An plan is emerging to build a block of flats on an unusually awkward scrap of land on Wandsworth Road. It’s currently home to a garage, as well as an unofficial late night club, on St Rule Street next to Heathbrook School. The site currently houses a ramshackle series of corrugated iron structures, which are no beauties, that seem to have been put up in some haste in the 1940s after the Victorian-era terrace houses previously on the site were destroyed by German air raids (which fortunately left the rather elegant and spacious school building next door undamaged). The garage has been a general purpose repair shop for many years, while the separate venue behind has a long and complicated history that led to a closure order by Croydon Magistrates Court in September last year. It was described by the police at the time as an illegal nightclub that was ‘linked to a number of unlicensed music events and antisocial behaviour’. The site looks set to become a six-storey block of 22 flats – with similar numbers of one-, two- and three-bedroom flats – as well as some general retail / commercial / office / light industrial space on the ground floor facing St Rule Street.

It’s not the first time there have been plans to develop the site. None of the earlier proposals led to anything actually being developed, but this one has been developed in much more detail – with a substantial and presumably expensive team involved covering everything from daylight and planning consultants, to companies brought in to advise on tree protection, acoustics and overheating – suggesting that this time the owners of the site are serious about actually building something on the site.

It’s a complicated bit of land to build on – quite narrow, with a school playground behind who are not keen on being directly overlooked – but who are also very understandably not keen on having a large blank brick wall facing their playground (as the fairly rudimentary design of the building just to the north currently does). The school works hard to maintain as an attractive space with lots of nature (including garden areas, animal habitats and many trees) and many different spaces for play and learning, so having something that is a suitable but also varied backdrop matters. The developers’ solution – which is visible in their artists’ impression below – has been to put access balconies for the flats at the school side, and a small open area at the ground floor, with the main windows facing out over St Rule Street.

There is also a slope along the length of the site, which the developers have handled by planning for the commercial unit at ground level to be slightly underground at the Wandsworth Road end, as shown below. The aim is to avoid the messy situation where ground floor flats face right on to the street so lack any privacy and tend to keep the blinds down all day – and also to ensure that there is not a net loss of commercial and employment space, though the sort of business that occupies this new space is very unlikely to be a garage

Developing the site also needs to not be done in a way that has a negative effect on neighbouring bits of land – including the adjacent petrol station and small freestanding Co-op supermarket – which may be redeveloped in the future. The developers have had to align the flats in a way that allows that site to maybe also accommodate flats in the future – without affecting the ability of either block to have decent light levels, which means there’s a large windowless wall next to the Co-op building that a future neighbouring building can go right next to.

There have clearly been some real headaches surrounding the tiny plot of land at the corner of St Rule Street and Wandsworth Road that accommodates a freestanding advertising hoarding, with a small garden in front looked after by the Heathbrook school pupils (shown in the above photo). In an ideal world the developer would just buy that plot and incorporate it, but that seems to not have been feasible. The Council doesn’t want to be stuck with the eyesore of the advertising hoarding forever, so has made it clear they want to ensure that the development doesn’t prevent that being built on in the future – and also that flats in the new building must not have their windows looking straight at the back of an advertising board! The developer says they are confident that that corner plot is unlikely to be redeveloped any time soon (“The Design Team have it on good authority that it is highly unlikely that the billboard site will be developed any time in the future. It should be noted that the area of the advertising billboard site is below 50 square metres, making the site itself difficult to develop.“), and has done what they can to adjust the flats to look around the hoarding – as shown in their diagram below where the awkward corner plot is in yellow – but this does seem a rather messy part of the plans overall.

All in all – this is a site that’s clearly ripe for redevelopment, and the principle of converting this site as flats isn’t controversial. We suspect there will be some neighbours who will be glad to see the back of the nightclub too, give the issues that have been seen while it was in operation. Keeping some form of local employment on site is also important, and the plans do this by reinstating a decent amount of ground floor commercial floor space. That said, this is a large block on a small site, which will cause various challenges including parking availability – and there’s little doubt that a six storey building (with extra bits above that height to accommodate lift towers and the like) will shade flats to the north which currently have good levels of sunlight, as well as reducing light in the school playground next door.

At the time of writing there have been some concerns expressed by neighbours, with five objections making arguments including that the development is too high, that it tries to fit too much on the site, that a smaller building should allow for some greenery along the street frontage, and that it’s not realistic to make no provision for parking – and one support comment noting that this would go some way to addressing a critical lack of housing, and that the site as it stands would be improved by some form of development. The Council aims to make a decision in mid-December on the plans. The details (and ways to contact the Council with concerns or support comments) are on Lambeth’s planning database, as application number 23/02944/FUL.

This is not the only big project coming to St Rule Street. The building sits right opposite part of the Westbury Estate, which is very gradually seeing a fairly comprehensive redevelopment of its own to demolish all the low-lying blue buildings and build a series of much higher and denser series of blocks, to replace the 89 flats in the existing estate with 89 new flats built to a more modern and spacious standard, and also create 181 new flats. There will be a net increase of 41 ‘affordable’ flats overall, with the rest of the increase being new flats for private sale (which will fund some of the cost of the redevelopment). That project will eventually see both sides of St Rule Street become quite densely built, as the old estate (designed by the same architects as the Cedars Road Estate, which we have written quite a detailed history of and which has aged rather better than the Westbury Estate) fades away.

This is part of our series of posts on planning issues in the area in and around Lavender Hill. You may also want to see our article about the ongoing redevelopment of the buildings at the corner of Wandsworth Road and Silverthorne Road, and our brief further update as the old Tearoom des Artistes has met the wrecking ball.