Everyone likes a good ‘before & after’ property makeover, and the building on the corner of Queenstown Road and Battersea Park road has been needing one for a while! A rather manky-looking building, it would logically have been absorbed by the development next to it, Taylor Wimpey’s Battersea Exchange – but no price was ever agreed and so it stayed separate as that development continued around it. It has now changed hands – and the new owner of 179 Battersea Park Road has given it a long-overdue sprucing up.

The windows have been replaced, including the ground floor that had lost its windows years ago. The whole building has seen a repaint, which has lost the original brick but has given it a bit more visual consistency. The balcony had been collapsing, and one bit seemed to be held together with a few metal struts; this has now also seen some repairs. The buddleia trees that were growing in the brickwork have been removed, the once-smart stone carvings on the first floor balcony and second storey window surrounds have regained some of their original style, and the battered and bruised facades have been patched and filled.

This had been a very sad and unloved building. It was so mucky-looking that the tenants at one stage added a banner saying ‘This is not a public rubbish site !!!‘ in a seemingly only partially successful attempt to discourage people from adding to the mattresses, boxes and general detritus around the site. The shop on the ground floor felt the brunt of the decline of the building, as it just didn’t look clean or in any way welcoming; the building also contained three flats on the upper levels and a basement used for storage, whose main access was via a basement hatch in he shop.

One detail we like in the renovation work is that one of the very few Space Invaders in Battersea, on a ground floor window frame of the building, has been preserved! One of the first businesses we ever wrote about was Sendero Coffee on Lavender Hill, whose second branch is right next to this building; we suspect they’ll be pleased to have something that doesn’t look like it’s full of rats and about to fall down next door.

There’s a small outside space that used to be full of wheelie bins and flytipped rubbish, but which could – with some more work – become a useful space for a business to use, or alternatively with a bit of demolition of the structure next to the pavement to get a bit more light down to that level, could allow the rather hidden away basement courtyard to be opened up and that floor of the building used as a fourth flat. The long-lost windows of that floor have been replaced, which does suggest some scope for this.

This building is part of the original Park Town Estate, the huge planned estate that ran all the way from here to Clapham Common. It started out as a hugely ambitious plan, and then the railways arrived and chopped it up and made it all rather less grand, and the later stages were aimed at a more middle-of-the-market set of buyers. There are others of similar design scattered around the neighbourhood, including several opposite Queenstown Road Station and a few much further south around St Mary’s Church.

One small detail is that the previous owners put in a whole series of applications to install a vast advertising hoarding on the site, typically via schemes where the owner puts a scaffolding for a year or more, and leases the advertising space to a separate company that essentially pays for the scaffolding and the site. Wandsworth’s planners weren’t convinced by these proposals, quite rightly in our view – they essentially lead to a vast illuminated eyesore. Because adverts make money, these schemes also give a dubious incentive for developers to keep the scaffolding up and obstructing the pavement for years, rather than the weeks or months needed to complete any works (and these works were done in hardly any time at all). There’s one currently still in the planning appeal system at the time of writing.

Overall while it’s not a top-of-the-range effort – the new windows used are towards the more budget end of the market! – this is a generally solid property restoration effort that has made this a much happier and healthier looking building, and – thanks to its hugely prominent location on one of Battersea’s busiest junctions – has made the whole area look a bit more welcoming. The ground floor in particular will be a much better unit than it was before.

179 Battersea Park Road, London SW8 4LR, where we’ll presumably see newly-upgraded flats and a shop unit for sale or to rent in the near future. If you’re interested in obscure local property news in and around Lavender Hill in Battersea you could do worse than see our other articles on planning and development issues. Our occasional much more in depth local history posts are here. And this is where you can get in touch or receive posts by email.