We’ve written before in some detail about the abandoned cluster of buildings at the junction of Wandsworth Road and North Street in Clapham. Once home to the Artesian Well & Lost Society, and before that to the Cafe des Artistes, the last few years have seen them become particularly run down: the owner gave up running them as bars after becoming embroiled in a series of license disputes, and they then changed hands a few times while being intermittently occupied by squatters and Property Guardians.

Both were ultimately bought local developer Marston Properties in 2016, a local firm responsible for quite a few developments in the Lavender Hill area. Marston knew this area well: they just happened to already own the Plough Brewery across the road (which they have converted to an office complex). The year before, in 2015, Marston had also bought the former Plough Inn next door to it – which had been trading as Mist on Rocks, under the same licensee as the Artesian Well and Lost Society. With these purchases, Marston found itself in the interesting and unusual position of owning four neighbouring buildings – three of them former licenses premises – so had quite an opportunity to reshape this bit of town. They got going on a comprehensive refit of the Mist on Rocks building at the very end of 2020, and have recently finished work – creating two flats on the upper levels, facilities for the business centre next door on the lower levels, and the ground floor currently up to let as a cafe that will be open to the public as well as to those working on the brewery office complex next door. It’s looking pretty decent – a nice touch is that the original windows and the pub tiling have been carefully restored.

The larger of the two properties currently in construction work, formerly Artesian Well, has been a pub of one form or another for most of its existence, and Marston plan to refurbish it to house a new gastropub at the ground floor and flats on the upper floors. It will be the only licensed premises remaining, where there were three. The building was stripped out quite early on, with the shell pictured below – but it’s only in the last few months that works have properly got going.

It’s now comprehensively covered in scaffolding – with works well underway. The construction work’s pretty substantial – a complete replacement of everything in the building other than the shell and the basic floor structure.

That said, there are no plans to change the exterior: the artists’ impression of what it will look like is shown below (which, to be frank, is about what it looks like now – but tidied up a bit)

The story’s a bit more complicated for the smaller white building next door. The planning extract below shows the planned layout of the new ground floor – which sees the old Artesian Well and Lost Society buildings joined together as a single property.

There’ll also be a small new building between the two, the one with the black front shown in the aerial view below, which will include some flats as well as the access stairwell to the upper level of both buildings.

The smaller Lost Society building isn’t remaining as a bar, but will instead be converting to an entirely residential use, creating 9 flats in all spread between the two buildings, with the entrance to all the flats being in what used to be the bar’s garden area. A maybe more surprising part of the proposals, in a conservation area, was that the building was to be completely demolished, and replaced with a similar looking but brand new structure. The planning application reported that the years of rather limited maintenance hadn’t been kind to the building (whose front wall was indeed noticeably cracked), and it was in a rather poor state that made its conversion to anything like modern building standards not cost effective.

The building works kept the old building in place for longer than we expected, as substantial amounts of material were extracted from the old building and extensive digging took place. We did wonder at one stage if the building – or parts of it – had maybe had a partial eleventh-hour reprieve. But then the whole lot rapidly disappeared…

…leaving nothing but a large gap in the terrace. It’s a shame to lose this particularly old building with a long history, maybe going all the way back to the 16th century when it was a barn on the Clapham Manor estate and would have been on an isolated hilltop. After stints as a as a motorcycle showroom and garage, a tyre depot and an antique emporium “called Ageless” – whiel also being said to be haunted by the ghost of Rose Devereaux, a flower seller who died in tragic circumstances at the turn of the century – it became the Tearoom des Artistes in 1982, and was for many years quite a unique venue. For those of us who never saw it in its prime, Bill Hicks’ recollections as well as the article comemnts are well worth a read –

The Tearooms des Artistes… was a rare survivor of a genuine late-60s style alternative meeting place space. Part bar, part cheap veggie restaurant, part art-gallery, nightclub, performance space – a veritable mini-arts lab for the shrinking bohemian populations of SWs 8 and 4 and 11. Somewhere you could sit and read and talk most of the day, or just find a dark corner to hide in. Occupying what felt like farmyard buildings (and it did apparently incorporate much of a 16th century barn and -according to some accounts – slaughterhouse), with low-ceilinged rooms and passageways going off in directions, plus a garden area if you were adventurous, creaking floorboards and furniture, it seemed, sourced from skips across all 35 boroughs.

As he commented when we last wrote about this cluster of buildings –

“I used to spend good time at the Café des Artistes, in the 1980s it was a fabulously anarchic place, and it remained so up til the 90s. Then it became Lost Society. But the building was – and it still is – an amazing relic of the pre-suburban era, when Clapham was a village deep in countryside. You sensed its age, especially upstairs. I loved this place and wish to god some sort of preservation order had been made, forbidding its falling into the hands of property developers, however “sensitive” they might seem.”

The new building (pictured below) will look distinctly similar to the old one (above) but – being new – allows rather more practical layouts for some of the flats. But there’s no doubt that we’re probably losing the oldest and most historically interesting building of the set here.

That said – generally speaking this looks like a thoughtful and careful treatment of this site – and Marston’s decent work on the Plough Inn opposite generally bodes well for the development. They have previously restored and let a pub (in Fulham) and we suspect they won’t have too much trouble letting this new premises, even though it’s pretty unlikely the one remaining commercial unit at this crossroads will ever regain the level of crowds and action it saw at its peak as Artesian Well, let alone as the Tearoom des Artistes. Though after so many years of years of dereliction and decay, it’s good to see this cluster of buildings finally start to come back to life.

If this was of interest, our previous article about this bit of town goes in to the history of the Plough Brewery opposite, and also explores the controversial plans to redevelop parts of North Street Mews to the south of this site, as well as the large and rather messy house that was previously the Silverthorne Cabs office to the east.