.

Of course you will get "wonderful views" of the power station if you can afford a flat in Prospect Place, the Frank Gehry designed area of five of his characteristically wonky, titanium clad apartment blocks just to the south of the Giles Gilbert Scott's monster. Or, perhaps you could take a top floor suite in the proposed "Art 'Otel" next to these. Or stroll along the high-level Foster & Partners designed Battersea Roof Gardens, which will surely be open to all. Or, if not, then snap up one of the one-bedroom apartments, "from £590k". If you are not happy with anything in your new dream home, remember that Foster & Partners are just across Battersea Park, so you can deliver your complaint in person.

Of course, if the power station had been even slightly looked after in the 30 years or so since it was decommissioned, the developers might not have had to do so much drastic surgery. This is a question which only structural engineers with access to this much fought-over building could ever answer.

Er, was it not a real place before?

Anyway, to get back to my initial point, isn't it odd, how with all this talk of the regeneration of the Battersea to Nine Elms riverside, with all those Asian billions invested into a forest of new high-rise luxury apartment blocks, that somehow we were hoodwinked into believing that at least the developers would be preserving and glorifying the power station itself.

By the time the development is complete - what, about 2025? – it seems likely that the re-fitted power station building will be almost completely hidden behind vast cliffs of luxury apartments. Just think of all those very rich people up on their roof gardens, floating in their infinity pools, sipping on their cocktails, worrying about their investments, then looking down on the building that used to dominate the skyline for so many people in and around London, and thinking….what a weird old pile of bricks. Why did they bother to keep it?

Here are a few photos showing how views of the "icon" have changed in the past two years.

The power station in May 2012, when the area in front of the facade was turned into a Chelsea Flower Show
overspill attraction. It was one of the last times the public could get this close to the building. 

6th November 2014: the SW chimney nibbled down to half-height, the cranes are gathering to prepare for building the Circus West blocks. And a full gasholder.

14 March 2014, Netherford Rd SW8. Typical view from the time when Battersea Power Station seemed to loom over  every street in Battersea, Clapham North and Stockwell.

Someone's obliterated Clapham's only decent bits of street art

I never got to take a decent photo of this clever bit of street art by Loretto, so this is two bad mobile phone pics stuck together….but you get the gist, right? Well, now someone's gone and painted over it. 

Every time I go to Clapham Library, which is often, I pass Carpenter's Place, a little road just off the High Street. And every time I pass it I smile, because right on that corner there's a witty, well-executed satirical mural…

Well, there was. Until - it seems - this week. I had to do a double take. I am at Carpenter's Place. There's a blank white wall. There's no mural.

Carpenter's Place today: no sign of the mural, just a poster
for some more physical jerky stuff.

This can't be right. I must've got the wrong road.

I go home and check out the mural online. Sure enough it's in Carpenter's Place.

No, they can't just have destroyed it, just like that. Maybe they've just put a temporary cover over it.

So I cycle back, hoping against hope that the mural that I'd come to love will somehow magically re-appear.

It does not.

The wall is blank, apart from a new poster on the corner. I look closely to see if there's even a shadow of the old painting - but nothing. It's obviously had a couple of good thick coats, you'd need to x-ray it to find what's beneath.

So, it was a quite clever and nicely painted (stencilled?) piece using that famous image of Darwinian evolution from ape via neanderthal to homo erectus and then homo sapiens, with the latter emerging out of millions of years of development and straight into a Job Centre Plus.

I feel a bit sick.

Sometimes there's a final straw moment, where one more thing is taken away from you and you snap.

I felt like shouting in the street, or breaking into the building and doing something gross in there.

Well, I don't have to break in, it's a print shop fronting the High Street. I stride in full of anger. A nice young bloke is working at  a PC. Can he help me? Yes, he did remember there had been something on the wall outside, but no he hadn't a clue what had happened to it or when or why. He use worked here, poor guy.

I leave quietly.

I mean, it wasn't a Banksy was it? No, but it was by a good street artist known as Loretto, only a couple of years ago. It certainly had some of the wit and political edge that makes the best Banksy's so good.

Seeing it, you might chuckle to yourself and think, well at least not everyone is Clapham is a wealth-obsessed, sports-mad SUV-driving rugger-bugger with a pair of designer sunglasses perched on their expensively gelled coiffure.

No wonder the bastards painted over it.

I never took a good photo of it, just a couple of mobile phone snaps first time I saw it. Always meant to take a good camera along. Now, too late. Bad lesson!

Now I am going back again just to make treble sure I am not going mad. I will also try to find the other Loretto work in this area, on a cafe wall in Landor Road. If it's not been painted over already.

I cycle up and down Landor Road. I so clearly remember this painting, a young couple sitting at a café, but instead of a head one of them has a flat TV screen, and the other is holding a remote control.

I never even took a snap of this one, but luckily someone else did - scroll down a bit to see both of the lost Loretto murals on this site.

Loretto also painted lots of stuff in the Southwark area around the same time - there's a good selection of them here. Defintely a sub-Banksy look about these as well, but I do like the London Olympics one.

Now, it's nowhere to be seen, but ominously, a couple more of the old buildings along Landor Road, on the approach to where Andy's used to be, are shrouded in those developers' sheets that  nearly always presage the arrival of yet another horribly blandified, tarted up and luxurified residential apartment property.

All I can say is: fucking hell!

Clapham Library's getting its café - lovely, but where's everyone going to sit?

Just what you always longed for: a bookish café inside
Clapham public library. Well, at least it's not
a...

After a few years of trying, Clapham Library has finally found a taker for the café concession it always wanted in the street-facing ground floor seating area.

It seems the company ukcoffeestop, who run the popular Hill Coffee Stop in Richmond-upon-Thames, will be taking over this strange space, with an opening expected in a week or two.

Well, almost everyone likes coffee, it seems. But taking a look at the Richmond branch's price list, it's clear we're in Costa/Starbucks territory, that is, around £2.40 for a cappuccino or latte.

Having got used to excellent  1€ cafe cortados in Valencia, I can't say I'd be partaking of that. I'm sure it'll be better than the stuff they serve up in the big three coffee chains, but really, the prices…well, they are Clapham prices but perhaps not Clapham Library user prices. Let's hope they adjust them downwards for this new location.

Anyway, the builders are in right now, so roughly 20-30 study spaces are temporarily unavailable in a library which is often packed to the gills with revising school and college students.

And this also at a time when the council is telling people that they don't need the 10  properly staffed libraries they have been used to, and telling them to go to the town centre libraries - including this one.

Well, if this library gets overcrowded in the run up to the big exam season, as it has for as long as I can remember, let's hope the cafe staff don't get sniffy if kids want to sit at their tables without buying anything. I mean, this is a Public Library!

Why do libraries matter so much? Carnegie's occupiers let the poets explain

Amazing scene in SE24 yesterday afternoon: a young woman was reciting, with passion and clarity, a poem about one of London's great lost libraries, the old Whitechapel Library. She was reading this on the steps of another amazing but seriously threatened London library, the Carnegie Library, Herne Hill.

The poem, Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East, by Bernard Kops, described how this library gave him - as a drifting East End street urchin during the early years of the blitz - everything he needed to get going as a writer and to become the great playwright and poet we know today.

It includes these lines:

I emerged out of childhood with nowhere to hide
when a door called my name
and pulled me inside.

And being so hungry I fell on the feast.
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

And my brain explodes when I suddenly find,
an orchard within for the heart and the mind.

Plenty of other great poems were read out by people  both inside and outside the occupied Herne Hill

library.

Ted Hughe's late poem, Hear It Again, is another amazing work. Hughes had no doubt that libraries were not merely important, but a crucial factor in the development of civilisation.

He pulls no punches. In the first verse, he announces that the destruction of the library in Alexandria 14 centuries back "brain-damaged the human race".

Then these terribly prophetic lines, later in the poem:
And it's plain
Decay of libraries is like 
Alzheimer's in the nation's brain.. 


The traffic on Herne Hill Road at that time was busy. But whether coming up from Loughborough Junction or down from the leafy heights of Herne Hill, almost every vehicle slowed down and beeped its  support for the occupiers.

In fact, I counted twenty, in the space of about 3 minutes, and 17 of them beeped. They even made it difficult for some of the poetry readers to make themselves heard!

And it was not just private cars. The biggest beeps came from white vans, trucks laden with building debris and scaffolding, taxi cabs, scooters, minibuses, oh yes and Range Rovers and the occasional Audi. Even the police car that had been parked round the corner gave a  little peep as it drove off, and then a couple of growls from its siren.

There's no doubt whatsoever how deeply loved this library is. Nor how much respect there is for the people who are doing their best to save it from this strange Lambeth Council plan to instal some sort of gymnasium.

Attached to the locked metal gates outside the Carnegie Library,
Herne Hill, here's a message those wishing to gut this building need to
understand

We now know, thanks to the Brixton Buzz website,  that Lambeth has issued a possession order to evict the occupiers and get on with its ludicrous scheme of turning part of this dignified building into a gym.

I've read stuff from Labour councillors saying we shouldn't worry, that the library will re-open with the same books, etc etc. Well, I wonder about that.

The real, absolute killer in the Lambeth plan, which they freely admit, is that there will be no trained, paid library staff in the new "healthy living centre". So however many books they have there - and you do wonder who will be looking after them, replenishing stock, etc - there won't be anyone there to help you with informed, expert advice on where to look, or what to try.

And, while Bernard Kops' beloved Whitechapel Library has now closed (it is now part of the art gallery), at least that council (Tower Hamlets) provided a proper library building to replace it, staffed with real, paid librarians.

All strength to the Carnegie Library occupiers - and shame on cloth-eared Lambeth council

No, sadly it wasn't an April Fool's joke, but thanks to the brave and brilliant 80 or so people who locked themselves inside Herne Hill's Carnegie Library last night, Lambeth council's dismal scheme to turn this and other libraries into gyms is once again under  close media scrutiny.

A London borough council is supposed to be responsive to the views of its electorate, and to do its best to protect their interests.

For the past year or two, on the subject of libraries (not to mention housing estate regeneration)  Lambeth is doing precisely the opposite of this,  the opposite of serving its public.

This is a council that is planning to turn two of its best loved libraries - the Carnegie and the Minet at Myatt's Fields, both of which were donated by philanthropists to the people of this borough over a century ago - into gyms, so-called "healthy living centres" where you'll pay to get a bit of physical exercise. And to close another two.

That is to take away four of the 10 libraries that  are currently struggling to cope with demand of the borough's library users.

The anger this "culture 2020" policy has provoked can hardly have surprised the council. We've all been  marching and shouting and petitioning everyone possible about it for  the past year or so.

Each time they turn that big deaf ear to the protests they raise everyone's  determination to resist and overturn the bonkers gym idea.

So when, at 6pm, March 31 2016,  the Carnegie Library in Herne Hill was supposed to have closed its doors for good, and instead, dozens of users of this amazing library staged an occupation, what did they do? They called in the cops , of course.

Thing is, even the police only need to take one look at the beautiful Carnegie Library building to understand that the gym idea is not only absurd, but also immoral. As soon as you entered this library you realised it was a well-loved place. I mean, how many public libraries in London have their own "Reading and Wildlife Garden"?

The Carnegie is a beautiful place, designed  for a specific purpose, to be a place where people of all ages and backgrounds can  read, study, and learn in peace;  where people can share their love for books and literature and storytelling and information-giving. It has always offered more in the way of extra, volunteer-led activities for a huge range of interest groups, from toddlers to yoga freaks to chess players, than  almost any other library I have visited.

It even had a large exhibition space, which helped launched the careers of many local artists and photographers.

And what does the council say?

"Changes to Carnegie Library"

So, they suggest Carnegie Herne Hill users should try Brixton Central or West Norwood libraries instead. Good advice? Maybe not.

The clue is in the word, "Hill". The Herne Hill library is up on high, it serves a large area of residential streets, young families with young children in pushchairs,  also lots of elderly local residents.

 Lambeth tells them to get down to Brixton centre, then back up again? And when they get there, where will they sit?

Or all the way down, then up again, to West Norwood Library, which is itself in temporary accommodation? Is Lambeth going to offer free bus passes to this displaced group of library users, or a taxi service?

It's all worse than insulting! (And I am not even a regular Carnegie Library user, can't you tell? But I am a Lambeth council tax payer, and I am disgusted by the way they treat so many of their electorate as though they were naughty children, and then carry on perfecting their vanity projects).

Now the council has even admitted it doesn't have a detailed plan on how it will convert this building into a gym. Look at those beautiful parquet floors, then imagine how they will bolt down those absurd stationary bicycles you see in gyms. There's now talk of using the cellar, involving as lot of excavation and possibly the destruction of the garden. Just think of the costs.

It's all very well saying this. I'd be saying it even if the Carnegie were an ordinary public library. Thing is it's a very special place, but the tragedy is you won't be able to experience its magic again unless…unless the brave action of yesterday evening's occupiers finally makes this cloth-eared council listen, just for once!

The following pics, I hope,  show a bit of the passion of those defending this wonderful place, and a bit  of what you and me and all of us will lose if the council's plans for converting this place into a "bookish gym" actually go through.

The wildlife and reading garden at the Herne Hill Carnegie Library

Carnegie's staff and friends ensured that the library, if it had to close, would close with a bang or two, and not a whimper…and predicted that the closure would not be  permanent