The lost community & uncertain future of Culvert Road

Posted on February 27, 2022 by David

It’s best avoided after dark. A winding footbridge, with suspicious yellow puddles and high walls either side that are hard to see over, followed by a big and somewhat muddy yard with stacks of flytipped debris, where you’re completely on your own, a long, dark, narrow tunnel with no pavement, and a final section that smells of pigeons.

No-one likes the bit of Culvert Road between the railways. But it wasn’t always like this – and it turns out there’s quite an interesting history to this forgotten corner of Battersea. For starters – there are no houses there now. But as the old map below shows, there used to be 21 houses here!

A small community lived here for nearly a century, in neat terrace houses along both Culvert Road (the road that heads on through the tunnel) and Culvert Place (the road that heads east, before diving back under the railway arches to the Parkfield Industrial Estate – home to Caffe Nero’s UK roastery, which incidentally is why the whole of Lavender Hill occasionally smells of roasting coffee beans in the morning).

Victorian researcher Charles Booth famously walked round the whole of London and mapped out the relative wealth of the inhabitants, with a view to identifying where the poorest and most marginalised populations lived. He visited Culvert Road in June 1899, accompanied by Police Constable Edwards (of District 36 – Battersea East), and as his colour-coded map above shows, he reckoned that Culvert Road’s residents were ‘Mixed – some comfortable and others poor’ (about the middle of the scale overall), while Culvert Place’s inhabitants were “Poor. 18 to 21 shillings a week for a moderate family”, which suggested the district was slightly less well off than the Shaftesbury Estate to the south.

The photo above – via the ever resourceful members of the ‘Battersea Pictures’ Facebook group – shows two of the houses & several of those who lived there. This was a happy little community by all accounts, that just happened to be in the middle of a series of railway lines. The photo below, taken slightly further along Culvert Road in front of another set of now-demolished houses, shows much of the street celebrating VE day.

The houses between the railway tracks on Culvert Place were also known for having a small memorial to the many loved ones that the small cluster of families living there had lost in the war. This stood out among memorials, for its modesty – a simple wooden affair – and for the loving care that it received from the community for over 20 years.

And it wasn’t just the terrace houses who brought this area to life, as the area between the railway the western end of the land was also home to a long established Romany Gypsy community – as pictured below in a photo taken in 1900. The 1911 census lists members of the Winter, Lee, Wheeler, Smith, Botton and Anderson families as residents, as well as the Mills who owned the yard.

The photo below is one of a collection assembled by the Romany & Traveller Family History Society, one of whose members was passed a few photos of the yard and residents by a friend who was a documentary film maker who had researched a possible film about the Mills family, who had been in the area for some time and had an involvement with the local boxing club.

The society put out a call for information about the old yard and the family, not being quite certain where it was in Battersea but assuming it had long since been redeveloped like many other similar sites that were once scattered through Battersea and Wandsworth, and to their surprise (given the amount of change this little corner of Battersea has seen) Tony Mills promptly got in touch confirming that the yard is still there many decades later – and still owned by the Mills family! It’s tucked away behind what is now Culvert Tyres, and is still very much in use, also being home to The Field Kitchen Company (who hire high-quality mobile kitchens to events). Mills Yard was just one of the many parts of Wandsworth’s rich Romany Gypsy & Irish Traveller heritage – with the map below showing many of the other now-lost sites around the Borough.

We didn’t draw this map, it’s from Summerstown182, which is one of the other sites we consistently recommend – and which really puts our occasional efforts at local history reporting to shame! They have just run a walk visiting many of these sites, to explore and celebrate this little-known part of Battersea’s past – the photo in the flyer below is of course taken from Culvert Road bridge, albeit not directly facing Mills Yard.

But this little community between the tracks was about to be torn apart. The houses were all, we understand, demolished by the Council between 1968 and 1972. Exactly why remains a bit of a mystery, although there was a deliberate policy at the time of clearing out ‘old’ housing – especially when it hadn’t been upgraded with the modern kitchens and bathrooms expected at the time – and replacing it with the giant estates that were very much in vogue. We suspect that this little cluster of houses was just thought to be too isolated, and too close to the railway.

Culvert Road and Culvert Place weren’t the only bits of Battersea to meet the wrecking ball. Another set of similarly railway-centered houses a short walk along the railway met a similar fate, and became what is now known as Banana Park. But while Banana Park has gone on to become a reasonably successful green space, no-one can really say that the destruction of Culvert Place improved matters: the contrast with the same spot today – pictured above – is quite marked, and unfortunately it’s all become bit of a mess. The footbridge & tunnel – technically known as “Poupart’s Crossing” – is too indirect, narrow, and hidden away to really feel safe at night, and having a load of corrugated iron structures and rutted paving along the route does nothing to help the sense of abandonment around the place.

It used to be even worse: the tunnel was created as a private access route to what was, at the time, a large market garden owned by Samuel Poupart in what is now the Shaftesbury Estate, but the southern set of railway lines were for many years crossed by a level crossing; which were so busy that they had to be staffed by a gatekeeper. When the Shaftesbury Estate was built the railways rather grudgingly built a footbridge, but it was a cheap and flimsy affair – five feet wide at and with steps that were too steep. Soon after this mediocre bridge was opened, a 1877 survey measured 4,372 adults and 1,725 children a day crossing the bridge; 420 people an hour – which was hugely overcrowding it with frequent accidents. A combined effort by the railway inspectorate, the Battersea Vestry, the Metropolitan Board of Works and the London County Council eventually managed to get the current bridge built, at public expense, in 1892 (and it was rebuilt in the same layout in) 1945 – and while better than what came before, this rather unappealing route across 400 feet of railway lands is still a significant barrier between North and South Battersea.

For many years, the larger of the two areas of cleared land was used as a store area by Metro Waste. Metro’s yard was always somewhat disorganised affair, overgrown at the edges, but with a substantial amount of space overall including no fewer than seven railway arches under the main railway, and two more miniature arches under the ramp up to the footbridge. These images from Geraldeve, the letting agent show how the yard actually runs under the railway through the arches, and continues on the other side.

Metro Waste’s lease has recently ended, and the landlord has set about tidying the whole place up with a view to finding a new tenant. The photo below shows the yard from the footbridge, now that it has had a major clearout.

A proper fence has been put up around the site, replacing the previous ‘corrugated iron and scaffold poles’ assembly with something a bit more secure and somewhat tidier, and new roller shutters have been fitted to the railway arches. A vast amount of buddleia has been cleared away, and works are underway to level the ground.

It’s a huge space – with 11,789 square feet of arches, as well as 39,743 square feet of outdoor space! It’s likely to be quite in demand, as the sort of parking / delivery / vehicle storage dept that is becoming rarer and rarer in inner London. The landlord is also installing three-phase power and plans to pave the whole surface as well. It’ll be interesting to see who leases this – with an eclectic mix of neighbours including the Caffé Nero roastery, a large number of ‘dark kitchens’, motor repair shops and Chesneys almost any commercial or industrial use could fit in here; provided they don’t need lorries to large to fit through the rather slim tunnel.

But while the new tenants, whoever they are, are bound to modernise the place further, there is one set of people who’d rather like to preserve the rather down at heel nature of Culvert Place: Film makers! Because this motley set of backstreets and railway arches has had far more than its fair share of film appearances over the years.

Maybe the one that makes the best use of the area is Night Ferry, which was filmed in 1977, five years after the houses were demolished. The screenshots above and below are a few of the large collection on Reelstreets, which show how the railways, the roads and the arches were used extensively – in these shots Engin Eshref (yellow top – working in a small tea stall) and Graham Fletcher-Cook spot the film’s villains hiding a stolen Egyptian mummy in the odd-looking railway arch right next to the tunnel.

The stills below show the stolen Mummy later being brought out of the arch and loaded in an ambulance, as they try to smuggle it out of London.

The rather curious-looking Arch 1 – with a miniature arch within the larger arch (which seems to be unique – we’ve never seen any other like this) was clearly in semi regular use as a film location for dodgy dealings, as it also features in 1998 classic A Fish Called Wanda, as the hideout place where the team hides the diamonds – here a getaway car enters the arch:

And almost uniquely, A Fish Called Wanda also gives us a shot of the interior of the arch, where we see Jamie Lee Curtis & Kevin Kline in a space looking much as you would expect an unloved railway arch in the late 1980s to look –

This spot has also featured in Villain, Minder, The Saint, numerous episodes of The Bill, and many more – more often than not in the context of some sort of Heist, and always as a suitably atmospheric and run down spot for dodgy activities! Arch 1 belongs to Network Rail, and according to an obscure list Wandsworth occasionally publish on business rates that shows which commercial properties are unoccupied, it and its neighbour been empty since February 2011.

Now that a large part of Culvert Place looks set to be converted in to a modern delivery depot, both its days as a tight knit community, and its days as a run down spot for stolen goods to be stashed away in movies, may be behind it. But we have to say – what started out as a short post on an unusual piece of land to let, turned in to a rather more interesting story of how Battersea has changed over the last century – and even our quick look has shown there’s more to Culvert Road than we expected.

It seems Culvert Road hasn’t been photographed much before the 1970s, but it’d be a shame for its past to be forgotten. If you have any more photos of the area when it was still lived in, that you’d be happy for us to publish here – or detail to add on its history – please get in touch.

Posted in Curiosities, Environment, Local history, Street by street, Transport | 13 Comments

Revealed: The first two new businesses replacing Debenhams in Clapham Junction

Posted on February 19, 2022 by David

We’ve written at some length on the redevelopment of Arding and Hobbs building at Clapham Junction, following the collapse of previous tenant Debenhams. The plans will see the upper levels converted to offices, with a two-storey rooftop structure replacing the various service buildings that used to be on the roof, and the ground floor and basement split in to smaller retail units (more on the plans here).

W.Real Estate, the owner of the building (who were happy to discuss their plans with us and the Clapham Junction Action Group in some detail) appointed Knight Harwood as the main contractor to deliver the project, and to their credit have forged ahead in the midst of the pandemic and got the construction well underway: anyone who has been in T K Maxx recently (who are set to remain open more or less throughout) has probably heard the sound of some fairly heavy duty construction coming from the rest of the building. The scaffolding is also up around the building, with the awning over the pavement (which was not part of the original design) likely to be removed in the near future.

W.RE have also released some new images of the planned interiors, shown here – with the former first floor (latterly Debenhams’ mens formalwear section) opened up as a modern workspace – shown at the top of this article. And a view inside the under-construction rooftop pavilion structure, which is a timber framed structure in a relatively modern style, designed to create a large and open workspace. To help understand what this photo’s showing – this view is standing on the roof of what was Debenhams (which was previously a mess of various small buildings, water tanks and air conditioning units), looking along St Johns Road, with the cupola at the corner of Lavender Hill just about visible in the middle of the picture.

W.RE appointed Green and Partners s their agent to let the retail part of the new development – a company that has a fair bit of local experience, for example selling no fewer than ten shops further along St John’s Road back in 2015. And they’ve clearly made good progress – as with building works still at a fairly early stage, the first two tenants for the new development have already been identified.

The first is Albion & East Limited, who run a collection of neighbourhood bars, described as “Open all-day & late-night with early-morning coffee, brunch & hot-desking in the day to cocktails, wood-fired pizza & DJs at night and everything in-between”. This would be their seventh venue, with locations already open in Hackney, Crouch End, Old Street and (opening soon) Ealing. In Brixton they also run both Canova Hall and Cattivo, which offer someshat similar combinations of cocktail bar / coffee / pasta and wood-fired pizza / gin distillery, and are on two sides of the same road; with bread supplied from their own bakery in the Old Street branch.

Albion & East have taken on ‘Unit A’, which is the corner directly opposite the Falcon, more or less half of the old beauty section of Debenhams – shown in the plans to the right. They also have a small section of the pavement outside that is owned by W.RE and counts as part of the premises – though the toilets and kitchen facilities are ingeniously down the stairs in a more central part of the basement that would otherwise be quite hard to let. They have applied for a fairly late license, from 8am to 12:30 (and 2:30am on weekends).

The second tenant, in ‘Unit B’ – which is the next one along St John’s Road (after which there will be the entrance to the offices above and then the existing T.K.Maxx) – is completely different – and of course, it’s a branch of Amazon Fresh. These stores are Amazon’s big new push in to selling food, and they work on a ‘just walk out’ basis: you need an Amazon account to enter, scanning a code at the entrance. In store technology automatically detects when you take products from (or return them to) the shelves and keep track of them in a virtual basket. When you finish shopping, you can leave the store – receiving a receipt and your Amazon account is charged. Although these stores do not have checkouts, the premises (which will be open from 7am to 11pm) will have employees, assisting customers, doing stock replenishment, and managing access to the age-restricted section of the store with alcohol and other restricted produce.

It’s no secret that Amazon (who have already opened a branch in Wandsworth) have been keen to open in Clapham Junction, and there had previously been local rumours that they were taking on the former Byron at 53 Northcote Road. That building is certainly having some fairly substantial works, to increase the internal area and sort out the general layout. But that is instead set to become a branch of Danish bakery chain Ole & Steen – with the plans illustrated below.

We’re not too sure what this means for Whole Foods Market just around the corner, which is also owned by Amazon (and which – as we reported some time back – has also been extended). We suspect it;s a different product for a different market, and both will carry on as usual – but we’ll keep you posted if we hear otherwise. Update (March 2023): Amazon pulled out, as part of a slowing down of their UK expansion plans! The unit is up for letting again. Read the full details in this more recent post.

Unit C is the one that opens on the Lavender Hill, that does not yet have a confirmed tenant. And it’s a huge unit – with a lift connecting the smallish ground floor area to a vast area in the basement. This could become all sorts of things – and there are quite a few businesses, like Decathlon, who really like this sort of premises because of the larger areas available at below-average cost – but we would not be at all surprised to see a gym take up this space. Update (March 2023): Thanks to one of our readers, we can confirm that this unit has indeed now been let to a gym: Third Space will be taking it over, and in an interesting move they will be taking space on three levels: the basement, a small section of the ground floor, and some of the first floor – adding up to a huge 28,000 square feet! As well as a wet spa and fully equipped open gym space, Third Space will be opening a reformer Pilates, hot yoga, high-intensity training and cycle studio.

And of course, the main event is the five floors of office space above. There’s a healthy interest in office space outside the centre of London at the mlmemt, we we’ve reported on recently – but details of Arding & Hobbs’ future occupiers remain under wraps for now. We’ll keep you posted if we hear more – but for now, it;s good to see this project forging ahead, and we’re reasonably impressed by W.RE’s early success in signing up new occupiers.

Posted in Arding & Hobbs, Business, Food & drink, Planning, Retail | 9 Comments

The 1998 Motorcycle Murders on Lavender Hill

Posted on February 6, 2022 by David

This week 24 years ago on Lavender Hill, about 1,700 people were at a Rockers Reunion concert at Battersea Arts Centre when a feud between two motorbike gangs took a dramatic turn – and ended up in a brutal double murder. The gangs in question were the Hatchet Crew (an Essex chapter of the Hells Angels) and the Outcasts. Their relationship had until then been fairly peaceful – but there were growing tensions about who was the dominant gang, tensions that were about to explode. The Outcasts were gaining members, and and about six months before they had tried to integrate The Lost Tribe gang from Hertfordshire – which would have made them equal in size to the Hells Angels. The Hells Angels responded by making the Lost Tribe honorary members – but by now, American branches of the Hells Angels were pushing the UK side to resist these rival groups.

And an otherwise unremarkable gig in Battersea was where it all came to a head. The event had a good number of Outcast attendees (including some of the security) and it had been going well – until a group of about 40 Hells Angels who had infiltrated the event approached the dancefloor and launched an oganised and brutal attack. The ringleaders reportedly came equipped with microphone headsets and walked through the crowd spotting Outcasts, pointing out targets to the rest of the group.

But while chaos ensued on the dancefloor, the murders would be outside. Keith Armstrong, who had one leg and was known as Flipper, was parking his bike in Theatre Street down the side of Battersea Arts Centre when he was attacked by five or six men with an axe, iron bars, coshes and at least one knife; he was stabbed between four and eight times in the abdomen and left leg, and his lung was punctured. His friend Malcolm St Clair, known as Mal, tried to help, but was heavily outnumbered – so when he was attacked with a hammer and an axe he also collapsed and died on the spot. A witness said that they saw one of his attackers walk off calmly and droving off in a Volvo – so calmly that he even wrote down the number plate. Several others were wounded but survived; Flipper was rushed to hospital, but succumbed to a heart attack that evening.

Witnesses said that the Hells Angels involved in the attack had appeared calm and pleased with what they had done. One of them was heard to say ‘I got the bastard. I got him. I did him.’ And with over 1,000 people at the event, there were plenty of people who had seen what happened (both in the gangs and the general public), and dozens of arrests were made. But there was such fear of retaliation at the time that few dared testify in court, and when the judge declined to anonymity to those who would testify (and in one case, a witness’ identify was accidentally revealed), witnesses quickly faded away, with the cases being dropped. The vice-president of the Essex chapter of the Hells Angels was eventually convicted for organising the attack, and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, with the judge saying ‘You took an active part in conspiring to cause grievous bodily harm, a conspiracy which led to the death of two men. In truth they were executed in a manner that was as ruthless as it was arrogant.’ The prosecution said that the attack was brutal, planned and premeditated – and aimed at making the Hells Angels the main bikers gang in the country. But no one was ever convicted for either of the murders.

The Battersea incident was a dramatic step up in what had until then been a low key turf war, and it kicked off a violent nationwide feud between the gangs that continued for years, with shootings, arson and attacks, backed by an impressive array of weaponry. Nearly a decade later, in 2007 Hells Angel Gerry Tobin would be shot dead on the M40, with seven Outcasts convicted over his murder. For those with an interest in this largely forgotten part of Lavender Hill’s history, Melanie McGrath’s contemporary article Riders on the Storm is a thoughtful and much more detailed account of the fateful night in 1998, and the wider culture of the biker gangs.

But Mal and Flipper are not forgotten, and last week saw a large group of Outcasts, with an impressive set of motorbikes, assemble early on Saturday morning at Battersea Arts Centre to pay tribute to their fallen comrades. The sign post where Mal died always has several small tributes attached to it, and for a few weeks after the anniversary, like every year, it also has a wreath in their memory.

Posted in Local history, Street by street | 1 Comment

An unusual new house for the Shaftesbury Estate

Posted on January 8, 2022 by David

We regularly write about interesting and planning applications – and this one on Heathwall Street below Battersea Arts Centre certainly makes a change from the usual run of bi-fold doors and mansard loft extensions. The site is currently a row of six garages on Heathwall Street, and the plans are to knock down five of them and build a two-bedroom house that has at least a passing ressemblance to row of garages.

It’s obviously a complicated and unusual place to want to build a house! Two of the four walls look directly in to private gardens (so no windows allowed there), the third adjoins a garage that is owned by someone else (so not part of the development), and the fourth looks directly on to the pavement. Some of the terrace houses on Elsley Road behind the development are also listed buildings, which limits what the developers can do around them (and as we’ve posted on before – extensions in the Shaftesbury Estate can be complicated!). The developers’ approach is to make the few windows facing the road quite high level (as shown above), but also to create a large notch that is set back from the road, to make a fairly generous internal courtyard lined with large windows that provide light around the house but also provide some degree of privacy.

The ground floor includes two bedrooms, as well as a one-car garage – and the developers also plan to dig a basement level, shown in the perspective diagram of the site below, to substantially increase the space.

The basement level (whose floorplan is shown below) includes most of the living space, with big windows facing in to the lower level of the courtyard / garden. The house is respectably large at 1,300 square feet (about the same as a typical Shaftesbury Estate house) and the developers aim for it to have a modern design, with plans for lots of glass around the courtyard, and a mostly open plan layout – using brick, wood and polished concrete floors. The plans will lead to a small increase in the overall height of the building, compared to the existing garages. In theory, there will be some greenery at ground level in the form of integrated plant pots along the street side of the courtyard that can accommodate a hedge (though as we have seen elsewhere, such as the flats on Taybridge Road or on Avery Walk, plans for greenery included in planning applications are rarely delivered in practice – so in reality we’re maybe more likely to see a fence.

Unusually, this is not the first time these proposals have been in the planning system – as more or less the same plans were put forward (and approved) in both 2014 and in 2018, in both cases the permission timed out before the building work was started. In 2017 the developers also applied for permission for a larger variation of the scheme, with two storeys above ground (shown below), but this approach – which would substantially affect the houses behind and the street as a whole – was refused.

Now it’s fair to say that having already let the permission lapse twice without building anything, the developers here don’t seem to be in a rush to get shovels in the ground. We can also surmise that having got planning permission twice before, it is likely that they will be approved again! Plans for the site have previously been a bit controversial, with objections to the application on several grounds including that the design was bland and not really appropriate for a conservation area; but above all linked to the challenges of actually building the building and the likelihood that this could affect neighbours – including concerns that building the house would require the destruction of some of neighbours gardens, concerns about whether the developers’ assessments of the light impact on gardens and neighbouring properties were correct, including trees right next to the current garages; that the building seemed vulnerable to flooding; and that the garages weren’t as unused as was maybe implied so their loss would harm the area.

Planners approved the previous more-or-less-identical plans partly on the grounds that they were only a small change in overall scale of development and an improvement in appearance compared to the garages (which is hard to argue with), and that the overall scale of change was small – but they did apply several conditions including the reinstatement of pavements and parking spaces in front of the building at the developers’ expense, and various design, sustainability and waste management issues to ensure that the impact of the development was minimised. As ever, if you’re interested you can see the detailed plans (and, if you wish, make a comment for the planners to consider) – by visiting Wandsworth’s planning website and searching for planning case 2021/1236 .

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

New cafe: Maiella Worth, 789 Wandsworth Road

Posted on January 5, 2022 by David

Update (8th January): Maiella Worth is now open, so we’ve added some updated photos. They’re offering a wide range of hot and cold food typical of the Abruzzo region in central Italy – including pasta they make on-site, as well as a broad mix of Paninis. If you are in the area, do drop in and say hello!

For the last few weeks, renovation works have been underway at what was Maiolica Cafe on Wandsworth Road, who we have mentioned a good few times over the last few years. Maiolica opened as a Sicilian cafe not long before the pandemic, and quickly diversified from coffee and cafe food to instead sell fresh fruit and veg and a wide range of Italian produce. Maiolica was popular and well-liked, and became a mainstay of this quieter neighbourhood right at the very end of Lavender Hill’s local centre. But getting through a series of lockdowns was clearly hard work and we were sad, but not altogether surprised, to see Maiolica hand the baton to new owners late last year.

Maiella Worth will continue as an Italian business – as a Cafetteria & Tavola Calda – but has had a complete makeover of the interior, to create more seating space in this small shopfront, and also to open up the back as a fully equipped kitchen. It’s looking pretty smart, and if all goes well, they hope to open up on Saturday 8th January.

Posted in Food & drink, Planning, Retail | Leave a comment

A new ‘tiny house’ house for Marney Road?

Posted on January 1, 2022 by David

We have a curious fascination for tiny houses, fitted on to implausibly small scraps of spare land – and proposals crop up regularly in planning. We’ve previously covered tiny house plans on Sugden Road, and at what later became a hair salon on Latchmere Road. And here’s another – a three-storey-plus-roof-terrace project on what seems to have once been an off-street parking yard at the northern end of Marney Road, shown below – on a site currently known as “land to rear of 14 Stormont Road”.

The plans here essentially plan a kitchen / diner in the basement (with a lightwell at the front providing daylight), a living room on the ground floor, a bedroom and bathroom upstairs, and a small roof terrace (to meet the requirement that new developments have some private outdoor space) – all in a fairly modern style loosely reminiscent of the new-build house at 31 Stormont Road. The interesting thing about the plans here is that because they include a full basement, the overall indoor area would be about 670 square feet, which is quite a respectable space for a one-bed property, and maybe not really the ‘tiny house’ that might be expected on a site like this. The basement could be a bit of a headache to build given there’s a substation right next door, but it is key to making this site work as a comfortable property.

The neighbours at 12 Stormont Road may not appreciate having a two-storey building to the south of their back garden, but these plans are otherwise likely to be fairly uncontentious. There are a few precedents for this type of development, including the garage at the back of 33 Stormont Road which got permission to become a house. There aren’t any windows in the rear of the proposed building, and the roof terrace includes screening so it does not overlook the neighbouring gardens. There’s understandably some concern about parking with new developments, though this could be mitigated if (as is likely) approval of the development includes a requirement for the developer to fund the removal of the dropped kerb and reinstate a street parking space in front of the old off-street access gate.

To see full details (and, if you wish, make a comment to be considered by the planning department) visit the Wandsworth Planning website and search for application number 2021/5425.

Update: On the 25th January, this proposal was refused planning permission. The details haven’t yet been published but this maybe wasn’t surprising – the proposal saw many letters from neighbouring residents worried about overdevelopment with a building running right to the edge of the small site, overshadowing gardens, and the general effect on the street.

Posted in Housing, Planning, Street by street | 2 Comments

A cluster of new office developments is coming soon to Queenstown Road

Posted on December 30, 2021 by David

The middle section of Queenstown Road is changing! Until now it’s been a light industrial cluster, but the explosion of development that has taken place around the power station, the arrival of a shiny new Zone 1 tube station, and the imminent arrival of Apple’s UK headquarters, mean that buildings that were once the low-rent home for storage, logistics and catering, are increasingly attractive to media, design and technology businesses.

And for those lucky enough to own buildings in the area, this means that they have a much wider range of tenants than they did before, as these buildings move from being hard-to-let niche-interest affairs to actually quite desirable. This probably explains why there are a dozen or so new office developments at various stages of construction around Battersea and Nine Elms, including some of what had originally been planned as flats in the power station development, but which are now set to become offices instead.

But these new tenants have high expectations, and are looking for workspaces that are up to the very latest standards. Take 220 Queenstown Road: this unusual pair of buildings right next to Queenstown Road station has been around since 1889, originally designed by architect Thomas Massa and built by Holloway Brothers as a factory and warehouse, and called Queens Road Works. The first occupiers were R.Z.Bloomfield & Co, who specialised in making caps for use in the army (and possibly also railway staff). The large building was the main factory, with the smaller next door used as administration offices.

Back in 1988 a rooftop extension was added, with a bridge that links them at the roof level (and whose interior decor has a distinctly distinctly ’80s’ feel). The building hasn’t had much spent on it since and it’s fair to say it needs a bit of updating – which is exactly what its owners (the Medical Research Council’s pension fund) now propose to do. Their plans will see the dilapidated glass rooftop floor removed, and replaced with a new top floor more in keeping with the rest of the building, as well as adding smaller sixth floor which includes plant rooms. A large extension will also be built at the back of the building, which is currently a bit of a mess as our photo below shows:

The extension will connect the two buildings, and increase the overall floor space quite a bit, which is an important part of the plans. Both buildings combined have an area of just 14,600 square feet, which to make matters worse is split in to lots of tiny and inefficient spaces which are not properly disabled accessible – we can see how the current building will have become harder and harder to let (the smaller one has been empty since the current owners bought it in 2016, the larger one is partly occupied). These plans will create some decent flexible and open floorspace that is workable for a modern office.

There will be a restoration of the heritage exterior parts of the buildings, as well as a comprehensive refit of the interior of the existing buildings, reflecting the industrial character of the building and bringing it up to the standard a new tenant will expect – an indicative illustration si shown below, and we can imagine the unusual shape of this landmark building and position right at the heart of all sorts of road and rail links could make quite an interesting workspace.

Another key change will be the entrance – which will move to the space between the two buildings, with a double height reception, with balconies above it, as shown below. This will make the building a lot more approachable, and is a clever way of linking the two buildings as a modern office without losing sight of their history as two structures. The target audience for the new office is small to medium size businesses, probably mostly in the technology, media and telecommunications sectors.

The floorplan below shows the ground floor layout, with a cafe space to the left of the new reception, and a co-working hub on the right. There’s a small light industrial workshop space at the rear of the ground floor (maybe designed to replace some of what will be otherwise lost in the conversion), with the upper levels more of a classic open plan office layout. The building has all of the reception space, showers, plant rooms, cycle parking, bin space and other stuff that a modern office needs – a real change from the current very dated setup! The developers are keen to make the whole thing sustainable, aiming for the updated building to meet the ‘Excellent’ standard for BREEAM sustainability, which would put it in the top 10% of new buildings.

These aren’t the first redevelopment plans for the building. In 2002 planning was approved for a six storey rear extension and three storey roof extension (but this was never built), and in 2015 plans were approved to convert it to flats (but this wasn’t taken forward either – which is just as well as this site is really more suitable for offices than flats). The latest plans are subject to planning permission, but as a sensitive updating (and fairly clear improvement to) a heritage office building we don’t expect this will face any particular planning issues – to see or comment on the plans, search for application 2021/3958 on the Wandsworth planning website.

But this is not the only office project on Ingate Place. Next door, Ingate Works is a recently completed new building, with 17,000 square feet of top quality office space over four floors. A real step up in quality over what went before, it is the first of a new breed of office building to actually complete.

The space is for rent at £49.50 per sq foot, which is well above the £35-40 per square foot that high quality ‘Grade A’ office space traditionally lets for in Battersea, but which remains an absolute bargain compared to the £70+ you can expect one stop down the railway line – and is hence pretty attractive to smaller firms wanting to be close to both the city centre and a large workforce, without spending a fortune. Ingate Works took a while to let amid the pandemic but a decent amount of the building is now ‘under offer’.

And that’s not all. In 2018 planning permission was approved for a 92,000 square foot ten-storey office building at 8-10 Ingate Place, pictured above – which will be built on what are currently a couple of warehouses, shown below.

The whole development has yet to start and is currently on sale for £13 million, with the sales notes pointing out that with each floor being an impressive 9,000 square feet, two south facing roof terraces, and being a five minute walk from a tube station and seven minutes from Apple’s new headquarters, it should be quite attractive to smaller businesses in the IT sector.

There’s a more to come too – as all these buildings are in the Battersea Design & Technology Quarter, a creative and technology hub which Wandsworth Council have designated that covers the whole of this area, essentially extending and increasing the density of the existing industrial area to accommodate more employment, in particular creative design and technology businesses that are likely to cluster around the power station and Nine Elms. As an example, the plans foresee a further six-storey building to be built at 7 Ingate Place (between Ingate Works and the railway), shown as a blue rectangle in the image below.

But these are all a bit of a sideshow compared to what lies further along Ingate Place. Because as anyone who’s taken a train past Queenstown Road knows, the showstopper is the huge curvy Safestore self storage building shown below. Originally built as a furniture depository by high-end furnishers Hamptons, it has an interesting past – so interesting that we’ll be writing a separate post all about the building in the near future! Its present is useful but not particularly exciting – being mainly a large self-storage base, and (in assorted sheds in the car park) a hub for a variety of delivery businesses and dark kitchens.

Tellingly, Safestore already know there’s demand for offices here: in addition to the storage options you’d expect, Safestore’s Battersea premises is one of relatively few Safestore sites that also operates as a business centre. The smaller building opposite the main depository (pictured below) offers office space on flexible leases. It’s a low-risk and fairly affordable way of hiring office space, with a straight all-inclusive monthly fee and no long lease terms, as well as conference room space and business support services, and (having run for over a decade, and housing dozens of local firms from upholsterers, cleaners and antiques traders to sushi makers and wine merchants) it seems to work.

But the huge increase in value of buildings round here means that the vast and elegant main structure – surrounded by various other buildings that were once Hamptons’ factory, and a lot of car parking – is becoming too valuable to be just used for storage. Safestore generally own the Freeholds or long leaseholds so will likely be pleased to be in control of this vast and increasingly strategic site. We understand that property consultants Houston Lawrence undertook some type of commercial viability study of the site for Safestore in 2018, and we’d hazard a guess that it is likely to see further expansion and development in the medium term. As yet, there are no development plans – but we’ll keep you posted. And in the meantime, we can expect Ingate Place to change quite dramatically as all these office developments start to take shape.

Posted in Business, Local history, Planning, Street by street | 2 Comments

In Pictures: Ashley Crescent at dusk

Posted on December 27, 2021 by David

Dusk falls over the quiet green space between the flats on Ashley Crescent, with a glimpse of the brighter lights of Lavender Hill in the background. One of many estates of similar design, the architect of Ashley Crescent was L. Phillips, Borough architect for Wandsworth in the late 1970s (who also designed the Northcote Library). This was a simple design that worked pretty well, which explains why there’s another block of much the same design at the junction of Stormont Road and Gowrie Road, as well as clusters of similar flats in Halston Close off Northcote Road, and in Hanson Close and Hunter Close in Balham.

Posted in Curiosities, Housing, Street by street | Leave a comment

Farewell to The Corner Stone bookshop on Lavender Hill

Posted on December 27, 2021 by David

The Corner Stone, a very recognisable shop on Lavender Hill which became of the street’s longest running businesses, has called it a day. The shop opened at some point between the late 1980s and early 1990s, and sold a wide range of Bibles and Christian literature, as well as hosting bible lessons. It was run by a couple, Brian and Ulrike Warner, who we believe previously had a career in property with several businesses to their name (one of which changed its name to Cornerstone Bookshop Limited in 2005). After many years running the shop we understand that age and ill health finally caught up with the owners as Brian passed away in 2020, and his wife Ukrike has now brought the business to an orderly close and retired.

The shop was originally three separate businesses: the corner unit was a newsagents & sweet shopcalled Peter Grose. The right hand side was a television rentals shop, a branch of D|E|R (Domestic Electric Rentals Ltd). There was also a small shop at the back facing Beauchamp Road, which in the late 1960s/early 70s was a nice old-fashioned Italian deli with cheeses, cured meats and all sorts of Italian stuff, which seems to have been particularly reputed for salt beef sandwiches – all served by an elderly gentleman, presumably closing when he retired and later being incorporated in to the rest of the premises.

The Corner Stone reportedly had a narrow escape in London’s 2011 riots (which affected this short stretch of shops quite severely) as windows were smashed and a fire started, causing some £4,000 worth of damage. One of the rioters had a change of heart and returned to put the fire out, and another rioter about to set fire to the premises was apparently dissuaded by someone, whom the shop’s owners believed was an angel, shouting, “No, don’t do that, I live upstairs!”; the shop was able to resume trading after only one day.

The ever-recognisable primary-coloured “scripture posters” so characteristic of Church noticeboards round the country remain in place, but the whole shop is now to let with local commercial estate agency Bells, which comes in at a pretty spacious 1,841 square feet including the cafe at the back. It’s a good spot with high visibility, and the asking rate is £90,000 a year, with business rates (essentially Council tax for shops) coming in at an additional £35,679 a year. The listing notes that the shop includes a front sales area, back office, multiple storage rooms and two bathrooms, and also that (maybe unsurprisingly after several decades) the property does require refurbishment throughout.

We know relatively few of our readers have a strong religious persuasion, but as The Corner Stone’s shopfront sits quietly and awaits a new beginning, we can all recognise the many years of commitment and effort that Brian and Ulrike dedicated to their bookshop, and wish Ulrike a happy retirement.

Posted in Business, Curiosities, Retail | 1 Comment

Has anyone forgotten a boat on Queenstown Road?

Posted on December 26, 2021 by David

The prize for ‘abandoned vehicle of the year’ goes to… a boat that has mysteriously been abandoned on Queenstown Road! It’s all a bit of a mystery – it’s in reasonably good condition, it seems watertight, and it has even been abandoned with a fully functional tow frame.

There’s fresh paint and it has the look of a fairly careful and dedicated boat restoration project abandoned part way. There are tools and the start of a kitchen, with what looks like a new cooker inside.

It has a somewhat out of date mooring permit! Maybe someone with more knowledge of boats than us can confirm if this means the boat was once called ‘Christine’.

We have to say, this poor boat seems a long way from home! But it raises so many questions. How did it get here? Was this a case of ‘the boat goes or I go’? Did someone run out of cash or just decide they’d had enough? Did someone’s mooring permit expire leaving them with no choice but to dump it in the middle of Battersea?

Either way, the Arch Company who own the land don’t seem too impressed – as taped to the vessel there are CCTV stills of a gentleman driving up and abandoning it on the 16th December (seemingly without making much attempt to hide his identity), with a request “Please remove this boat within 24 hours! Alternatively we will arrange”.

Can you solve the mystery of the Battersea boat? Do you want a boat (one careless owner)? Can boats get parking tickets? Will this boat ever see the water again? We’ll keep you posted if we find out more.

Update: There’s a twist to this story!

While preparing an unrelated future post on office developments on Ingate Place, a couple of hundred metres away from the boat’s current location, we dug out one of our archive photos of Ingate Place (taken back on the 18th September) – and spotted a very familiar looking boat in it! It’s clearly the same boat, in the same trailer… but with a bit less white paint. So this boat is indeed local, and there has been some restoration work done while it was on Ingate Place before it was moved a short distance and abandoned. Whoever abandoned it didn’t take it far – and maybe it is indeed a Battersea boat…

Posted in Curiosities, Street by street | 1 Comment