Tall, Dark and Malodorous: The rise and fall of Battersea’s stink pipes

Posted on October 21, 2026 by David

They’re a bit of our streets that pass unnoticed, even though there are hundreds of them scattered across Battersea: ornate columns with no obvious purpose. Some people assume they’re left over old street lighting posts, that maybe got missed in some previous modernisation. Some suspect more eclectic origins – maybe cable supports for long-lost tram lines, or old telegraph poles. But these lonely bits of street infrastructure are actually part of the sewer infrastructure – and they are relics of one of the most transformative infrastructure programmes in London’s history.

It all goes back to the development of our sewer system. Big sewers were pretty much invented in London after the Great Stink of 1858, when a blazingly hot summer, a fast-growing population, and the rapid spread of newfangled flush toilets all spectacularly came together to transform the Thames into a foul, putrescent miasma of stinky sewage. Awkwardly this was a river of sewage running right outside the windows of Parliament, and more worryingly it was linked to a bundle of virulent and deadly Cholera outbreaks. The sewage issue couldn’t be ignored any longer, and engineer Joseph Bazalgette kicked off an immense project to build 85 miles of huge ‘interceptor’ sewers along the north and south side of the Thames, to intercept the flow from loads of smaller sewers that had, until then, drained in to the river.

These interceptor sewers would transport the waste out to the east London marshlands, where it was pumped up to ground level in a pair of huge cathedral-esque pumping stations and dumped in the river to – hopefully – make its way out to the sea. This was a big improvement on the previous approach of dumping it in the river in the middle of London, but as anyone living in Battersea will know, the river spends quite a lot of the day flowing west as the tide comes in. Just dumping the poos further downstream doesn’t necessarily deal with the issue of the water being full of sewage and disease, as the incoming tide may bring a lot of it back within a few hours.

People living downstream weren’t exactly overjoyed either, now that they were suddenly seeing the whole of inner London’s sewage dumped in to the river right next to them. This led to a curious system where the solid parts of the sewage were filtered out and put in a fleet of ships – nicknamed Bovril boats because of their dubious brown content – that would sail further out to the sea, and tip it overboard, beyond the reach of the Thames tides. This process carried on for a surprisingly long time (not just in London – similar arrangements were used in several other cities), but it was banned in 1998 on the grounds that by then there were much better technologies available to deal with sewage, and too much poo was washing up on beaches. The picture below from Greenwich Industrial History is of the Hounslow, the last of the fleet of Bovril boats, that retired from the role in 1999. Later efforts would see increasingly sophisticated filtration plants, sewage treatment works, sewage gas power stations and sludge incinerators developed, to make sure what was being put in the river was reasonably clean.

London builds a wonder of the industrial world

Bazalgette’s sewer project was immensely ambitious – it took about 15 years to complete, which by the standards of the Victorians (who didn’t hang about when they saw a big project) was a remarkably long time. The engraving below shows the building site at the Embankment, where the new sewer was being built along what would be the future shore of the Thames. But it was worth waiting fifteen years, because the end result – in 1870 – was a wonder of the industrial world. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the sewer network – it cleaned up the cist for once and for all, and hugely reduced London’s exposure to cholera, and it set the standard for modern sewer systems right around the world.

The big interceptor sewers also fundamentally changed London’s relation with the river. The Victoria, Albert and Chelsea embankments were built along the shores of the Thames to house the sewer, but in doing so they turned the riverfront from a series of individual wharfs that were accessed from a series of back alleys, to a big open roadway open to the public – as shown in the early postcard below, when the embankment would have been about 25 years old.

These new streets connected London with the river, but also protected it from it: they were specifically designed to reduce the risk of flooding at high tides – a job they carried on to do pretty much single handedly until the Thames Barrier was built to strengthen the city’s defences almost a century later.

Bazalgette really left his mark on the Thames – having also designed Battersea bridge, which happens to sit at the very end of the northern sewer – as well as Putney Bridge, Chelsea bridge, Hammersmith bridge, aspects of Albert bridge and the early design for tower bridge. There’s a small and little-noticed memorial to him near Embankment station (shown below) – though his main memorial is maybe the road the memorial is stood on, the sewer under it, the wall behind it, and the embankment on the other side of the river.

But Bazalgette’s mega project wasn’t just about the Thames embankments – it also saw changes right around the city. The 85 miles of ‘interceptor’ sewers were undoubtedly the most visible part of the project, but they were only a tiny part of what Bazalgette built. To get the sewage to the big sewers, he also designed a complete city-wide network of over a thousand miles of smaller street sewers, to collect sewage from individual streets and channel it to the big new sewer. This would hugely upgrade the patchy local sewer network that had, at least in the smarter bits of town, previously carried waste away to a mixture of local streams.

Map of London sewers west | Matt Brown | Flickr

This meant the end of a system of filthy cesspits that were scattered around less desirable residential areas – which were notorious for being exceptionally smelly, and which would contaminate local wells and water sources, and of the muckiest neighbourhoods having what were in effect local open sewers running along gutters. These new sewers were a huge development at the time, and got global attention. The city immediately became a lot cleaner, and in slightly slower time, the city also got healthier – because a proper sewerage system went a long way to reducing the number of cholera outbreaks caused by sewage getting mixed in with water supplies.

Other cities started similar schemes. Paris built a comparable network but managed to spend five times as much on building theirs, despite covering a smaller area – which is mostly because they built much bigger tunnels for their street sewer system, that were initially focussed on dealing with rainwater and capable of handling washed-away street debris, with tunnels that could also accommodate other utilities, with household sewage being fed in much more gradually. One benefit of the Paris approach is that some of the huge tunnels in their sewers had walkways in them, and some could accommodate small boats – so they quickly became open to curious visitors. To this day you can visit it as a tourist, for an interesting if mildly malodorous experience (there’s even a gift shop down there).

A problem emerges – of smelly, but also lethal, sewer gas

London’s sewers were – aside from the giant interceptor sewers – mostly rather smaller. And this introduced a new technical challenge: the build-up of methane and hydrogen sulphide (rotten egg gas) within enclosed underground pipes. The old cesspits were notorious for exploding because of methane building up, while the early sewers before Bazalgette’s big project also had a recurring problem of toxic gases building up. The Pimlico sewer disaster in 1849 led to five people dying in a poorly-designed and badly ventilated sewer under that had been built in 1847 under the streets of Pimlico – three workers who initially went in to undertake maitenance, and then one of two rescuers, and then another person who tried to rescue one of the rescuers. After that the bodies were recovered by digging more holes in the sewer rather than going in, leading to ‘another escape of pestiferous gas’ – and an inquest that would conclude that a lack of ventilation in the sewer, coupled with poor maintenance, had led to the tragedy.

And this is where our mysterious neglected street columns come in. If you look at the front centre of our photo of the fateful street in Pimlico you can just about make out a drain in the middle of the road, that’s right at the highest point of the roadway. It isn’t going to be particularly effective at catching rain water from the gutters. Its aim is, rather, to provide some ventilation for that troublesome and badly-built sewer – and avoid it filling up with methane and other troublesome toxic and maybe even explosive gases.

You can see plenty of similar drains round Battersea – maybe most famously along the course of the Heathwall, that we have reported on before. Once a stream called the Heathbrook, running along the very edge pf what had once been the Thames estuary and which the local school is named after, it is now a long sewer that runs from near Clapham Junction all the way to the Heathwall pumping station in Nine Elms, where the sewage is pumped up to Bazalgette’s interceptor sewer to be taken off along the Thames to east London. We can only assume that this was once a particularly smelly and problematic sewer – because the drains here are unusually large and often come in pairs; peering down in to them some have access ladders for maintenance.

Drains like this went some way to solving the issue of toxic sewers, but they weren’t ideal. In the 1850s disease was widely believed to spread through miasmas, or ‘bad air’ – if you could smell it, you could catch it! Improving air quality was seen as really important – and smelly sewer ventilation grates might have made the sewers safer, but they worried people on the streets that they were now also exposed to horrible smells and foul gases.

Stink pipes come to the rescue, and clean up the sewers

The answer was stink pipes, designed to reach down to the sewers to provide an escape for sewer gases – and extend above roof height so that the fumes would get scattered away by the breeze, rather than getting in to people’s windows. The basic concept of the stink pipe was designed by Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, who was a classic Victorian inventor, scientist, surgeon, chemist, steam engineer, who was working closely with Bazalgette. He had form in the area: he was already responsible for lighting and ventilation at the Houses of Parliament during the Great Stink, and had plenty of expertise in managing air quality and bad smells.

Our photo above shows one on Longbeach Road, which is fairly typical of what was installed in Battersea, and one below shows one on Stormont Road. Both date back to around 1870, the year the streets were built – and also the year the Bazalgette sewer project was completed.

A symbol of Victorian civic pride

This was long before the era of mass-produced steel and aluminium tubes that go in to today’s lamp posts; these stink pipes were usually made of cast iron, which meant two things: one, they were heavier and thicker, and two, they could be much more ornate.

Victorians rarely missed an opportunity to add a bit of decoration and make something look the part, especially when it was connected with a glamorous new world-leading bit of sewer engineering, and stink pipes were no exception – you could see fluted columns, ornate bases, and crowns up at the top to deter birds. The example below at the junction of Queenstown Road and Battersea Park Road, which has survived huge changes including all the buildings next to it being completely replaced, is a typical example of ornate Victorian decoration contrasting with the more utilitarian modern street lights and traffic lights.

With time, stink pipes were supplemented by more ventilation. From the 1880s, as more and more houses were fitted with interior bathrooms, we started to see houses fitted with an external ‘soil stack‘ pipe that ran from the drains up to roof level, designed partly to ensure that flushing toilets didn’t pull the water in the U-bend down after the flush and so allow sewer smells in to houses, but partly also as a further air vent from the attached sewers. This means the ventilation has been moved from being a tall pipe on the street, to be a load of smaller pipes running up the back walls of connected houses, or hidden inside buildings and peeking above the roof.

A diagram showing how stink pipes and soil stacks in houses together provide a degree of ventilation to under street sewer lines

The primary rule of thumb for their height was to reach high enough that winds could safely catch and dilute gases well above street level and away from pedestrians or nearby windows. The standard design guideline championed by Gurney and adopted across municipal projects (and later reinforced by local public health acts like the Public Health Act 1875) was 20-25 feet – but heights could vary depending on surrounding building elevations and local board of health specifications. In Battersea, the stink pipe height tends to follow the local roofline fairly precisely – to get the gases just to the level where breezes would carry them away. Our investigations suggest the shortest is this one on Latchmere Road, which is surrounded by railway lines, so only needs to peek over the height of the railway viaducts to do the job.

However they could be enormously tall, over ten metres in some cases! Not far away from Latchmere’s mini stink pipe is this XXL stink pipe on Grayshott Road, which seems to have needed to be extra-tall because the house next to it has an unusual turret, and the whole street is at the bottom of a slope.

Going further and using the sewage gas

A diagram illustrating the operation of James Webb's sewer gas destructor lamp

Another inventor, James Webb, designed a street light that would be powered with sewer gas. The original aim was for the lights to be powered solely by burning methane collected with a small dome or collector in the sewer ceiling. It turned out that while there was a reasonable amount of methane in the sewers, it wasn’t concentrated or reliable enough to sustain a constant flame on its own. Webb therefore modified the design so that it would have a gas-powered light fed from the mains gas supply, which created an updraught that would draw out sewer gas that could also feed the flame. There’s still one of these in operation, on Carting Lane close to the Savoy Hotel (as well as a few in Sheffield).

The widely-assumed link between smell and illness didn’t last long (something we’ll be covering in another article imminently – because there’s a little-known but important Battersea connection) – meaning that the need to avoid smells faded pretty quickly. But the need to avoid dangerous and flammable gases building up remained a concern for a long time, and the stink pipes did their job of improving the safety of our sewers.

Stink pipes become an orphaned, abandoned bit of street infrastructure

With time, everyone took clean streets and not dying of cholera for granted, and started to forget about the stink pipes. As generation after generation lived alongside them they went from a symbol of civic pride at what had been achieved, to a core bit of infrastructure, to a mysterious old post that of uncertain purpose.

No one really knows who looks after these now – but more often than not, it’s no-one. It’s probably Thames Water, but they don’t seem to care. As our reporting on the neverending series of leaks from their water mains noted, with the whole company on the brink of collapse, stink pipes probably sit fairly low on their priority list. The Stormont Road one is typical of how their condition has decayed – it looks to have last been repainted at some point in the 1980s, there’s lots of deep rust pitting, and the base is full of debris which means it’s unlikely to be doing much sewer ventilation.

And the stink pipes are proper originals. Street lights are a local Council responsibility – and in the 150 years since the stink pipes were built, we could easily have seen four or five generations of street lamps come and go. Traffic signals and road signs have maybe seen two or three generations (or rather more for the ones that get crashed in to all the time). But the stink pipes have remained in their original form – just as they came out of the Victorian foundries, and aside from a few specially preserved heritage gas lights, they are the oldest bit of street furniture that is still standing.

Or mostly still standing. Because the neglect of the stink pipes has got to the stage where even these cast iron stalwarts of the Victorian era are starting to give up the fight.

Our photos here show the tragic end of one at the southern end of Queenstown Road, which came down on a stormy evening a couple of months ago. Fortunately its final journey happened to be in the perfect direction – in falling to its grave it missed passing cars, pedestrians, parked cars and the houses next to it – the only casualty was the projecting sign at the Moonlight Chinese takeaway, which was summarily destroyed in the collapse.

A close look at the wreckage showed just how bad the condition of the pipe was – the interior was a mass of shards of rust, and the cast iron had rusted through so much at street level that it could no longer take the strain. It’s a sad and unceremonious end, after 150 years. We suspect more will see a similar fate – it took quite some time before anyone even worked out who was responsible for clearing up and removing this stricken stink pipe.

A few others have been reduced in height, seemingly for safety reasons. This extra tall one on Fontarabia Road was recently chopped down to a stump, although the base was cleaned up and repainted at the same time to at least preserve some of the old pipe.

The pipe was also fitted with a cap – recognising that most of these stink pipes are not really doing any ventilating duties any more. This is the only example we’ve seen of this being done, and we believe it was a locally organised effort, rather than something done by Thames Water.

Is the era of the stink pipe coming to an end?

Maybe. A few people make a hobby of tracking down the ones that are still standing. Surviving stink pipes are gaining recognition as artefacts of a heroic Victorian cleanup and public health exercise – three years ago one of them was listed – though as oprphaned infrastructure, there’s not even a reliable database out there of where they all are.

One thing we’re seeing is that as the stink pipes get clogged up with debris and fail, and as house plumbing increasingly also removes the soil stacks in favour of air admittance valves (which let air in, but stop sewage gases emerging – and whose installation is allowed as long as enough traditional soil stacks remain on any particular street), the stink level in sewers is starting to creep up again. Occasionally this seems to be starting to cause headaches – for example in the last week a bike shop in Herne Hill has found that a presumably faulty part of the sewers connecting to the long-lost River Effra, that runs up to Vauxhall, is causing business concerns by emitting horrible sewer smells under the floor of their building.

But things are happening in the world of London’s sewers.

Bazalgette certainly built big, and the sewers handled a tripling of London’s population in the 150 years since they were built. The fact that they’re still running is testament to Bazalgette and the Victorians not doing things by halves. But with the city now heading towards ten million people, the sewage load was getting to be too much even for a heroically visionary sewer system, with overflows becoming a regular occurrence

Over the last decade London has spent five billion pounds building the Thames Tideway Tunnel, or ‘super sewer’ – which is a further 16-mile extra tunnel running up to 70 metres under the river from Acton to Beckton. It catches overflowing sewage from the 34 most polluting discharge points – the places where if Bazalgette’s interceptor tunnels get full, they throw in the towel and overflow in to the river – and takes it directly to Beckton.

And a deep sewer tunnel is bound to generate some methane – and you all now know how to deal with that problem – it means new stink pipes! With the new sewer mostly running deep under the middle of the Thames, most of the new five-metre-high stink pipes are on little peninsulas built out in to the river, often accompanied by sewer-relevant artwork (the one above is at Vauxhall, and the stink pipes are surrounded by brass replicas of vintage toilet bowls). Where the Victorians went for floral patterns and fluted cast iron, these stink pipes are generally curvy bronze tubes. Nineteen of these new ones have been installed, and there are also some plainer ones also hidden away here and there that look like unusually wide lamp posts.

These 21st century stink pipes are more sophisticated and complex ones than their 19th century ancestors, with specialised air treatment chambers containing activated carbon filters and chemical scrubbers designed to strip out as much of the methane and hydrogen sulphide as possible. But at heart they are doing the same thing as the ones dotted around the streets of Battersea. Perhaps fittingly, one pair of these new 21st century stink pipes is at Embankment, next to Bazalgette’s memorial.

If Bazalgette or Goldsworthy were around today, they’d recognise these architect-designed new stink pipes as doing just what their originals were doing, just with a bit more technology attached – and they’d probably be quietly impressed that it took 150 years and a tripling of the city’s population before we had to make a major addition to their sewer system. Walking round Battersea they might be disappointed at the lack of care we have taken to maintain their stink pipe network. Or maybe, just maybe, they’d be pleased that thanks to their work we’re now living in an environment so free of sewage-linked diseases that almost everyone has forgotten what the stink pipes are for.

This is one of a pair of posts on the rarely covered niche topic of sewage management! Stay tuned for the next one, which is about how one of the biggest ever advances in understanding how to manage sewage and prevent horrible deaths kicked off right here in Battersea. If you found this interesting, you may want to see our article on the similarly worn out network of water pipes that runs under our streets, and increasingly bursts through them. Lavender-hill.uk is a community site covering retail, planning and development and local business issues, centered loosely on the Lavender Hill area in Battersea, with more occasional more detailed articles like this one on local history, and other subjects of community interest. If you found this interesting you may want to sign up to receive new posts (for free) by email – and if you have tips and leads to share, get in touch.

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A change of guard for The Crown on Lavender Hill

Posted on October 14, 2026 by David

Every neighbourhood needs a decent pub. Lavender Hill used to have lots – but many drifted away over the years, including the Beaufoy Arms (now the Iron BodyFit gym), the Cedars (which we’ve written about – currently up for lease as a restaurant), and the Craven Arms (a former boxing pub, now a medical practice). Four Thieves has a particularly complicated history, originally opening as the Cornet of Horse, sending its early years as a music hall, later becoming the first ever branch of what would become the Jongleurs comedy club empire, and now closer to where it started as a large all-welcome pub and venue. Wetherspoons run what’s probably Lavender Hill’s busiest pub, the London & South Western – but for a lot of its time it wasn’t a pub at all, instead housing Hasting’s furniture store (whose logo is still visible on the mosaic doorstep).

Just one has stuck to being a ‘classic’ pub throughout, and that’s The Crown. Built in the 1870s, at the same time as many of the surrounding houses, it was originally called The Crown Hotel. Later on it became a Truman’s pub, and the tiling on the outside – dark green, with paler cream faience tiles above (currently painted grey – but the colour’s still visible on the corner columns) is a classic part of the Truman brand for pubs that saw makeovers in the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 2000s the Truman branding was still visible on the tiling and signage – as per the Google Street View below.

Inside it’s a big, spacious, open plan pub with plenty of seating, a pool table, and a small raised alcove area at the rear, and there’s a front terrace opening on Lavender Hill. Pub Love, originally called Best Place Inns, have run it for a decade or so as part of a small chain of inner London pubs. They converted the managers’ flat on the upper level to a backpackers’ hostel, which – once a few early planning concerns were ironed out – went on to run happily over the years. The hostel brought a helpful source of affordable accommodation for younger tourists, as well as a useful sideline to the pub’s core business – even if it was fairly high maintenance for the relatively small amount of income it brings.

Soon after taking over the venue the PubLove team moved the bar from being right in the middle of the pub to the left hand side, alongside a comprehensive interior refit that brought a quality wooden floor and quite a stylish – but still pub-like – general feel. They also greatly improved the front terrace, that had been a bit bleak beforehand – to make it more welcoming and a little less open to the street, with a partly sheltered area and an outdoor TV. The rather smart stained glass lead-framed windows on the eastern side of the building remain intact, and overall this is a good looking pub, inside and out.

But after ten years at the helm, the team at PubLove’s lease has come to an end – and a couple of weeks ago, the Crown pulled its last pint, at least for the time being, and closed its doors. The PubLove brand was quickly painted over on the signage, but otherwise there was little sign of what the future held for the building.

What happens next? At times like these, it’s worth taking a look at who owns the building, and how it works in business terms. And brace yourselves – because like a lot of London pubs, the Crown has a complicated ownership structure, with a lot of different layers between the people pulling the pints and the ultimate person collecting the rent!

The landlord at The Crown is a firm called Stonegate – a huge company backed by private equity firm TDR Capital, who are registered in the Cayman Islands but with an operational headquarters in Solihull. Stonegate got hold of the Crown in 2020 when they bought the previously listed pub operating firm Enterprise Inns, for around 3 billion ponds – a deal that made them the proud owners of around 4,000 pubs, on top of 772 pubs and bars they already owned and that included the Slug & Lettuce, Yates, and Walkabout chains – and that instantly made them by far the UK’s largest pub landlord.

Around 2,000 of Stonegate’s properties are directly managed within the business. These tend to be the biggest, busiest sites with a strong food offer – they include Be at One on Battersea Rise, and the Two Brewers on Clapham High Street. But many more are leased out to someone else to operate – sometimes with a beer tie, which means the landlord sees a mix of rental income and a share of income by requiring some of the drinks sold in the pub to come from their in-house suppliers. The leased-out pubs in Stonegate’s portfolio are typically more local affairs, but still busy locations – an example is Lost Society on Battersea Park Road, currently on offer to an operator for £40k a year for the first year. If you fancy running one of Stonegate’s pub, there are several currently available! The Crown is very much one of the latter category – a classic neighbourhood pub rather than a big brand city centre bar or club – having been leased to smaller teams to run as they see fit over the years.

Since their huge pub purchase, Stonegate have been busy reorganising their pub empire. They sold off some of the sites, to offset some of the cost of buying the pubs, with some suggestions that they aim to offload up to a thousand in the medium term, worth a billion or so pounds. Some of these may go in big groups: Terra Firma, another venture capital outfit, was reportedly eyeing up 300 or so of the strongest sites – but Stonegate are also selling off smaller bundles of more local pubs – for example a deal thsat has seen a bundle of ten mostly-London pubs sold to Fuller’s for £35 million. They are also part way through moving some of their 2000 or so centrally-managed sites to instead run as leased-out or tenanted sites, with around 300 expected to make the move with time.

So we know who the landlord is, at least for the time being. But the ownership picture gets a little more complicated – because Stonegate only owns the freehold for about a thousand of its pubs (sometimes called its “Platinum” estate). The actual buildings that house other 4,000 or so of their pubs – including the Crown – are leased by Stonegate from all sorts of other property owners. Sometimes this is because the Stonegate property is just one unit in a larger building, and sometimes it’s because someone else owns the freehold and has leased the whole place to Stonegate. The freehold of the Crown building is ultimately owned, as far as we can tell, by someone called Goldcrown Investments Ltd – with a long lease to Stonegate, who the lease it on again to someone else to operate.

And it’s not just the tenants and Stonegate who are in the middle of a lot of sales and reorganisation: Goldcrown may also have their eye on the door, as the Crown’s freehold is also currently for sale, alongside a whole cluster of ‘Enterprise Inns’ pubs in inner London (including the Kona Kai in Fulham, the Library in Pimlico, and the Prince of Teck in Earls Court). The guide price is £2.2 million, and the property is described as having a blue chip (i.e. reliable, big business) tenant in the form of Stonegate, with a lease for 35 years from June 2020 (so running to 2045), for £92,500 in gross rent. Some highlights from the listing for The Crown:

…a substantial detached three storey (plus basement) Victorian pub building with brick elevations save for the ground floor which has a classic pub frontage and return with feature windows and painted stucco work. The windows on the upper floors have stone surrounds… Stairs to the rear lead down to the basement and up to the upper floors where there are 7 dormitories providing 60 plus beds… there is a substantial basement which is the almost the same size as the ground floor.

Maybe ominously, the listing notes it is a ‘reversionary opportunity‘, which in pub landlord speak means a freehold pub is currently under-rented or undervalued, and that financial value can be unlocked once the current lease expires or “reverts” back to the freehold’s owner. This can mean many things – most commonly it’s because the property is stuck in a long-term lease below market value and can, with time, be brought up to a much higher level (which is probably the case here), but it can also be because the current operator is underperforming (less relevant here given the rent is fixed rather than the freeholder seeing a share of turnover), because the property can see a big renovation or extension to unlock potential (for example extending on to unused land – again unlikely here, though the back of the building is a little underused), or because the building is worth more for other uses than as a pub (for example converted to flats, or demolished altogether and replaced with something bigger). The latter is a risk for any London pub, though in this case the relatively good protection Wandsworth applies to pubs and prevent unscrupulous landlords demolishing them or changing them to flats – which we have covered amid the previous attempts to unpick the protection of the nearby Queens Arms and the decent profitability of well run pubs – maybe reduces the risk here.

The listing also notes that the pub is in a prime location – which it is, being a very visible site right in the middle of a dense and relatively wealthy catchment area, on one of Battersea’s busiest roads. The listing notes that this area of Battersea has a mixed demographic with “relatively affluent housing on the [southern] side of Lavender Hill but social housing (but many now owned privately) to the [North] (to the rear of the Crown).” Competition in its immediate neighbourhood is limited – with the Queens Arms, and the Fox & Hounds on Latchmere Road as the most obvious ‘similar’ pubs, and for more town centre options, the Falcon, Windsor Castle and big Wetherspoons’ at the London and South Western by the station. The sale listing has been online for a while – but as far as we can tell, the building remains on the market at the time of writing.

This may look like it all adds up to quite a turbulent time for the pub, with a landlord busy buying and selling pubs right left and centre, and in some cases changing their operating models, and a freeholder also looking to sell.

But as a generally workable pub in a decent location, that is unlikely to see major redevelopment or a move to being centrally managed, chances are any of these changes won’t really affect the day to day running of the pub – and what matters for most of our readers is whether The Crown is open – and if it’s a decent place.

We had a good run with the team at PubLove, who invested in modernising and improving the building, and generally ran a good pub with a friendly and enthusiastic team who made it work. They also did so in a way that attracted a wide mix of people – from the sports crowd, the lived-here-forever locals, the young family market, the young professionals living here for a few years – and of course some of the visitors staying upstairs in the hostel. The tricky thing with a pub is often that you are trying to be somewhere that serves so many different interests, and you need lots of different customer bases – something the team were very good at. As the old team move on to pastures new it’s worth recognising their effort over the years in running a proper pub on Lavender Hill.

And the good news is that The Crown is not set to stay empty for long – because a new team have already agreed to take over, with plans to reopen this week. They have spent the last 17 years running The Dover Castle, right next to Borough tube station – that lease came to an end a few weeks ago and The Crown is going to be their next venture.

We haven’t been to the Dover Castle – but it seems to be a popular and decent pub – known for a lively atmosphere, and (particularly in its early years) also attracting a significant student crowd. Reviews point to friendly staff, low prices, and a generally unpretentious neighbourhood feel. The pub is appreciated for sensibly priced drinks, regular live music, and generally shows a fairly wide mix of live sport (not just football).

A bit like the Crown, the Dover Castle also catered to backpackers and travellers staying at the associated hostel upstairs. We understand the Dover Castle did not have a full-scale dedicated kitchen, so food options there were limited – but they did offer good-value deals like Sunday pizzas; The Crown has more scope in terms of its on-site food offer but is still not about to convert to being a full gastropub.

Now that they have the keys we look forward to seeing what the new team do with The Crown. It’ll no doubt be a change for the pub and also for the Dover Castle team – the Crown is a bit more suburban, and with a slightly more settled local catchment than the city centre surroundings at Borough, but it’s certainly a well loved pub with lots of potential. In a time when pubs can spend months or longer between tenancies, it’s good to see it has been picked up so quickly. With the pub aiming to reopen today – do visit to welcome the new team to Lavender Hill.

The Crown, at 102 Lavender Hill, London SW11 5RD – details at Dover Castle’s instagram. Lavender-hill.uk is a community site covering retail, planning and development and local business issues, centered loosely on the Lavender Hill area in Battersea, with occasional more detailed articles on local history, occasional coverage of local pubs, and other subjects of wider community interest. You can sign up to receive new posts by email (for free, unsubscribe anytime).

Posted in Business, Food & drink, Planning | 3 Comments

In pictures: From dodgy derelict toilets, to Clapham Common’s newest cafe

Posted on October 9, 2026 by David

Five and a half years ago, we reported that the long abandoned toilet block in the woods on Clapham Common was up for lease as a cafe – to anyone brave enough to take it on. But we also reckoned the estate agents were not going to be seeing queues round the block. The building had been closed for decades, it was jammed between the South Circular and a set of dilapidated changing rooms, it came in at a pretty tight 500 square feet, the whole place was cracking and slightly leaning, and it was surrounded by brambles. To top it all, someone had stolen part of the roof, meaning it was loosely covered with plastic sheeting.

It’s always ominous when the estate agents’ listing contains no interior photos and the building is liberally scattered with ‘Warning: dangerous structure’ signs; all in all it was clear that this building was in the last chance saloon.

And yet… for all of its faults, this was a place with potential. The number of people walking past on a typical weekend is vast, it was right next to one of the wealthiest and densest residential catchment areas in London, there was plenty of enclosed space around it that could become a seating area. It remained a pretty elegant structure – with fine brickwork and plenty of signs that about a century ago someone had put a fair bit of love in to building something that would look good and would last. It’s not entirely clear when it was built, though a look through historic maps suggests some point in the 1930s. The always excellent NLS map database also shows another couple of buildings to the north in the early 1950s, as well as a lot of prefabs at the western end of the Common.

Back in 2011, the building narrowly escaped demolition. Lambeth, who manage the whole Common despite this part being in Wandsworth, applied for permission for knock everything down. They clearly weren’t keen on what they described as “redundant brick built toilets”, arguing that it had been empty for 15-20 years, had suffered from vandalism and structural defects, and was ‘beyond repair’. They proposed to replace it with two steel portakabin-type changing rooms with an attached bathroom.

Lambeth’s planning application was a mess, with a distinct ‘Friday afternoon job’ look to it – and Wandsworth (who are in charge of planning in this bit of the Common) weren’t convinced. They felt there wasn’t a convincing case for knocking the building down rather than repairing it, especially as it was in a conservation area. They recognised it was in ‘a decrepit state’ and seemed to be leaning at one end, but they noted it would be attractive if it was refurbished, and that Lambeth hadn’t really offered up any evidence that the structure was beyond economical repair. The proposal was rejected, an another similar planning application y Lambeth a year later was dropped before any decision was made.

At that point Lambeth seemed to lose patience with the project, and pretty much closed the book on the old building, leaving it to an uncertain future. Not much happened for a long time, though it’s at some point after this that a fair bit of the tiled roof mysteriously went missing, and was covered with a plastic tarpaulin.

When they had a first go at leasing it as a ruin, withal the repairs to be done by whoever took it on, it did draw some attention and interest – several thousand people read an article we wrote about it. But no one leased the property. The thing was – even though it had loads of potential – who was really going to take it on in such a run down state, where they would have to invest a fortune fixing every aspect of a building they were only leasing, before making any money? We started to wonder if the place was, after all, doomed.

But then in a surprise move that no one saw coming, Lambeth themselves, the ones who had been itching to knock it all down 13 years prior, had a change of heart. They decided the building wasn’t beyond economic repair after all – but would make an ideal premises for a new café (just as Wandsworth had suggested back in 2011). Changes are the estate agents had reported that while there was interest in the location, no one was really going to take it on in such poor condition. Amd given the sorts of rent they were making from other cafes on the Common, they had by now probably also realised it could be a nice little earner.

So Lambeth got the builders in, who didn’t waste any time getting the leaning wall and chimney straightened up, damaged bricks carefully replaced, the whole building cleaned and repointed, and the tiled roof replaced. Services were upgraded, the area around was partly paved, and all the windows were replaced.

Back in 2024 we reported as the works neared completion. The builders had done a fine job and the structure had scrubbed up really well. The original toilets were gone – but a new fully accessible one has been included at one end of the building that’s open to everyone, not just cafe customers (partly because the existing ones attached to the changing rooms have rather variable opening hours and aren’t really accessible, but also because a building on the public Common needs to have a public function rather than just being a private business).

Inside the building as many of the original Victorian glazed bricks as possible have been kept in the interior. The original fireplace opening under the building’s chimney is still visible – and it’s quite an unusual thing to have in a small and remotely located toilet block, it suggests that the toilets must have (at one stage) had an attendant who not only kept the toilets clean but was also on hand to top up the coal needed to keep the building warm through the day.

The fully-spruced-up premises were put up for lease again – and this time, as a ready-to-go premises, it saw lots of interest. Three bidders made the final stage, and the outcome was that 21 Grams would be taking on the lease. They know the location well – as they run an existing and very popular cafe at Clapham South, just at the corner of Cavendish Road, where the south circular sets off from the Common on the long and winding route to the Woolwich ferry.

21 grams is a proper locally owned business, and a success story made right here in Clapham Junction. The business started with its first branch in Northcote Road, and grew steadily to open in Clapham South, Northcote Road, Fulham, Wimbledon and further afield – and your author (as a semi regular visitor to Clapham South) can confirm their coffee’s excellent! We spoke to the owner at the time, who was looking forward to getting going – and assumed that the building would be reopening imminently.

However that didn’t happen – because it turned out that someone in Lambeth Council had accidentally made a mess of part of the leasing process, and the whole thing had to start again at square one. This led to almost a year of delay, with the building sitting empty. We understand that 21 grams, having got all the way through a long and complicated process and then seeing it all called off, decided they’d had enough time and money wasted and walked away from the process – and who can blame them.

The second process eventually reached a conclusion, and this time it was another local independent business who got the lease – and one we know only too well, because Spread ‘s first branch is right here on Lavender Hill! A popular independent cafe with a highly rated food menu, Spread have become a firm favourite since they opened their first branch a few years ago.

A bit of fitting out work followed, to get everything shipshape and ready to go – and they opened at the end of the summer. There are a few seats and tables inside but the main seating is outside, with a serving hatch for takeaway collection. Unlike Spread’s Lavender Hill branch there’s no big back kitchen with a chef at work making dishes to order – the culinary emphasis here is on drinks and a range of pastries, sandwiches and lighter bites.

But the secret sauce for a cafe in a place like this is always the quality of the coffee. Spread’s nearest competitor, Pear Tree Cafe next to the band stand, were well aware of this when they took over that lease five years ago; with a rather improved coffee offer they vastly increased customer numbers within a few weeks. Good coffee has long been a strength of Spread, so the were set up for success here. And word about Spread’s opening has, well, spread – the crowds now turning up in the weekends are a confirmation that the coffee does not disappoint.

But this is a win for more than the availability of good coffee. A long-overlooked local heritage building is now looking its best, improving the whole feel of this once down-at-heel corner of Clapham Common. A local independent business run by a lovely and enthusiastic team has found the perfect home to grow, and create new jobs and opportunities. And everyone using the Common now has new facilities with a proper accessible bathroom in a place that didn’t have one before. It all suggests that all those years ago, the anonymous Wandsworth officials who rescued the building in its hour of need by throwing out the dodgy demolition proposals, and many years later the similarly anonymous Lambeth officials who got the money together and argued the case to get it back in business, were right. It might have taken thirty years from the toilets being abandoned, a fair few bumps in the road – but a little building hardly anyone cared about, that for a long time looked to have reached the end of the road, has instead found its own happy ending.

At the time of writing, Spread on the Common is open daily from 8 til 5, though hours will likely vary over the winter; they’re close to the junction of Clapham Common West Side and The Avenue. Lavender-hill.uk is a community site covering retail, planning and development and local business issues, centered loosely on the Lavender Hill area in Battersea but also reporting on developments on Clapham Common., with occasional more detailed articles on local history, and other subjects of wider community interest. If you found this interesting you may want to see recent posts on Battersea Power Station’s mysteriously missing historic cranes, on the story of how one of Clapham Common’s oldest houses was saved, on the complicated case of Clapham Orangery, or on the pioneering women of Battersea’s early days. You can also sign up to receive new posts (for free) by email – and if you have tips and leads to share, get in touch.

Posted in Clapham Common, Food & drink, Local history | Leave a comment

How long can it take to build ten steps? The decade-long saga of Queenstown Road’s second entrance

Posted on October 7, 2026 by David

It all seemed so simple. A great big new housing development was going up in Battersea, which would bundle lots of little sites together to create new flats, a completely new building for St Mary’s primary school, shops, restaurants. It would open up lots of previously locked-away space to the public for the first time, including the back wall of Queenstown Road Station. A new road would lead from there to the front of Battersea Park Station – so why not open a new door to give access to the new development? The new entrance would also provide a handy route from Queenstown Road station and the areas around it to the new shops and restaurants, and a handy pedestrian shortcut from Queenstown Road to the areas to the east including the power station and new tube station.

The works were minimal – a low brick wall at the back of the station needed to go, some steps needed building, and an existing door at the back of the station needed to become a bit more access friendly. Taylor Wimpey were leading the housing project, and as one of the country’s biggest builders they know what they’re doing. This was going to be a breeze, everyone would see benefits from the plans – what could possibly go wrong?

Well, in the end, it seemed quite a lot.

The second entrance became a part of the overall development agreement, as a way of ensuring the residents, businesses and school had decent transport access, and also providing some benefit to the wider community. The station is a listed building (which even affects the messy back walls, even though these weren’t really the reason it was listed), but planning permission proved uncontroversial and was granted back in 2014.

The housing development, which was the complicated bit, went very smoothly. And that’s despite it needing a tricky process of assembling dozens of scraps of land, three separate railways, a bundle of different existing buildings some of which needed to be retained, a dozen operational railway arches, and several roads and paths – while also rebuilding a school without disrupting its day to day operations. Someone behind the scenes at Taylor Wimpey did a very good job getting everything together! It sold quickly – everything was gone by 2020 – and from what we hear, residents are happy with what was built. It even made the shortlist for New London Architcture’s award for the best mixed use development.

Things went rather more slowly on the second station entrance. Nothing is ever simple on the railways, and working out the details of who would deliver the works took quite some time – the station is managed by South Western Railway, the railway belongs to Network Rail, the rest of the development is Taylor Wimpey, and the funding was partly organised via Wandsworth Council. The 2014 planning application timed out, with no action whatsoever on site, so Taylor Wimpey submitted a new one in 2019 with small tweaks. Still no action followed, but in 2021 another planning application went in with some more tweaks, partly aimed at reducing costs (the planned lift disappeared) and meeting Network Rail design standards (the stairs were made wider), and in 2022 yet another with some more small tweaks.

Three years later, in May 2025 (five years after the rest of the development was finished), we reported that building works finally started – and a couple of months later it was all complete. The works are tidy and it was clearly all done to a good standard. The builders, M Group, celebrated completion in July last year – noting that they had been working on behalf of Taylor Wimpey, and had used the expertise of their rail and access team and mechanical and electrical teams to deliver works to the busy station on time – which has included changes to CCTV, moving one toilet and improving an accessible one, changes to drainage and electrical systems, and lowering the ground level outside the back door of the station.

William Carter of M Group, who knew this was a project that had been a long time in the making, commented at the time that ‘We know that the second entrance to the station has been highly anticipated by the public and we hope that the improvements make the station a more enjoyable experience.’ Things would be opening swiftly, and this decade-long project would finally be complete. Yes, it had taken way longer than expected, but at least we were there now – right?

Except that it didn’t open. And more than a year later – well over a decade after the second-entrance plan was first given planning full permission – it still hasn’t opened.

What has opened, though, is a whole row of small businesses in the arches – as the Arch Company (who manage them) – having taken several years to properly get going on leasing here – finally agreed leases on all the arches, and they all went from empty to occupied at more or less the same time. This was arguably the missing ingredient for the development to come to life at street level, and has seen a dozen businesses, most of them independents, det up shop along Patcham Terrace- including the Kutchenhaus kitchen showroom, the Pilates Studio, La Vie clinic, and OnPrint design and print studio. Two cafes at the Battersea Park end of the arches have brought activity to the pedestrian square – with The Coffee Studio opening their second site, after making a success of Greenwich, and Not Another Jungle combining a cafe with an impressive range of less-commonly-seen houseplants.

The trouble is, while it’s good to finally see Patcham terrace in business, most of it remains a dead end for pedestrians – which really holds back its potential. Maybe the worst affected is Vietnamese coffee house Kiju – which is something quite different and unique to Battersea, and worth a detour.

It’s a great space, with a large upper level that is perfect as a quiet workspace, but also hosts art classes and gatherings of all sorts – with excellent natural light and sunset views across the rooftops. As well as direct views of the station and the route through to Queenstown Road that ought to be a source of customers!

So why are we seeing even more delays, after a decade of delays? As far as we can tell, there was an element of paperwork and process involved, which is maybe not surprising: there are usually a lot of management signoffs needed, and everything involving the railway costs more and takes longer than you expect.

But the final sticking point is an unexpected one – and it relates to the concerns of a neighbouring property that the new way in may make a window accessible to miscreants, that was previously less visible and exposed. The precise details are proving a little hard to track down but we think it’s the one on the right, above the wooden fence, in this photo:

A variety of things have been done at the back to limit access from the new entrance to neighbouring properties, including “security trespass mitigation measures” in the form of a grey slopey panel on the part of the ledge on the right that might be ‘walkable’, and a black ‘roller’ on the lower ledge to make it neither walkable nor something that can be easily sat on.

You could argue that the understandable concerns here haven’t been made any worse by the works – the back wall of the station was previously only waist-height rather than being a large full height sliding gate (as our old photo shows), and the back yard of the station was a shambolic mess of overgrown vegetation complete with a long abandoned outhouse building (which gave rather good access to other houses) rather than a generally well overlooked modern entrance with CCTV throughout.

No one wants the house next door to suffer because of the new entrance, and more could be done if needed: adding a smoother wood panel to the station side of the wooden fence could make it less ladder-like, and a climbing deterrent could go at the top of the fence. All it needs are trip to Wickes and about 30 minutes’ work with a saw and a screwdriver, and boom, we’ll have a more accessible station and a commercial street that is not a strange dead end.

So why – after a decade of delays, and a whole year after the project was (barring maybe a few more burglar deterrent measured) complete – is it taking so long? A sobering thought is that in slightly less time it has taken us to build ten steps in the back garden of a suburban station, China built fifty thousand kilometres of railway and over a thousand stations. Even TfL, who aren’t known for speed, are faster – the Northern Line extension just down the road only started back in 2014, and opened for business seven years later. It does suggest there’s something a little wrong with the way projects like these are delivered: too many different organisations involved in the design, building and running of railway assets, slow and complex processes that slow things down rather than delivering useful outcomes, and maybe a lack of anyone with the mandate to keep things moving.

Will this project ever complete? At this stage it’s anyone’s guess. You can sense the frustration of residents, for some of whom this would be a rather convenient route – and now also of businesses who have invested in good faith and are finding themselves cut off from the station and isolated from a lot of their potential customer base. Information on this fiasco (and we think it’s fair to call it a fiasco now) has become harder and harder to get hold of, with a faint sense of everyone hoping it is someone else’s problem. Maybe someone will manage to solve this – or maybe this entrance will be forever locked.

But do visit the businesses on Patcham Terrace, even if it means going the long way round – it’;’s worth the detour.

Lavender-hill.uk is a community site covering retail, planning and development and local business issues, and sometimes posts like this one on transport, centered on the Lavender Hill area in Battersea. We sometimes also post more detailed articles on local history. We have reported on Queenstown Road Station a fair few times over the years. If you found this interesting you may want to sign up to receive new posts (for free) by email – and if you have tips and leads to share, and especially any insider information on what is going on behind the scenes at the station, get in touch.

Posted in Business, Housing, Transport | Leave a comment

Six new houses may be on the way to a well-hidden part of Queenstown Road

Posted on April 17, 2026 by David

Part way along Queenstown Road, a grey roller shutter looks a bit out of place among the Victorian mansion flats. A faded sign for Terminal Coachworks hints to its former use, having spent many years as a vehicle maintenance yard, the home of Queenstown Car Restoration Ltd, run by Darrell Joseph who specialised in restoring quality classic cars – with a notable focus on early Jaguars.

Behind the shutter, a narrow passageway opens up to a fairly large industrial area. These back yards have long seemed a strange choice when the area was originally built up – the spaces are awkward, completely surrounded by housing with only one fairly narrow access point, and would have been more usefully attached to the flats themselves which have very little outside space – but they do seem to have been a deliberate feature when these flats were originally built. There are several of these back yards along the street, the others have more modern buildings in them and are in use as the Domus (a tile showroom) and Button & Sprung (a bed and mattress showroom). Rather unusually, one of the yards is in use as allotment gardens.

After a century and a half of business use, plans are now in to build a terrace of six houses on the site. The developers note that they have tried for a while to let the site without seeing much interest, and it seems they also recognise that the rather basic state of the current buildings means it would need a lot of investment to really work for the sort of company that is currently looking to locate in Battersea – more akin to the development we have occasionally reported on in Culvert Road.

The artists’ impression below shows what the houses would look like; each would have a small courtyard garden (between ten and fifteen square metres), and there’d be a flat roof to try and minimise the effect on the light at the existing houses and flats either side of the development. Four of the houses are two bedrooms, while the ones at either end are slightly larger and have three bedrooms; the layout is fairly conventional with an open plan kitchen / living space on the ground floor and bedrooms above.

Access to the new houses would be via the existing archway, with a walkway running along to the houses. The plans say this walkway will include planters and shade-tolerant climbing plants to add a bit of greenery (though these aspects are, in our experience, usually ignored and not delivered once planning goes through – we have reported a few times on the battle to get the landscaping at nearby Avery Walk delivered to the standards the developers initially promised, which was ultimately successful, and similar issues arose at a development on Taybridge Road). Bin and cycle storage would go in the archway. One tricky design issue is fire safety, given the development is quiet hard to get to and only has one access and escape point; the plan is therefore to have sprinkler systems throughout.

This development is not likely to even get noticed by most of us – and probably won’t be especially controversial. For those of us who don’t live right next to the site, the main effect will be a slight tidying up of the entrance – with a gate that’s more coherent with the rest of the building, and a small planted area. Adding six houses isn’t going to suddenly overwhelm local schools, doctors or wider services. A development this size won’t move the dial in terms of local housing need either – but these houses look broadly decent and at a time of significant housing pressure, where (as we have reported on estate redevelopments) larger builders are really struggling to make the sums add up in London, smaller and more deliverable projects like this can hopefully provide a good homes.

So far the plans have received a handful of comments, from neighbours who are the most affected – noting the need for clarity on precise heights and distances between properties, expressing concerns that the houses (which will be taller than the existing workshops, and include first floor windows) could overshadow neighbouring properties and reduce privacy, and asking for the proposed air source heat pumps to be designed to minimise noise in a tight urban context. Several also note that the demolition and construction in a context where lots of old and potentially fragile neighbouring buildings are connected to each other needs very careful handling.

The Battersea Society generally support the plans – but echo the point that careful thought needs to be given to the quality and maintenance arrangements for the proposed new boundary walls. Consultees also express concern about the development’s impact on car parking, and the plans here are frustratingly unclear: there is supposedly a transport statement as part of the application (which might suggest it is proposed to be ‘car free’ other than disabled spaces – a common approach for new developments) but we can’t tell because the transport statement seems to have been incorrectly loaded in to the planning database and generates a ‘server error’.

Building houses in a space as tight and hidden away as this is unusual – but increasingly common in Battersea. A year ago we covered a similar site next to Battersea Arts Centre that was in scope for conversion from a series of small workshops that are spread along a thin passageway, almost completely hidden from every angle, again to six small houses.

As we suspected would happen, this ended up being more of a ‘rebuild’ than a ‘refurbishment’ – because while it is generally a bit easier to get planning permission if you already have a building of more or less the same shape and size on site, there’s no way it would ever be cost effective to upgrade those old buildings – which were little more than garages and sheds – to current energy efficiency standards!

Plans to retain the structures were dropped as soon as planning was received, in favour of a new build effort with houses to more or less the same layout. In another more-or-less-expected move, the developers also put in another proposal to build two more houses in a space in the middle of the development that had not previously had buildings on it, pictured above, which was also approved.

Construction at Theatre Street is now well underway. A bit like the Queenstown Mews development, this should make a small but helpful contribution to local housing needs, and will probably create quite an interesting and quirky set of properties, hidden away in a quiet little mews right in the middle of Clapham Junction that hardly anyone knows exists. There’s still time to comment on the plans for the proposal at Queenstown Road (details below) – and chances are it won’t be the last of these small developments in hidden away scraps of land.

To see or comment on the plans, visit wandsworth.gov.uk/planning and search for planning application 2026/0553. Lavender-hill.uk is mainly focussed on the Lavender Hill area of Clapham Junction. If you found this interesting, you may want to see our wider articles on local environment, planning and housing issues. Some of our favourite articles are on local history, and if you live near this site you may also find our photo story on the Shaftesbury Estate of interest, a recent report on plans to upgrade this part of Queenstown Road, or our post on a rather unusual house that was for sale near this proposed development. To receive new posts by e-mail (for free, unsubscribe anytime), sign up here.

Posted in Housing, Planning | 1 Comment

A colossal new advertising screen may be coming to Sisters Avenue

Posted on March 13, 2026 by David

A supersized digital screen might be coming to Sisters Avenue, opposite Battersea Arts centre. Screens aren’t new to Battersea, but what is new is the sheer size involved: at twenty four square metres, it’s bigger than some London flats! We’ve seen a steady stream these proposals over the last couple of years, with a few big advertising firms rushing to install these highly profitable displays wherever they can get away with it, typically on the end walls of terraces where they are as visible as possible to passing traffic. Most have been refused permission by the Council; the developers invariably appeal to central government to try and override the decisions – but the Council, who aren’t fools when it comes to planning, has generally won these appeals.

The image in the planning extract above shows the location – at the corner of Sisters Avenue and Lavender Hill. It looks quite tame, almost tasteful, in the picture – but of course what the image doesn’t show is the blazing illumination and dynamic nature of the screen! Our photo below is maybe a more typical view of what we might get, of the advert at the back of Sendero’s building on Queenstown Road at dawn. That advert is pretty intense for something that has a fair few bedroom windows facing it. It occasionally gets toned down a bit when people manage to track down the owners, but funnily enough at the next system update it tends to mysteriously revert to the ‘brighter than the sun’ illumination setting. The one proposed at Sisters Avenue is set to be the same sort of thing – but larger.

There are already a couple of paper-based advertising hoardings at the end of Sisters Avenue, seemingly dating back to the early 1980s when few cared what happened to the run down buildings along Lavender Hill. As far as we can tell, no one bothered to get planning permission for those, so (maybe fortunately) they don’t give much of a planning precedent. The companies involved generally argue that changing these old advert boards for digital screens is environmentally friendlier because no one will have to take van out every couple of months to change the posters (conveniently overlooking the electricity consumption of producing and running a 24 square metre 24-hour digital screen, but then that’s the art of planning statements). In this case the developers also argue that the new sign will ‘reduce physical signage and improve the visual coherence of the elevation’, though whether a much more prominent and illuminated sign will do this feels doubtful.

The companies behind these proposals aren’t daft, they know that no one really wants these things on their street. They’re ugly, they keep nearby residents awake with an ever-changing kaleidoscope, and for those in the wider area they turn a fairly attractive and mainly well preserved Victorian streetscape in to something more akin to driving along the parade of huge billboards along the M4 viaduct. The developers usually hope that a distracted and overworked planning officer at the Council will accidentally wave it through, or not make a sufficiently strong case against it for the rejection to stand up on appeal. A variety of other more dubious ‘public benefit’ advantages are typically cited in the planning applications – ‘high quality design’, somewhere for local businesses to advertise, the ability to broadcast emergency messaging, the use of ‘void periods’ for public information and public art campaigns, maybe even business rates from the advertising income – but this is all nonsense really, we all know these things are there for one reason, which is to show adverts.

And to be frank, there’s nothing inherently wrong with digital advertising – and these big screens genuinely can work well in the right place. But the right place for a 24 square metre illuminated screen is next to a flyover on the M4 (where the mix of big adverts scattered between the multistorey car showrooms have become a positive feature of one of London’s more unusual and unique landscapes), or in the middle of Wandsworth roundabout (where adverts in the middle of the Wadsworth Atom have become a sort of symbol of that bit of town). Not in a narrow Victorian residential street next to a Grade II* listed building. People trying to install these in Battersea often argue that similar adverts have been approved in some other areas of London so should be fine here – but when you look closely those other areas tend to not be densely built residential streets.

And the local context here matters: Sisters Avenue is a key part of the setting of Battersea’s old civic district, with a street lined by the largest and grandest houses in the Borough – generally detached, a rarity in the area – leading up to the town hall (now Battersea Arts Centre). There used to be a large theatre here too, but that was damaged by German bombs and demolished in 1955 (to be replaced by the rather less glamorous ‘Shakespeare House’ building, that now has Foxtons on its ground floor). The street has lost a little of its status since the town hall moved to Wandsworth, and the once spectacular houses are now subdivided to flats, but the overall sense of Sisters Avenue & this bit of Lavender Hill being an important bit of Battersea – built to convey the power and importance of a growing Borough – remains strong.

The negative impact of billboard adverts isn’t lost on the Council. Over the last few years they have worked behind the scenes to get rid of many of the big poster advertisements from gable ends, as part of their efforts to create a more attractive town centre (for example, adverts have gone from the side of buildings on gable ends on Kathleen Road (opposite the Magistrates court), Tipthorpe Road, Stormont Road, and Rush Hill Road. They’ve refused digital screen proposals at the eastern end of Lavender Hill, and – thanks to carefully considered refusals, and the proposals being pretty suspect – also won the subsequent appeals.

So we’d be surprised if they allowed a huge new advert to go against all this work, especially given the wider planning context – which includes the National Planning Policy Framework (which makes it very clear that the design of the built environment and good design is a key aspect of sustainable development – encouraging new developments to respond to local character & history, and reflect the identity of local surroundings), and the Local Plan (which steers new developments to ensure a high level of physical integration with their surroundings, and consider broader ‘placemaking’). The Local Plan also requires new developments like this to relate positively to the prevailing local character and (importantly) the emerging character where the context is changing – which it has been doing for a number of years on Lavender Hill, as it increasingly focusses on food and drink venues that are competing with St John’s Road and Northcote Road, and where the street really needs to look its best to attract customers and offset the more trafficky environment.

It’s not just about the visuals though. These big adverts are typically made up of a lot of smaller screens, as well as transmission and power equipment, all of which need access for maintenance. On the basis of other similar ones, such as the one at the Latchmere junction pictured above (which has a whole internal room – you can just about make out the door on the side that’s used for maintenance access), it’s likely that it will overhang the pavement quite a bit, and cause yet another area where residents are exposed to falling debris from pigeons. Worse, these large and heavy pieces of equipment have a disconcerting tendency to fall off the walls without notice! Maybe the most famous local example was on the Mitcham Road in Tooting in 2015, when one of the adverts just like the one in our picture above fell off the wall during the morning rush hour, dropping about 20 feet and crushing a woman.

Maybe these big adverts do, as some of their proponents argue, ‘activate the street scene’, helping householders discover new products and services that may be of interest from the convenience of their own bedroom windows, and bringing a sense of inspiration, wonder and delight to even the quietest side streets. Perhaps a touch of Blade Runner aesthetics is just what we need to drag our fusty old-fashioned town centres in to the digital age. Or perhaps these are just another cynical attempt to push advertising in to every corner of our cities, ready to trash what remains of the carefully designed civic centre Battersea’s residents built back when it was a new Borough caught up in London’s break neck industrialisation of the 1890s for the sake of a few more spots to push the latest cars, vapes, VPN services and fast food.

You can probably tell we’re not wholly convinced this is the perfect place for a big advert screen, and at the time of writing the case is open for residents to make comments, and support or oppose the proposal (details of how, below). In due course we’ll see what Wandsworth’s planning team make of this proposal – and, if they refuse it and it inevitably goes to appeal, what the government planning inspectors reckon. As ever, we’ll keep you posted.

Update (25th March): They have withdrawn the planning application. This can mean a few things – maybe they have realised it won’t get through so they want to tweak it significantly and then resubmit it (which, if they do so within typically 12 months, they can usually do without paying another £588 fee), or – because withdrawing the application also withdraws the objection comments that went in (we’ve checked, there are only objections so far!) it can that they’re a dodgy developer looking to quietly resubmit the same thing in a couple of months and hope that residents think “we’ve objected, all good, obviously no need to do so again” but it looks to the officials handling any appeal as though there were ‘no objections’. We will keep an eye on this one and keep you updated.

To see and comment on the proposals, visit wandsworth.gov.uk/planning, and search for planning application 2026/0404. Comments are in principle accepted up to the 27th February, but in practice you can often comment well after the date and the planning team will take it in to account if they can. Lavender-hill.uk is mainly focussed on the Lavender Hill area of Clapham Junction.

You may want to see our wider articles on local environment, planning and housing issues; we have written about advertising proposals a fair few times including a dubious plan for loads of lamp post banners in Lambeth, and on advert hoardings pretending to be phone boxes; Clapham Junction Insider has also reported on some of these questionable plans. Some of our favourite articles are on local history, and if you live near this site you may also find our photo story on the Shaftesbury Estate of interest. To receive new posts by e-mail (for free), sign up here.

Posted in Environment, Planning, Street by street | 1 Comment

A pair of green plaques are being unveiled this week, in Nine Elms & Lavender Hill

Posted on February 24, 2026 by David
Yvonne with then-leader of the Council Cllr Maurice Heaster

On Wednesday, a green plaque will be unveiled on Thessally Road (near Larkhall Park), to Yvonne Carr – former housing Manager for the Patmore Cooperative Estate in Nine Elms, and tireless campaigner for a community centre in an area that was very much lacking one.

Yvonne’s childhood was in a farming community in Jamaica, she came to London aged 16. She was well educated and looking to go in to nursing but at the time the only work was factory positions – so she joined Ponds ‘Cold Cream’ factory, which made moisturiser, in Acton, where she was paid enough for her to rent a room in a house shared by three families. She had two children, and moved around a few jobs including school kitchen assistant and then working at a publishing company, while learning typing and shorthand at night school – as well as teaching herself sewing to save money om her childrens’ clothes. By then a single parent, she was keenly aware of the challenges of raising a family on a tight budget – and ran a sideline making clothes for neighbours and colleagues. She became chairwoman of a local chapter of Gingerbread, an association for one-parent families, and then found work at Brent Council’s housing department. It went well, and she went on to manage around 15,000 properties at Hackney Council, before her final post in Wandsworth where she brought her industrious and enthusiasm to improving the estate and making it the best place to live that she could.

This was to be where she developed the community centre that would one day be named after her. Many former colleagues remember her dedication to her job and the people of Patmore and surrounding estates and her tremendous efforts in getting funding and persuading others of the need for the centre, in the large area of densely-built housing that didn’t have much when she started – which led to her success in securing over a million pounds in funding for the project from sources including Wandsworth and Lambeth Councils, and seeing it through the design and construction stages. Sadly Yvonne died suddenly just weeks before the official opening by then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown in 2003, although did see the project finished. The plaque in her memory, on the centre that was named after her, will recognise her long commitment to the area and the project.

The centre now hosts a nursery, as well as the Children’s Centre and Family Hub, which offers a huge range of local services for local children and parents – including Stay, Play and Learn sessions, and regular Talk Shop drop-ins with a speech and language therapist. There are parenting courses, help with nursery applications and form-filling, regular housing advice sessions, and a friendly ear to listen.

The plaque to local hero Yvonne will be unveiled on Wednesday 25th February at 2pm at the Yvonne Carr Centre, 2 Thessaly Road, SW8 4HT – full details here. All are welcome! Speakers saying a few words about Yvonne and her legacy will include Councillor Aydin Dikerdem, Marsha de Cordova MP, and representatives from Yvonne Carr Staff and Children’s Services. 

Patrick Barrington, courtesy Guyana Times

And then on Friday we’ll see another plaque, on Dorothy Road (close to Clapham Junction’s Asda supermarket) – to Hanna and Patrick Barrington. Hanna was an activist, Patrick an artist – and their home was a haven to many. Hanna (nee Hanna Greenwood) was born in Vienna, where she was a communist activist, and was arrested by the Nazis. An old boyfriend helped her escape and make her way to Paris, and she eventually came to Britain. She had many jobs – working in a biscuit factory, as a bus ticket inspector, and as a script-editor for the long-lost early cable television company Rediffusion. She had a lot of Guyanese friends and got involved in Guaynese politics – travelling to Guyana to support Cheddi and Janet Jagan, a pioneering husband-and-wife political team who led the country’s struggle for independence from Britain in the 50s, and who went on to become its Prime Minister & President.

Patrick was born in Guyana, where as a student he joined a Saturday painting group and sold paintings to tourists before taking up a job as an art teacher. He won a scholarship from the Booker Tate sugar company, that allowed him to travel to Britain to study art at what is now Central St Martins. In order to make money he trained as an engineer, mainly working for BT – but he made art throughout his life, exhibiting at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions during the 1970s. Many pieces of his work portrayed life as he was growing up in Guyana and are now in the National Gallery of Guyana – with his best known being a Cubist-style self-portrait.

77 Dorothy Road – formerly the Corkscrew wine bar

Hanna and Patrick met in 1958, and married in 1967 – in what was to become a 61-year partnership. In the 1960s Hanna had bought a rundown off-licence in Battersea – at 77 Dorothy Road – where she lived above the business, and from her retirement in 1978 until 1992 she ran the property as a wine bar, the Corkscrew, with resident cats on the bar and prices so low that customers often insisted on paying more, and a reputation for legendary parties that drew a hugely eclectic mix of ‘artists and academics, socialists and socialites of every hue and sexual orientation’ to this corner of Battersea. She didn’t put up with any nonsense though – at one point she famously threw Sarah Ferguson out of the bar for making too much noise, reportedly saying: “I don’t like riff-raff at either end of ze social scale”. She ran the bar well in to her 70s; but after Hanna finally decided it was time to call it a day, and having been a passionate lifelong supporter of LGBT rights, she used the space to host lodgers through the Gay Switchboard telephone helpline. The Guardian published an obituary to Hanna in 2019, and to Patrick in 2020.

The plaque unveiling to this rather extraordinary couple, who came from far afield to make their lives in Battersea and made quite an impact on everyone they met, will be at 77 Dorothy Road SW11 2JJ, on Friday 27th February at 12 noon – details here. All welcome to come and learn more about this extraordinary couple and their loving (if often quarrelsome) partnership. Speakers will include their Hanna’s obituarist Helen Braunholtz Smith and Patrick’s obituarist Sue Balding, several Guyanese and communist friends, and LGBT speaker Nick Collinson.

These two plaques follow one unveiled last week to former MP Shapurji Saklavata, and they’re all part of Wandsworth’s Borough of Culture programme. Again, we’re indebted to Jeanne Rathbone who has been a driving force behind Battersea’s new blue and green plaques – telling the story of people who have made their lives and careers in Battersea (including for her conversation with Yvonne’s daughter Yasmin). You may find our previous article about the inspiring women of Battersea’s early days, including factory developers, social reformers, fearless pilots, celebrated artists, tenacious campaigners and ‘dangerous subversives’, interesting; or the story of the blue plaque at 84 Lavender Sweep. And keep an eye out for the walking tours Jeannie occasionally runs, of the growing cluster of local heroes commemorated in and around Lavender Hill.

Posted in Local history | 2 Comments

Shapurji Saklatvala, Battersea’s controversial one-of-a-kind MP in the 1920s, will be recognised with a plaque this Friday

Posted on February 19, 2026 by David

There aren’t many blue plaques in Battersea – but it’s been home to a lot of interesting and Plaque-worthy people over the years, and tireless local campaigners are turning the tide. One of the first was a exceptionally unusual one in a mucky alleyway hidden behind some smelly bins at the back of a petrol station on Queenstown Road, which – as the Short Brothers’ workshop – was the unexpected birthplace of British aviation industry – we’ve covered that story here.

We’ve also seen a series of plaques unveiled over the last few years focussing on the pioneering women of Battersea, including factory developers, social reformers, fearless pilots, celebrated artists, tenacious campaigners and ‘dangerous subversives’.

And as part Borough of Culture, we have three more blue plaques on the way – two of them right here in Lavender Hill. And in a fairly unprecedented move, all three will be unveiled within a single week.

First up is Shapurji Saklatvala – who was elected MP for North Battersea in 1922, receiving 11,311 votes (over 2,000 more than his nearest rival) – and again in 1924 (in a much tougher political climate, but still with a margin of over 500 votes). As an Indian Parsi, he was one of Britain’s first Asian MPs. He was a hugely popular and influential speaker – as well as a very outspoken one, with a lot of strong views! Anti- imperialist, anti-capitalist (as might be expected for an MP who started in the Labour party, but moved on to the Communist party), campaigner for Indian and Irish Independence (which he saw as being pretty much equivalent), internationalist and campaigner for workers’  rights and a hugely popular orator. He never missed an opportunity to campaign for the demands of the unemployed and the cause of cheap housing and lower rents.

He was arrested during the 1926 General Strike following a speech he made in support of striking coal miners, and was jailed for two months on the charge of sedition. His views on Indian independence – coupled with fiery speeches there – led to him being banned by British officials from travelling there in 1927; he was clearly seen as a little too controversial and influential for the government of the day, and ended up quietly under surveillance by the Security Service.

He was part of the super-wealthy Tata family dynasty, which then (as now) are one of the largest business empires in the world – but generally took a rather different path to everyone else in the family. He did work for Tata businesses for a while, as a mineral prospector where he was able to find new iron and coal deposits in eastern India – but it soon became clear he wanted to go down a different path. Catching a bad case of Malaria was a bit of a turning point, as he moved to England to recover – running Tata’s Manchester office, and then training (but not qualifying) as a barrister, before moving in to politics. He was clearly very much to the political left of much of the Tata family, but they clearly continued to have a workable relationship – indeed he managed to rather upset the (very much non-religious) communist party, when he held a Zoroastrian navjote initiation ceremony for his children – but he defended it on the grounds it was to ensure they could benefit from a Tata family trust fund!

The plaque to Shapurji will be unveiled this Friday, the 20th February, at 12pm – at the Labour Party headquarters at 177 Lavender Hill. Everyone is welcome – and the speakers will include biographers Marc Wadsworth and Dr Mike Squires, Marsha de Cordova MP, leader of Wandsworth Council Simon Hogg, Russell Profitt (who was the last Battersea North Labour candidate, Shapurji’s old seat, back in 1982 before it was abolished and merged with Battersea South), and Tony Belton (the longest serving councillor in Wandsworth).

And there are two more plaques on the way in the next few days – which we’ll write about soon.

Speaking of plaques – Shapurji’s plaque is almost opposite Battersea Town Hall – now Battersea Arts Centre. Which reminds us that there was, back in 2021, a plan to install a statue of John Archer, mayor of Battersea way back in 1913 – who was elected by fellow Councillors following a fierce election battle where he had to deal with racist campaigns against him and allegations that he did not have British nationality… in the end he won by a single vote, in a landmark moment for Battersea and Britain, as the first time a black man held a senior public office in London. We wrote about John and the plans at the time; sadly while the statue was announced with great fanfare, as far as we can tell the plan seems to have been quietly forgotten! If anyone has any tip offs on what happened to this plan, do get in touch.

The plaque was unveiled on Friday 20th February at 177 Lavender Hill – and it’s pictured below. We’re indebted to Jeanne Rathbone who has been a driving force behind Battersea’s blue plaques – telling the story of people who have made their lives and careers in Battersea. You may find our previous article about the inspiring women of Battersea’s early days, including factory developers, social reformers, fearless pilots, celebrated artists, tenacious campaigners and ‘dangerous subversives’, interesting; or the story of the blue plaque at 84 Lavender Sweep. And keep an eye out for the walking tours Jeannie occasionally runs, of the growing cluster of local heroes commemorated in and around Lavender Hill.

And if you find our occasional local history articles of interest, you may enjoy a long article on the complicated history of the Cedars Road estate, a similarly detailed look at the past of Culvert Place, a photo story about the Shaftesbury Estate drawing on its conservation designation, an article about the cluster of derelict buildings around the old Artesian Well bar on Clapham North street, a very detailed history of Rush Hill Road, and an article about the area around Falcon Lane that dives in to the area’s messy past and some scary 1970s road-building projects that very nearly got built!

Posted in Local history, Politics | 2 Comments

Antrim House may be about to gain a bundle of phone masts

Posted on February 18, 2026 by David

Antrim House is a block of ten flats on Stormont Road, built in 1962. The flats all have two storeys and a balcony, and make good use of space, and they’re popular; apart from a mini makeover a decade or so ago that saw new windows, balconies and cladding, and new paving to the front courtyard area, it’s the sort of building that quietly does what it was designed for and doesn’t get much attention. There’s also a health centre on the ground floor, that was built some years before the flats, in quite an innovative architectural style with internal courtyards and skylights to get natural light and create warm, calm surroundings (Layers of London has published an early photo of the medical centre, with the Battersea Business Centre in the background, it looks much the same now). It works as an outpost of St George’s hospital in Tooting that provides more local services.

The whole flats-and-health-centre complex was carefully designed by the London County Council (whose architects really liked two-storey flats) to fill a small gap in a row of big terraced houses that ran all the way along to the junction with Gowrie Road. The three-house-wide gap – outlined in the post war Ordnance Survey map above (we presume the surviving house within that outline was also for some reason deemed worthy of demolition) – was the result of a Word War II bomb, that damaged some of the houses beyond repair. While it was of a very different architectural style to its Victorian surroundings, Antrim House initially filled the gap remarkably neatly, by being perfectly aligned and exactly the same height as the terrace on either side.

Unfortunately someone in Wandsworth didn’t quite get the memo about what the London County Council was doing here to patch up the original streetscape, as just 8 years after Antrim House was built, Wandsworth Council demolished all the big Victorian terraces on the right hand side, and replaced them with a low-rise estate in a completely different style. The Stormont Road Estate, a dozen terraced houses and a small block of 12 flats, is much lower-rise and the first house is also set back from the street line – rather undermining the architects’ intent of stitching the bomb-damages street pattern back together! If you look closely at the big white wall on the side of Antrim House, there’s a rendered part that was where the Victorian houses were attached to it, and then a small brick bit nearer the back where Antrim House stretched a few feet further back than the terrace houses.

The demolished Victorian buildings – of four storey houses with big entrances – had been some of the biggest and most impressive houses around, if they’d survived another ten or so years they would have been looked after and treasured, rather than something old fashioned to be got rid of as soon as possible. One day we’ll write a more detailed article about it, but for now the houses are just visible in this archive photo!

Its neighbour on the opposite side of the road, the Devas Club, is a bit more of a stand out, being a huge block of reinforced concrete! The club is older than it looks, having been founded in 1884 (about the same time as Stormont Road was built) as ‘University College House’ – with the aim of providing poor young men with job skills. Its young founder Jocelyn Devas died a year and a half after founding the club in a climbing accident on the Matterhorn, and his dad offered a sizeable donation to his friends to carry on their work in Battersea.

Until the 1970s the club was based in a Victorian style building on Thessaly Road in Nine Elms – but it found itself in the way of the huge redevelopment of the area to create new Covent Garden Market. A deal was done that saw the club moved to Stormont Road, in a distinctly 1970s building that’s rather similar to the 1970s version of new Covent Garden Market. It has seen a few changes over the years, with a ground floor makeover, and many smaller internal changes as it has adapted and developed to provide modern training and recreation facilities – but it has stayed true to its original mission and will probably be the subject of a future article.

Rather like Antrim Huse, the 1970s version of the Devas Club was developed to replace a worn-out and somewhat bomb damaged Church hall at the north end of Stormont Road, and both its and its neighbour have weathered the past few decades fairly well, even if their styles fell out of fashion not long after they were built. And the two buildings are now also linked by the more prosaic matter of mobile phone masts – because it seems the big clusters of mobile phone masts currently on the roof of the Devas building, are going to be relocated – to be on top of Antrim House.

Antrim House’s new masts are being installed by Cornerstone, a large mobile infrastructure services company with over 20,000 sites that cover about half the country’s mobile customers. They’ll include six antennas and two small 30cm dishes, and three rooftop equipment cabinets – essentially exactly what is currently on the roof of the Devas Club. Unlike at the Devas Club where the antennas tend to be on the corners of the building, at Antrim House they will be clustered near the middle of the roof, where there is better access and something sufficiently firm to attach them to; this does have the side effect of making the overall mast a bit higher than it the ones it is replacing at the Devas building (to reach round the building roof) but also probably less visible from the ground.

We’re not entirely sure why the aerials are moving; though as a self funded organisation that does good things, it’s a shame to see the income from the phone masts move across the road. We know the Devas Club make £35k-100k a year from a bundle of ‘other revenue’ – which includes rental from the phone masts (as well as investment income and a variety of other sources). They do also make some income from the electricity feed-in tariff, having wisely installed a load of solar panels on their roof a few years ago.

In most cases, developers of phone masts do not need planning permission, they just need to notify the local authority in advance and demonstrate that the proposals meet a few core criteria – and we don’t expect this small move will be particularly controversial in any case. However slightly intriguingly, in the case of Antrim House (a building that they are, of course, also the landlords of – so will have done the deal with Cornerstone), Wandsworth’s planning team have just decided that this proposal will need to go through the planning process.

The planning officers’ reasoning for this was that although the mast plans are compliant with most of the conditions needed to allow mobile telephony equipment to have a ‘free pass’ on planning, the ‘highly prominent’ nature of what was being proposed for Antrim House was likely to detract from the appearance of the building and visual amenity – in other words, be an ugly eyesore for the currently tidy and well-maintained Antrim House – and the proposals did not give much or any evidence that efforts had been made to minimise the visual impact ‘so far as practicable’. The proposed locations of the masts on the roof did not seem to be designed to minimise the ugliness of the setup, or to maximise efficiency (for example by sharing one mast between multiple operators or pieces of equipment), no particular effort seemed to have been made with approaches like coordinating the colour of the masts and equipment with the building, and it was not clear of other options had been explored to make up for the loss of the masts on the Devas buildings like adding equipment to other nearby existing base stations.

We can see where they’re coming from here too – Antrim does have residents who make an effort to look after the building, and forest of masts on the roof will not help matters! There are better ways of delivering this, like the building above on Wandsworth Road where the bit up at the top (with a crane behind it) is a ‘brick pattern’ screen hiding a similar forest of masts and dishes. That one is well over a decade old and the brick pattern has faded, but when it was new it was very convincing and looked just like a part of the building; the same approach could easily work at Anrim House.

To see the full details of the ‘rejected’ approach visit Wandsworth’s planning site and search for proposal 2026/0070. Depending on how Cornerstone decide to adapt their plans to be less of an eyesore, we’ll probably see a full planning application for the site – hopefully with a bit more effort put in to the appearance of the planned works – in the next few weeks.

Lavender-hill.uk is a community site covering retail, planning and development  and local business issues, and sometimes wider areas like transport, all centered on the Lavender Hill area in Battersea. We sometimes also post more detailed articles on local history. If you found this interesting you may want to see our photo story on the history of the Cedars Road estate, an in-depth report on the chaotic redevelopment of the 1970s Westbury Estate flats on Wandsworth Road, an update on planned improvements to Queenstown Road, the imminent project to build lots of new flats on Tyenham Close. You can sign up to receive new posts (for free) by email – and if you have tips and leads to share, get in touch.

Posted in Planning, Street by street | Leave a comment

Clapham Junction’s Rough Sleepers Hub opens for business

Posted on February 9, 2026 by David

It’s been a long project, and a controversial one too. But after one of the most contentious planning applications in the history of the borough, a long building project that’s seen a dilapidated office building comprehensively renewed, and a bold and quite innovative approach to supporting the homeless move from concept to very real plans, Clapham Junction’s new homeless hub has today – the 9th February – opened for business.

The high-risk moment of truth for Wandsworth Council’s flagship project

This is the moment of truth. Will this prove to be the new thinking that rough sleeping has needed for quite some time now – transforming the messy and piecemeal local authority support landscape, that until recently has done very little to help many of the most vulnerable members of our community just when they need it most? The innovation born in Wandsworth, which can show the rest of the country that a quick, pragmatic and comprehensive approach, rather than passing people from pillar to post, can get people who are struggling back on track – and even save taxpayers money?

Or will it be a crime-ridden magnet for junkies and ne’er-do-well’s, that many of its neighbours feared during the chaotic early days of the project, when it was sprung on them by stealth with an unadvertised planning application – just another shambolic night hostel, no matter how it’s branded, that will add to the headaches of residents and traders already struggling to deal with the antisocial behaviour seeping out of an inner city town centre?

We can’t answer that question – yet. None of us can. But we can report on how the project has fared during the last few months. In this in-depth article we also take a look at the long story of how and why this project came about, what the Hub will do and how it will work, how the plans have developed from the chaotic early stages of the project to address a lot of concerns from local residents, and how this bold experiment still leaves a few concerns in its wake. We take a peek behind the scenes, with lots of photos showing how the lengthy makeover of the building behind the hoardings has transformed a tired and run-down Council office to an up-to-date modern facility – and also report from a meeting with the management team on how the hub is going to operate.

The new Homeless Hub at 201-203 Lavender Hill, now with new windows and repaired external brickwork

A new approach to rough sleeping, that no one else has tried

It’s worth looking back to how this all came about. A few years ago, an idea germinated at Wandsworth Council: what if all the Council’s services for those vulnerable to homelessness and rough sleeping, which were scattered all around the borough, could be brought under one roof, to coordinate properly between each other and have prevention and support services on one site? Better still – what if rough sleepers themselves could be temporarily housed right next to those services, rather than in expensively-rented rooms all over London and the south east, to go in early and strong with the support, and make sure rough sleepers get access to everything they need at the same time – right away?

Short-stay rooms (for up to a month) would provide safe, comfortable, welcoming surroundings – while being right on the same site as the Council’s homelessness support workers and housing officers, the SPEAR rough sleeping team who they work with as a partner, and all the other services that can get people back on track. A clinical room would mean medical and mental health support could also be provided on site by appointment. It would all work on the basis that ‘every door is the right door’ – where no matter which bit of the Council and its partners’ services someone first approached for help, they would act as a gateway to support from all the other partners, with no need to go to lots of different people and tell them everything again and again. The aim would be to provide intensive, comprehensive, quick support – to get people to the stage where they can then move to settled longer-term accommodation. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound like rocket science, and you’d think there would be some examples elsewhere to point to – but surprisingly, there aren’t. Wandsworth would be the first Borough in London to have all the relevant services in one building. There are loose similarities with St Mungos’ No second night out outreach scheme (though they are also thought to be turning towards a hub model too).

Hidden corners of Asda’s car parking have been one of the Borough’s more persistent rough sleeping spots

An approach inspired by Wandsworth’s efforts in the 2020 pandemic

The idea was directly inspired by the government’s Everyone In scheme during the early days of the pandemic, which provided all rough sleepers with a place to stay. That scheme was made up within days, and driven by short term need – but it also proved an interesting experiment on whether a more proactive approach to rough sleeping could deliver better results. And sure enough, it does seem that when people were provided with the services and support they needed, many thousands of people who had been out in the streets for many months or years did get back in to stable longer term housing, and just got on with their lives.

Research by Shelter found just under a quarter of the 27,000 people helped by the pandemic scheme across the whole country went on to longer term settled accommodation – but Wandsworth seems to have done rather better than that. They housed 564 rough sleepers as the virus swept around the country, and 244 of them – nearly half – then moved on from those temporary arrangements to settled accommodation. Sometimes they provided ongoing help for those with more complex needs with the skills & support to maintain their tenancies – but in other cases they found that just having a moment of stability and some short-term help to get back on track was all people needed. The Council found that the scheme provided access to a lot of people who wanted to get off the streets, but who hadn’t previously had access to the services to help them do so, and managed to get good results; they regretted that at the end of the trial they lost the space to engage with rough sleepers.

And there are a fair few rough sleepers here, many of whom carefully stay as out-of-sight as possible. A street count in the late autumn found 21 rough sleepers in Wandsworth, and 14 in Richmond; with safety sometimes being found by staying out of the way, chances are the real figures are a bit higher. That may seem a small number – but it’s a very specific subset of the homelessness challenge here; there are far more ‘hidden homeless’ who couch surf and hide away in unoccupied commercial premises, who may also see some support via the Hub’s services, and even more statutory homeless (the Borough has around 4,000 homeless families in temporary accommodation) – but it does reflect those who are arguably the most vulnerable of all.

The triggers for rough sleeping in Wandsworth are often being discharged from a long stay in hospital or prison, the aftermath of a relationship breakdown, and being thrown out of private rented tenancies – the latter often because people have struggled with rent payments – which itself can often be down to unemployment or underemployment, or wider difficulties including substance use, and physical and mental health challenges. There’s also been a recent rise in rough sleeping among non-British nationals who are struggling to find employment as rules and checks have been tightened up. A lot of rough sleepers are local, and have fairly long histories in the area – although there are also people from further afield; Sadiq Khan has recently commented that London in general attracts more people than it can house, being seen as more attractive than the rest of the country – with better access to services and arguably better opportunities for informal employment.

The main reception area, which also houses the 24-hour security team

The project hones in on a conveniently available Council-owned building

There was, conveniently, an available building to try this out: 201-203 Lavender Hill, right opposite Battersea Arts Centre. Owned by Wandsworth, it had become available following the move of the Council’s care leavers service to be closer to other family services in Falcon Groove. It was a distinctly tired property – a loosely-stuck-together pair of four-storey Victorian terraces, with precisely the tatty facilities and run-down ambience you’d expect of something that had been in local authority hands for decades, far away from the Council headquarters and housing an obscure and little-known bit of the Council’s work. But there was enough space to accommodate both a dozen or so bedrooms, as well as a whole floor of offices for staff, and some rooms for appointments and visits.

The Council applied for funding support from central government, to try out this new approach – and someone must have done a decent job of the application because they landed a grant of just under £5 million. The pieces were starting to come together, to try something quite new.

Residents will have a communal living room on the first floor with softer lighting and more comfortable furniture

A botched start to the project annoyed nearly everyone

But things quickly went south – because the start of the process wasn’t handled well at all. A planning application for a change of use of the building, featuring minimal detail and some vague floor plans that seemed to have been sketched out on the back of an envelope, was very quietly submitted by the Council – with hardly any detail on what was being planned. Wandsworth also submitted the plans in a rather sneaky way that framed it all as a trivial ‘change of use’ of the Council building, which meant that even the immediate neighbours whose buildings were connected to the Lavender Hill location, and who were registered to receive planning alerts, weren’t informed.

Whoever did this probably thought they were being very clever and avoiding any of that hasslesome consultation and process that more ordinary residents have to go through if they want to get planning permission. But they hadn’t reckoned with their ever-finicky local community websites. We spotted it buried deep in the database, accidentally while looking for something else, wrote a short and fairly bland article on it… and chaos ensued. This wasn’t surprising – the way it was framed immediately brought up concerns that creating a hostel for two whole London boroughs, to a residential area, would draw in a large population of transient people struggling with all sorts of challenges and addictions – who may or may not then find space overnight, and with knock on impacts on the quiet streets around it, and on local traders who have a tough time at the best of times. For many residents at the eastern end of Lavender Hill, it rekindled difficult memories of the chaotic 120-room St Mungo’s hostel that had, for years, brought mayhem to Cedars Road. That hostel had been questionably managed at the best of times, and while it had a very laudable aim of supporting vulnerable residents with severe drug & alcohol abuse issues, it was hard to escape the feeling that the sheer scale of that hostel tended to make residents’ problems worse, while leaving its neighbours to pick up a lot of the pieces.

A shared kitchen facility has been installed

The timing of Wandsworth’s stealth planning application was also pretty unfortunate: Clapham Junction and Lavender Hill were struggling with a wave of petty crime (and not-so-petty crime too – to the point where we wrote a fairly detailed special report on the serious violence that was plaguing some streets – and we don’t even cover crime as a topic). When it was revealed that this facility would be the main facility for Richmond as well as Wandsworth – and be focussed on those with complex needs – a view quickly took root among many residents and traders that the last thing the area needed was some new hostel to bring two whole borough’s populations of people struggling with addictions and mental health challenges, to what was a mostly residential site on the very edge of a town centre – and one right next to a busy day nursery.

A quick change of approach, as it became a political problem

The dodgy planning application was hastily withdrawn – and a new one was submitted that had far more detail. But by now the cat was well and truly out of the bag, and it saw 500 often detailed objections (as well as a couple of dozen support comments). People across the Council realised that a well-intentioned project had very much got off on the wrong foot. Worse, both what was being done and how it had been done were becoming sore points well beyond its immediate neighbourhood, and potential election risks. The Lavender ward is mostly made up of Conservative councillors, so from Wandsworth’s perspective trouble there is not their problem (although it is marginal and has been a target) – while Shaftesbury has three Labour councillors and is also something of a swing seat. The impact was spreading too, with disquiet rippling across the north east of the Borough. A change of approach was ordered.

Shared bathrooms have been fitted on the two residential floors

A core residents’ concern, that emerged again and again, was about what the facility would be: somewhere that had the management and support to remain true to its objectives of wraparound support to get people on track, or something that degenerated in to a city-centre casual hostel for vagrants that – by not actually being in a city centre – could cause disproportionate risk to neighbours. Recognising this, the Council organised public meetings to try and reassure residents that no, they didn’t want to create something like the old Cedars Road Hostel (or various other dubiously managed ‘bed for the night’ setups that had been nightmares for their neighbours, and in some cases brought a lot of crime and danger close to other vulnerable populations), that the stealth application had been a mix up, and that they did want this to work with the neighbours.

We reported on this part of the Hub’s development in some detail – and in one of the articles we wrote we suggested a middle ground approach, that could address a lot of the local concerns, and get the project off to a good start.

A better thought through approach to the hub

Wandsworth were quite receptive to the concerns raised, and did take a fair bit of the feedback on board. The building plans got tweaked to reflect the concerns and thoughts, with changes made to both the layout of the building and the way it will operate to both make it work better, address some of the obvious design problems with their initial approach and generally do what they could to minimise the impact on the neighbour.

The view from the bedrooms

Councillor Aydin Dikerdem in particular – as the Cabinet member for housing, and who happens to live very close to the site – emerged as a driving force behind the project. To his credit he had not been afraid to discuss and defend it, and also been frank that this is an experiment – not everything will run perfectly from the outset, and there will be hiccups and learning processes.

A recent meeting of the Local residents’ Forum

Wandsworth also made a lot of commitments on how the Hub would run. This included a proper sustained engagement programme with the site’s neighbours, including committing to having out of hours contact details if there were disturbances (including a neighbours’ phone line that will be open 24 hours), having the CCTV patched through to the Wandsworth joint control centre on Wandsworth High Street, creating a space within the facility that could let residents have a space to relax during the day rather than driving everyone out to side-street hangouts, closing off the already-problematic back alleys behind the site that risked becoming dealing spots, making the windows at the back that face a small childrens’ play area non-openable, and ensuring residents were provided with access to food to not lead to even more theft from the traders along the street.

The project moves in to the construction phase

The reception area at the new Hub.

A couple of years later, having got through the planning process (which saw a lot of changes made, and took far longer than originally expected – we also wrote about the updated planning application that was ultimately approved) and moved to the build stage, the building itself has had a comprehensive makeover.

While the initial thinking had been that a bit of a patch up would do, the usual thing happened when you take on a typical local-authority-owned building that’s been far out and out of mind for the main business of the Council, and which has had the bare minimum done to keep it ticking over for any years – and it turned out that lots and lots of things needed work! There’s been a much more in depth effort at really getting it up to date, as our photos throughout this article – which were mostly taken late last year as the building work headed towards completion – show.

This will be an open plan office area on the top floor, housing Wandsworth’s housing and homeless outreach teams.

What we have now is pretty much a completely new building, in the shell of an old Victorian one. The exterior has seen the brickwork repaired, the stray cables and pipes removed, the roof and flashing repaired, and the parapet repaired and repainted. All the windows have been replaced, to get the building both warmer and far more sound proof than it was before (we can confirm that you can barely hear the traffic from the inside). It has been fully insulated, and had a complete top-to-bottom rewire, with all the services and utilities replaced, and the whole building brought up to modern fire safety standards. The work was led by Medport Global, whose Director Tunde Adewopo is rightly proud of the way this old building has been given a new lease of life.

One of the new short stay bedrooms, nearing completion

The ground floor houses the reception, and a large area that can accommodate appointments with specialists and meetings. There are two doors: one to the reception, and the other giving direct access to the upper floors. The next two floors are the residential bit of the hub: first floor has a living area, a communal kitchen, and some bedrooms, while up another floor there’ are several more bedrooms (the 11 bedrooms are mainly very small single rooms – but there are a handful that could accommodate doubles if needed). The top floor is staff-only, with a mixture of open plan workspaces, meeting rooms and offices; with a capacity of 15 or so it will house Wandsworth’s homelessness and rough sleeping teams.

So what happens now – how will this work? Who will the Hub house?

The way the hub will work is strictly by referral and appointment – both for meetings with support teams and experts (which will run only Monday to Friday between 9 and 5), and for placements in the residential accommodation. It is absolutely not a ‘bed for the night’ general hostel, the sort seen in city centres that offer shelter or a night – which has reassured some neighbours who were understandably concerned that that type of operation can attract far too many challenging characters for typical residential and edge-of-centre locations to be able to deal with. The Hub is a joint venture between Wandsworth and Richmond, with the capacity (and the bill) split in a 7:4 ratio between the two Boroughs; while the Hub will operate as a unified facility, responsibility for ultimate rehousing of – and ongoing support for – the ‘Richmond’ residents falls to Richmond rather than Wandsworth.

It’s also targeted at a pretty specific set of the homeless and rough-sleeper population: people who, with the right support, are ready to move to settled longer term accommodation – which could be in supported accommodation, the private rented sector, private leased provision, or whatever. It’s not aimed at chronic or ‘high need’ rough sleepers with serious drug or alcohol problems, or who are very unwell physically or mentally – to be taken on you need to be capable of moving on with the support the Hub can offer within a typical four-week placement. Put more bluntly, this means it’s not planning to fill up with the belligerent drunks and aggressive beggars readers will have seen thieving and threatening staff in local shops!

As an aside, it’s also not aimed at the women readers will have seen dropped off with near identical cardboard signs every morning on St John’s Hill (and as a side note – as we understand it they are very likely to have been trafficked and be under some duress, but they are not homeless). Undocumented migrants, no matter how vulnerable, are also out of scope: residents need ‘recourse to public funds‘ to be able to receive Hub support, regardless of Wandsworth’s Borough of Sanctuary status.

There might very occasionally be a wider population housed, as the basement can be activated as a short term urgent shelter when temperatures plunge and the Severe Weather Protocol is activated, which requires Councils across the country to find somewhere indoors for everyone to stay no matter what, no questions asked. But the Hub’s basement is a last resort, and far from the best option available – so unlikely to be used for this much.

What happens when someone arrives at the Hub?

It’s a peer-led service : many of those helping its clients have themselves experienced homelessness and mental health challenges, or their impact on their peers. Each resident will have a housing officer to explore suitable options, and a support worker responsible for their welfare. Staff will aim to find long-term housing for residents to move on to, although they could also explore other alternative short-term options like temporary accommodation. If residents need, for example, to see a drug & alcohol worker as part of the process that appointment will be in the Hub rather than seeing them sent off to St John’s Hill or further field. recognising that a lot of the rough sleeping community are already a bit traumatised, the aim is also that they don’t need to repeat the whole of what has happened so far over and over again at each new appointment with four or five different bits of the Council.

Prospective residents will be booked in for assessment – with a check on immigration status / leave to remain / recourse to public funds, then a review of past housing history (have they managed tenancies before? What locations have they been in?) – sometimes with the ability to cross refer between local authorities. The management are well aware that residents will often be coming from complicated and sometimes traumatic situations and wont exactly share everything all at once; these processes are part of a softer chat – to help people feel sufficiently relaxed and comfortable to share what the Hub needs to help people.

As part of the wraparound support to get people back on track and back in the system, support available on site will include the Central London Homeless Inclusion team, as well as part time staff from the NHS rough sleeping and mental health programme (RAMHP) – including nurses and support workers. There will also be a part time consultant psychiatrist, and GP advice and sessions from St Georges NHS Trust.

The ultimate aim is to work out a personal housing plan with the individual. The Council has a maximum of 56 days to decide if there’s a duty to house someone, and there are a mix of options at its disposal – including the options of referral to low, medium, or high-need supported accommodation (the Council has ten sites around the Borough that house 6-8 residents each), nominations to social housing, or to private sector leases (essentially a two-year ‘training flat’ to help people get used to managing all aspects of a tenancy).

High-risk residents won’t be welcome

Part of the initial assessment process is also the Hub undertaking a risk assessment on prospective new residents, and the management have made clear to neighbours that high-risk prison releases, and sex offenders, will not be suitable for the shared living arrangements it can provide. It will be equipped to accommodate people with drug and alcohol challenges, although neither drink nor drugs are allowed on the premises, and – conscious of the risk of these activities being pushed to nearby quiet corners – part of the Hub’s good neighbour agreement, and the good management procedure, will see a prohibition on residents congregating outside the hub. There is a ban on begging, shoplifting, and causing a nuisance in the vicinity, and Hub staff will patrol nearby streets twice a day specifically to check that this rule is being upheld. Obviously there’s always a bit of a challenge in working out what local problems may be related to the Hub and what isn’t; the aim is for a kind of collective ownership on things that may be Hub or wider neighbourhood problems, and the management will try to work out what is most serious and relevant for quick action at the Hub.

There will also be a minimum of two staff on the premises at all times. There’s no curfew for residents – not least as that can lead to people kicking off outside if they are locked out! – instead, the night staff will manage any late night challenges, on the grounds that this is better for both Hub residents and their neighbours.

A high-stakes move, close to Council elections

Wandsworth is committed to hosting a monthly meeting for residents, which Aydin is chairing – made up of housing officers, the street homeless service, adult social services, community safety and public health representatives from Wandsworth, as well as the Hub’s partner agencies – the safer neighbourhood team, SPEAR, St Mungo’s and the NHS Trust. If you are a local resident, business owner, faith or community group, or local media, you’re welcome to join and we suggest you do. The comms have been a little bit wobbly: despite some mail shots aimed at the streets nearby, some people have been missed out, or found out about meetings rather late in the day (the aim is to have four weeks’ notice; at the time of writing the next Forum is scheduled for the 12th February). If you’re one of these, contact thehub@richmondandwandsworth.gov.uk to be added to the circulation list for the next meeting. There’s an open offer to neighbours who would be willing to support the Hub with volunteering – including befriending and mentoring Hub residents.

It’s fair to say, a lot of people have been won round by Aydin and the Council since the project’s difficult early days. This was very much in evidence at a recent public forum where views were rather more pragmatic and balanced than previously. Gary Clements, the manager of the Assessment Hub and no stranger to the challenges of homelessness, has also emerged as a reassuringly pragmatic and seasoned hand in charge of the operation, and has clearly inspired a good degree of confidence in the residents forum meetings.

The specific challenge of Mysore Road

Not everyone is convinced. Residents of the small block of flats on Mysore Road, right next to the Hub, have been especially concerned about an uptick in all sorts of antisocial behaviour in the central courtyard, pictured above and below. It’s one of those awkward 1970s-era layouts that was maybe built in more innocent times: it has no gates and is open to anyone – but it’s also almost completely out of sight to passers-by, with lots of hidden away spaces, as well as ground floor flats. This maybe owes something to a determined effort to crack down on some of these behaviours nearer the station, which may have displaced activity towards to the edges of the town centre.

The secluded courtyard at the centre of the flats on Mysore Road

Clearly recent issues here are nothing to do with the only-just-opened-today Hub – but the residents’ fears are very understandable, and they do underline the underlying challenge of being an estate with uncontrolled access to a secluded areas is inherently challenging, with obvious potential to become the quiet out-of-sight area of choice for residents who stick to the ‘no drugs on site’ policy but who still have addictions to deal with. There’s a desire to close the currently unrestricted access to the inner courtyard and parking area, but this is hard to do: it costs money to install and operate, and a clear majority of estate residents need to agree to changes to arrangements. In other words – whether there are problems at Mysore Road or not, may well end up as the real test of how the good neighbour policy works out in practice (and residents – do get in touch to let us know).

The un-gated entrance to the Mysore Road flats

The Hub opens today

The Hub officially opened today, the 9th February, for appointments. It’s a soft launch, and the first full time residents won’t be moving in until next Monday – with phased filling up of the 11 bedrooms. In a few weeks it will be fully in use, and we will start to see how it operates – and within 2-3 months we may start to see some of the results in terms of rough sleepers (hopefully) moving on to more settled accommodation.

Ultimately the Hub approach is a bold move, and an attempt to try and address a really knotty and persistent problem that affects communities all over the country, and help some of the most vulnerable people in the community. And on the face of it, with a committed team behind it, it has a good chance of delivering results – maybe this will be the model that other Councils pivot towards.

And in some regards, things have to go well for the Council – as it’s not long until the local elections, and there are some areas near the Hub that are looking to be tightly fought; if the Council is seen to have unleashed a chaotic mess on Lavender Hill this will be a Big Political Problem! Conservative councillors were unhappy at being bounced on the Hub plans along with everyone else, and while they could by and large see the logic in the plans, felt that the initial process was a complete dog’s breakfast. They are currently broadly supporting the approach, but keeping a close eye on if the Council lives up to its promises and makes this work. Councillor Guy Humphries previously welcomed the planned residents forum so the council can ‘be more proactive in their discussions with the obviously understandably concerned residents and businesses nearby‘, and asked for reassurance the authority is ‘willing to be flexible and moderate or change plans if things aren’t working according to exactly how it is in reality’.

And maybe that’s the art of it: this is a big new project and of course there will be the odd slip up, not every resident will end up happily housed, not everyone will prove able to live with others in the Hub environment, not everyone will manage to keep addictions sufficiently under control. If the Council and management team work with residents and neighbours, adapts the approach where it needs tweaking, recognises where things go right and where they go wrong, and reacts accordingly, we ought to get to a decent place.

We will, as ever, be keeping you posted on how this goes.

The Local Residents Forum meeting on the Rough Sleeping Hub

If you’re coming to this new, the story so far’s here: initial article describing the plans, follow-up article summarising the concerns raised & proposals for how the plan could be improved, and third article reporting on what was shared at the public meeting. Some further posts covered a lull in development, followed by the updated planning application, which more or less led to what has now been built. Don’t hesitate to contact us to let us know your experiences of the Hub; and contact thehub@richmondandwandsworth.gov.uk to be added to the circulation list for future meetings of the Residents’ Forum.

Lavender-hill.uk is a community site covering retail, planning and development  and local business issues, and sometimes wider issues like  transport, centered on the Lavender Hill area in Battersea. Recent topics include neverending water leaks, plans to smarten up Queenstown Road, the horribly messy redevelopment of the Westbury Estate near Wandsworth Road station, the barely-known Georgian orangery hiding in plain sight near Clapham Common, and a big investigation in to why Battersea Power Station’s cranes mysteriously disappeared. We sometimes also post more detailed articles on local history.  If you found this interesting you may want to sign up to receive new posts (for free, unsubscribe anytime) by email.

Posted in Crime & security, Housing, Politics | 2 Comments