It’s taken years and years – but works have finally got going on building a second entrance to Queenstown Road station. This was originally proposed way back in 2014, as part of Taylor Wimpey’s ambitious Battersea Exchange development, which combined lots of little bits of land, two railway viaducts and a school, to create new flats, shops and office space (and a replacement school).
We have reported on it many times since then – mostly noting that there have been new delays, or small changes to the plans bit with no actual works underway! The development itself completed years ago, with a layout clearly designed to accommodate the second entrance – but nothing happened on the station aspect. But after many delays, things are now progressing quickly. This is most visible from the back of the building, where the brickwork of the entrance archway is in place, the once-overgrown and abandoned back yard of the station now has steps installed, and the electrics and lighting are installed.
What’s being done is quite straightforward – we’ll have an entrance straight on to Patcham Terrace, which is a new road built by the developers that currently ends behind the station (which is in yellow on the diagram below).
It’ll be a useful link – it connects the station more directly to the school in the development, and also bring a bit of pedestrian traffic to Patcham Terrace, which is a rather isolated near-dead-end road where the small shops and offices under the railway arches have been slow to let. Because both the entrances will be outside the station gateline, anyone coming from Queenstown Road towards Battersea Park Station or the new tube station at the power station will be able to use this as a shortcut during station opening hours.
It’s a nice, simple, and above all cheap project. There are steps because the level at the back doesn’t match the station level, but there’s no expensive lift included as the front entrance is already accessible (ish).
The slightly frustrating thing about this is that, if the project was proposed now, it would be a lot less likely to get the go ahead – because since the plans were originally agreed Queenstown Road has seen a huge decline in passenger numbers, losing nearly two thirds of its passenger numbers, and doing so despite the population of the town around it exploding thanks to a load of new developments.
Covid and working from home played their part, and some local commuter traffic towards Waterloo has clearly also shifted across to the new Northern Line extension, which opens up more options for onward travel than the short overland journey to Waterloo used to. But the main reason is that in 2022 South West Trains slashed the number of trains that stop at the station, from eight to just four an hour. They sacrificed half of the stops at this station, as from their point of view these stopping trains were just blocking the line for smallish numbers of passengers – who were mostly also making relatively unprofitable short journeys to Waterloo – to make space for more of their more profitable long-distance trains from further out to get to Waterloo at peak times.
Worse still, the four trains hour that still do stop at peak times aren’t evenly spread through the hour, so you can easily be waiting over 20 minutes for the next train. All the evidence suggests that maximum-15-minute waits are the magic number where usage goes up, because passengers feel comfortable in just turning up rather than worrying about checking train times beforehand. The passenger numbers graph below (from ever-useful site Railstats) shows how severe the impact has been! Speaking bluntly, it’s fairly clear that South West Trains couldn’t care less about this minor station – but at least the small upgrade funded mainly by Taylor Wimpey has happened.
All is not lost, and the station still sees a fairly steady stream of people from south west London use the station to access Battersea Park, and Battersea Power Station. It remains comfortably within the top third of the busiest stations in the UK, even if it’s a shadow of the days when it saw nearly 2 million passengers a year (more than several northern cities!), and the more convenient access to the east that the new entrance will enable may see usage edge upwards again to the point where the decision to drop half of its train services may be revisited. There have also been long running plans to repoen Platform 1, which has been abandoned since the early 1990s (and which unusually is still made of wood!). This could allow local (‘Windsor’) and mainline services to be kept more separate – providing additional capacity on the approach to London Waterloo; if this is ever done it would allow a proper train service at Queenstown Road again.
One of the reasons for adding the second entrance was to create a better link to Battersea Park station – which has new-entrance plans of its own. Battersea Park’s passenger numbers are much higher that Queenstown Road, at nearly 2 million a year. After a notable dip in usage (like all other stations) during Covid lockdowns, passenger numbers there have bounced back and been going up and up, as it has become a key access route for visitors from all over south east London and beyond to get to Battersea Power Station, as well as the park itself (where the Saturday morning parkruns alone regularly attract well over 1000 people). The roads east and west of the station used to be a quiet area, but now you can’t miss the stream of people walking along the road between the two day and night.
Battersea Park station is long overdue for step-free access, as it is currently a bit of an accessibility nightmare and a borderline safety hazard, with the exceptionally steep wooden stairways within the station. This project has also been running for years, and unfortunately as the article we wrote on that project in 2023 makes rather clear, it’s a more awkward and expensive project that Queenstown Road’s second entrance – as it’s a really complicated thing to actually deliver, with steep stairs, narrow spaces, lots of old structures in the way, and not a lot of space on the platforms. And we have an update on that one – but that will be in another post in a few days.
Pizza’s one of the few foods that somehow never goes out of style – and we’ve got four new pizzerias on the way. First up is Common Pizza, who have just opened by the basketball courts in Clapham Common. Their speciality is New York style pizzas and deep-pan Detroit pies, with both on-site and takeaway on offer. A two-for-one happy hour is running daily from 4-6pm, and conscious of their outdoors location, if you order a main to eat on site and it rains, they’ll offer a free drink. Opening offers include half price mains, with details at @commonpizzauk.
Last year this was Megan’s terrace – a place we wrote about quite afewtimes in 2021 as they took over what had previously been a notoriously hard-to-let unit in the middle of Clapham Common. Before Megan’s it had gone through a lot of tenants, mainly because it was too small: there wasn’t enough indoor space to host a proper kitchen while also having enough seating to make a profit, the complicated laws that decide what can be built on Common land meant an extension was out of the question, and the somewhat isolated location meant it hardly saw any winter trade.
Megan’s took a completely different (and quite clever) approach, making the entire building in to a much larger kitchen, with all the seating outside. It wasn’t straightforward to do: they still only traded in the summer, and we understand they had nightmares with the power supply, which just wasn’t powerful enough for a modern kitchen (so needed a generator to be on site for more than a year) – but overall it worked pretty well, and the sizeable investment by Megan’s also made what had been a bit of an eyesore, in to something more worthy of this high visibility location.
Common Pizza have stuck with this model. As our photos show they’re taking more or less the same approach of a mainly outdoor venue, but have done a fair bit of redesign of the space and the seating area, mainly to make it all a bit lower-maintenance and simpler to run; it works on a mainly walk-in basis but they do take bookings for larger groups.
It’s a pretty decent location, if you can make this outdoor-focussed approach work, right next to the ever-busy skate park and the refurbished Basketball courts. Megan’s was very busy in the summers; going by the crowds on site so far it looks like Common Pizza has pulled in the numbers.
Next up – as we noted a few weeks ago, Corecore Pizzeria have been trading locally for the last two years from a ‘delivery only’ base at the nearby business centre on Ingate Place, and have a strong local following. So strong that they’ve made the big jump to running their very own restaurant, at 40 Queenstown Road – with lots of seating, as well as takeaway, and delivery. And after a few weeks of work to fit everything out and get the kitchen (and above all the pizza oven) up and running, they’re now open!
Corecore’s core product is very much the traditional Neapolitan pizza, with the sides and extras you might expect. Their previous Ingate Place Pizzeria was consistently popular – and also got a solid ‘5 out of 5’ hygiene rating from the Food Standards Agency – and the new location has had excellent reviews so far as well. Do visit – you’ll of course be doing your bit to support a local business as it takes a big step up in scale and ambition – but above all, you’ll be in for an excellent pizza!
Meanwhile back in January we wrote about part of the Party Superstore at Clapham Junction potentially becoming a restaurant, and while details were very vague at the time, a bit of detective work (looking at who the planning agents had worked for before, and tracing a few company links) led us to suspect it would become a branch of Rudy’s Pizza. And sure enough it is – as more detailed plans have now been submitted.
Rudy’s Pizza are a medium-sized chain specialising in Neapolitan pizza. They opened their first pizzeria in Ancoats in Manchester in 2015, and have been expanding rapidly to the point where they have thirty branches, including seven in London, and sold over two million pizzas a year. Their core product is classic Italian pizzas made with fresh dough in a Neapolitan-style base with a variety of toppings, including vegan and vegetarian options. Their new Clapham Junction branch will take over half of the Party & Celebrate store, making fairly minor changes to the shopfront as shown below; as we understand it our famous Party Superstore will squeeze things in a bit and carry on as usual in the remaining space.
The plans, which have now gone live after a delay while the applicants assembled all the necessary planning details, will see small changes to the building including a skylight on the rear flat roof, new extraction , and using some of the pavement at the front for customer seating. Most of the ground floor is taken up by the kitchen and pizza oven, with the basement opened up as the main internal seating area. The plans are not especially controversial – but there are concerns that the conversion of increasing number of shops to food & drink is eroding the overall viability of Clapham Junction town centre, and that the narrow and somewhat slopey pavement doesn’t have the width for more outdoor seating. If you want to see and comment on the details, search for application 2024/4363 at wandsworth.gov.uk/planning.
Now we said Rudy’s are an expanding chain, and it turns out this isn’t the only branch they’re opening locally – as another is already being fitted out next to Clapham Common station. This one will be rather smaller, and will take over the shopfront shown below. The Clapham Common branch has been through a few planning challenges over the last year as Rudy’s tried to make the small and awkwardly-shaped premises larger with an extension at the back, but saw the first plans rejected; an updated approach has now been given the green light.
Rudy’s Clapham Common will be located at 15 The Pavement, and will also be serving up fresh Neapolitan pizza daily. There’s no opening date yet, but work is well underway.
Of course no mention of Neapolitan pizzeria would be complete without a nod to consistent local favourite Pizzeria Pellone, who have been trading in their surprisingly small restaurant at 42 Lavender Hill since 2019 – and who see people travel from far and wide to get quality pizzas.
Corecore Pizza are open at 40 Queenstown Road, London, 020 7871 6897 (instagram). Common Pizza are open at the Junction of Long Road & Rookery Road (by the skate park & basketball courts), Clapham Common SW4 9DD (menu / instagram). Rudy’s Clapham Junction location will be at 270 Lavender Hill, subject to planning, and their Clapham Common is at 15 the Pavement SW4 0HYand looks set to open in a month or so (web).We post from time to time on developments in and around the Lavender Hill area of Battersea, London – if you found this of interest you may want to see our other recent posts on retail and on food and drink in the area, or to sign up to receive new posts by email. And if you’ve got tips or insights on any of the areas we cover – get in touch and let us know!
It’s rare to see new houses rather than flats in Battersea – but six of them are coming to a sliver of land you’ve probably never noticed, hidden away behind two rows of Victorian tenement flats on Theatre Street and Latchmere Street. The picture above shows their location (shaded in red) – where they will replace a series of small workshops that are spread along a thin passageway, almost completely hidden from every angle (apart from a glimpse through a gate on Heathwall Street, shown below).
The buildings are on the right hand side of the alleyway, spread along a long slope with lots of different sections at different floor heights, and they seem to have been built at the same time as the houses either side of the alley. The heritage assessment by Bridget Sheppard notes they were built by the original developer of the houses, Albert Bussell – who planned to use them as his own builders’ yard and workshops.
Albert’s original approach was unfortunate with hindsight, as it meant the already-very-small back gardens of his new flats ended up being truly minuscule – however he does seem to have at least built everything to a reasonably robust quality. The current buildings may not be especially pretty but they’re clearly solid, with brick walls and iron roofs, and have stood up to 150 years of use. The buildings are mostly in much the same state as when they were built, but those nearest to Heathwall Street have seen more recent changes, mainly to adapt them for use as garages.
The new plans will convert all the existing single storey buildings to six terraced houses. There’s no change in height, and the overall shapes of the buildings will remain more or less the same (even to the extent of keeping most windows and doors in the same place), which will make sure that they don’t block the light of the small neighbouring bakck gardens – but with the modern insulation, better roofs, and the more robust doors and windows that new housing needs. The plans suggest that the slightly industrial style of the buildings will be preserved in the new development.
The cluster of current buildings at the top bit of the slope nearest Lavender Hill – just inside the gate shown below – will become four houses, and a separate cluster of buildings at the bottom of the slop will become two more houses – with the proposed floor plans shown below. The houses, which will be a mixture of one- and two-bedroom properties, will all have small private front balcony areas – and there’ll also be a small area of shared green space in the middle of the development.
The general principle of conversion of these buildings from workshops to housing already has planning permission, following an application by the developer last year. Those plans received four objections and two general comments – with concerns including fear that these houses could become an Airbnb-type party zone, concerns about how foundations and party walls would be handled, worries about how fire safety and access would be maintained if the alley was to become partly used for balconies (which the Council has asked the developer to provide details of before work starts), and the lack of parking for the new houses.
There’s currently another cneighbour consultation underway on the details – including the design and appearance of the new houses. This includes, for example, the plan to include wildflower green roofs – which we hope is followed through with (even if in practice these elements seem to be consistently abandoned when the actual building work starts!), the way the doors and windows will look, and how most of the development will use a brick- and bronze- focussed set of materials. We don’t expect that any of this will be particularly controversial (and that’s despite the buildings being right in the middle of the Town Hall Road Conservation Area – the pdf map’s here – albeit not getting any mention in the associated planning guidance, probably because no one noticed them). Neighbours have fed inconcerns that the developer’s proposal to remove one of the larger trees between the two sets of buildings, but go some way to reinstating greenery with a green roof on the buildings, needs to be made a ‘binding’ commitment (which is a fair concern: as as we have oftenfound, greenery gets thrown in liberally at the planning application stage, but more often than not gets dropped when it comes to actually building projects).
Getting planning permission may be fairly straightforward – but this still won’t be an especially easy development to take forward: it’s a tight site, and the current buildings are old and tired, and weren’t originally built to be lived in and there will be quite a big job to get them up to modern standards. We suspect this may well end up being more of a ‘rebuild’ than a ‘refurbishment’ in many cases. However if the development goes ahead it should make a small but helpful contribution to local housing needs, and should 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.
This isn’t the first unusual houses plan on Heathwall Street – back in 2022, we wrote a post about the a planning appliation for some of this row of garages, just opposite Theatre Street Mews; which would have seen five of the six demolished, and repaced with a cleverly deigned two-bedroom house with quite a large basement, helped by a generously sized lightwell to create a bright and airy living space. That got planning (and it was the third similar planning application that had gone on for the site, with the previous two also both having been approved but both timed out after a few years without any development) – but we’re three years down the line and nothing has come of that application. Maybe the Theatre Street mews will see more action.
To see and comment on the detailed plans, visit wandworth.gov.uk/planning and search for planning application 2025/0034. 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. To receive new posts by e-mail (for free), sign up here.
Some of the articles we write really catch on and get shared all over the place – and some don’t. Early last year, we posted someting especially niche-interest: “Lambeth’s Planning officers face the interesting question of whether Dirty Blonde is a bar or a club“. It was the stuff of geeks, going in to the lesser known backrooms of planning and licensing policy. A couple of hundred of you read it at the time; whether you made it to the end is debatable!
Dirty Blonde was a controversial business for its neighbours, and we saw fairly reular reporting of late night chaos – not that crime is a topic we cover much. However it had nothing of the wider profile that some of the previous clubs at the site used to have (notably Inigo, which was hugely popular).
All that changed on the 29th September, when 24-year-old Dontae McLaren was murdered in a fight between about 20 people in the middle of the road outside the venue. Exactly what happened has yet to be fully mapped out (and we won’t be commenting on it here, given there’s an ongoing legal case), though it was at closing time for the club, and the sad loss of a young life followed significant ongoing concerns abut the management of the venue.
The whole area was closed for two days for a forensic investigation of the road surface – leaving Premier Inn’s guests somewhat marooned, both Tesco and Sainsbury’s closed, and all buses suspended. Our little-known article suddenly gained enormous numbers of readers. We suspect Lambeth’s licensing officers were also having a quick look at the status of the club – especially given that it had been operating in what was a bit of a licensing grey area for some years. Dirty Blonde’s license was suspended almost immediately, followed by the announcement of a Summary Review – on the grounds that a senior police officer was satisfied that ‘the premises are associated with both serious crime and disorder following an altercation outside the premises which resulted in a male being fatally stabbed‘.
That licensing review was held on the 25th October, and as the helpful report on Open Council Network shows, it was a pretty open-and-shut case! It got off to a bad start for Dirty Blonde when it wasn’t too clear that they had sent the right people along to represent themselves, and it emerged that was some confusion within the business on who even was the premises licensee. Lambeth, as the licensing authority, argued that a load of licensing conditions had been breached – including a lack of CCTV footage available for review by the police and licensing officers, the lack of an incident log, insufficient security staff, with inadequate SIA badging, training, supervision and communication equipment, the use of external promoters’ security staff, and – maybe most pertinently to the sad case of Mr McLaren – inadequate control of patrons leaving the premises.
The Met Police didn’t share all their input in public (presumably as a legal case was ongoing) – but noted they had concerns about how the venue was being run, as knives had been spotted inside the venue despite them being informed that there is a robust search regime in place; they were also concerned about a lack of CCTV. Councillors noted that the venue was ‘a magnet for anti-social behaviour that in turn fuels an atmosphere where crime occurs‘, and that not revoking the license would be irresponsible of the council and risk further unnecessary tragic fatalities. Linda Bray, ward councillor for Clapham Town, reported on complaints she had received about the premises going all the way back to 2019 – including the lack of a licence for the premises to operate as a nightclub, and the impact this had on the council’s ability to regulate its activities, a lack of communication from the premises about when events were taking place, the venue’s failure to respond to previous attempts at engagement with the council and the police, and suspicions that it was potentially also operating as an unlicensed sex premises.
Twenty nine members of the public – many from neighbouring street Victoria Rise – also opposed the reopening of Dirty Blonde, and reported a litany of anti-social behaviour, crime and noise nuisance associated with the club – inclding drug dealing and use, fighting, shouting and screaming, and cars playing loud music in the side streets – with many having a clear fear of walking past the premises at night. The past lack of response by both Police and Council to previous concerns was a frequent theme – with some shock that it has taken the loss of a young life to get a proper review of the license. This was backed up by the Regulatory Noise and Antisocial Behavious Enforcement Officer, who made similar points on behalf of Public Protection.
This was only realistically going to go one way – and the licensing hearing concluded that there was sufficient evidence to show breaches of the licence, and the licensing committee was not satisfied that the premises licence holder could be trusted to operate the premises consistently with the licensing objectives, or that any option other than revoking the license was appropriate.
Since then the premises has had a minor clearout, with the stickers removed from the windows, and it is now up for lease with Jarvis Keller for around £90,000 a year. Residents of Victoria Rise will be crossing their fingers that it doesn’t return to all-night club use – although Lambeth’s previous refusal of planning permission for a Certificate of Lawful Development (Existing) with respect to the use of the property as a nightclub (which kicked off our first report on the venue – where planners had denied planning permission for ongoing club use, but at the ame time left a late night club license in place), and the tragic events since then, makes a new late ‘club’ license unlikely.
It’s a relatively large unit, as these photos from the listing show – with 3,300 square feet of space spread over the ground floor and basement – in a fairly busy area; and it could see a fair number of uses. Although it’s not seen any food trade for years, we understand that there’s still an extractor flue in place that would allow for food preparation. Historically it was a pub, the Victoria, whose name can still be seen in the stonework on the upper floors of the building – but the lack of outdoor areas and narrow pavement probably mean it’s more likely to become something else – like the Vet’s premises next door, or the growing number of specialist businesses (gyms, property businesses, interior decorators, trade suppliers…) at this end of the street. If this sounds like a premises you could do something with, you’ll want to contact Jarvis Keller.
Update (August 2025): The premises have been cleaned up and are back in business, as Nicola Arts Charity Shop – with enough space to also host art exhibitions, live open mic performances, and more.
Dirty Blonde – previously Inigo, Blake’s, Grind, and The Victoria – was at 642 Wandsworth Road, London, SW8 3JW.Nicola Arts is open there now (instagram). Laveder-hill.uk posts from time to time on developments in the Lavender Hill area of Battersea, London – if you found this of interest you may want to see our other recent posts on retail and on food and drink in the area, or to sign up to receive new posts by email. And if you’ve got tips or insights on any of the areas we cover – get in touch and let us know!
The large corner unit at 36-40 Queenstown Road was for well over a decade home to Le Pot Lyonnais, a neighbourhood bistro offering classic Ferench fare done to high standard. In early 2024 the restaurant had a comprehensive refit and relunched as Mistral – while still focussing on the best of French food. It got off to a strong start, but sadly the restaurant suddenly closed after just a few months in May, following the death of owner Patrick.
The landlord has now split the site in to three smaller shops. Some are currently still to let (the middle one is currently to let for about £20k a year), but the left hand one will soon be opening as Corecore Pizzeria. Their core product is very much the traditional Neapolitan pizza, with the sides and extras you might expect. Owners Giovanni and Carmen of Corecore aren’t starting from nothing – they’ve been trading locally for the last two years, from a ‘dark kitchen’ at the nearby business centre on Ingate Place, which hosts quite a variety of businesses who solely sell food via delivery apps. They’re well reviewed – and have also got a solid 5 hygiene rating from the Food Standards Agency. Of course they’re not the first Neapolitan pizzeria (and have the formidable competition of consistent top performer Pizzeria Pellone) – but it’s fair to say demand for good pizza seems to be very large in Lavender Hill.
Moving from a dark kitchen to a full restaurant is quite a common way for businesses to grow – we have seen a fair few do this on Lavender Hill over the years, including Remedy Kitchen who started out in an industrial unit near the heliport, as well as several non-food businesses who have ‘graduated’ from smaller premises within the Battersea Business centre as they have grown. For food businesses moving from a dark kitchen to an actual high street premises brings new costs – but also gives the business a lot more profile and visibility, and aloows for the more profitable options of in-house dining, as well as customer collections. Delivery apps typically take a cut of a third of the restaurant’s takings (in addition to what the customer pays for the delivery), so even with a 10-15% collection discount there’s still a better margin for the restaurant if some local customers come and collect in person (and it’s also why prices on delivery apps can sometimes be higher than on takeaway menus, and menus restricted to the more profitable items).
We look forward to Corecore’s new venture opening – which is planned for the 1st May. We’ll keep you posted on what happens to the other two units next door.
Corecore Pizzeria, 40 Queenstown Road, London SW8 3RY. Planned opening is the 1st May (though they’re already trading via deliveroo and Just Eat from Ingate Place). We post from time to time on developments in the Lavender Hill area of Battersea, London – if you found this of interest you may want to see our other recent posts on retail and on food and drink in the area, or to sign up to receive new posts by email. And if you’ve got tips or insights on any of the areas we cover – get in touch and let us know!
It’s been a minor mystery for some time. 51 Queenstown Road was once the home of Ritz Dry Cleaners – but they closed maybe 20 years ago. Since then the shop has sat empty, keeping a rare example of a classic ‘0171’ inner London telephone number on its sign; these were replaced with 0207 numbers way back in 2000. At first someone kept the windows cleaned, but that stopped at some point and No. 51 has been getting gradually more and more buried under posters and adverts. The street around it has evolved in the decades of emptiness – losing most of its general retail, but finding a new market as it gained an ever larger number of interior design businesses, as well as seeing a bit of a growth in restaurants.
It’s always curious when this happens for so long – especially when so much potential rental income is left on the table, with rents for some of the units like this approaching £20,000 a year. We’ve seen a few cases where properties got caught up in probate issues, some where the owners own a lot of properties and have their focus elsewhere, and some where elderly owners struggle to manage their properties. Sometimes landlords are waiting for leases on other partys of buildings to end, to pave the way for bigger redevelopments. In a few (rare) cases, the owners can’t be traced at all! We don’t know what the story is in this case – although back in 2016, when Ritz Dry Cleaners had already been closed for several years, permission was given for the dry cleaners to be converted to a restaurant, which the planning documents suggest could be called Satchmo’s. It never happened, and for the following decade, the unit remained empty. The only clue we have here si that the current proposals are from the same applicant as the never-implemented 2016 plans – Mr Elliot Moss.
But now new plans have emerged to redevelop the building – and refurbish the shopfront to a condition where it can again be let out. The image above shows what’s planned – which includes a new shopfront that is a bit more consistent with its neighbours, but otherwise doesn’t make all that many changes. On the inside of the shop, not a lot will change – but a slight reshaping of the shop unit will make a more efficient use of the space. The plans also include a general reorganising and sorting out of the rest of the building, including a small ground floor extension at the back that will allow the existing flat behind it to be converted to a more open-plan and efficient layout, and a mansard extension to convert the currently-unused loft to an en suite bedroom, similar to what has already been done in some of No. 51’s neighbours – accompanied by a barely noticeable increase to the roof level. None of this looks to be controversial; at the time of writing there are unrsurprisingly no comments on the proposals. Fingers crossed these works will lead to this long-vacant retail unit, which has frankly become a bit of en eyesore, come back in to use.
A new pub’s coming to Battersea – and it’s set to be a bit special. The Queen’s Arms, which has stood empty for a couple of years, has a new landlord – as the third venue for Bohem Brewery, who specialise in traditional Bohemian-style lagers. Bohem are a proper brewery – putting considerable effort in to making the best beers, brewed by Czechs and Slovaks, in London. Their brewery is hidden away in an industrial area close to Spurs’ stadum in Tottenham, and uses bespoke equipment imported from the brewers’ homeland; it also sells to a range of other pubs round the country.
We caught up with General Manager Jakub, who already runs the Nicholas Nickleby pub in Finsbury Park, and explored the works in progress to update the pub and prepare for opening. His vision for The Queens Arms is similar to Bohem’s two existing pubs in north London: they;r enot making a beer hall, but instead want to create a proper welcoming pub with a Czech twist – that combines the best of London & Czech beer & pub culture. Our photos are of the works in progress, about a week ago, when the power was not yet up and running and there was a lot to do. But fear not – progress is ongoing and chances are by the end of the month or so this will be a fully operational pub!
Bohem started out in 2018 with the Bohem Tap Room in Bowers Park (north of Wood Green) – which was their first venue, and which stands out for its diminutive size – being a fairly small shopfront. They went on to take over the Nicholas Nickleby in Finsbury Park, pictured below – a somewhat larger and more classically pub-like vene.
The Nicolas Nickleby also has London’s first chladici vana, or cooler bath, a contraption that makes sure that the beer glasses are clean, wet, and above all cold: by removing the temperature change between the cold room and the tap, the beer is doesn’t get a shock when it’s poured, th eplan si to have one at the Queen’s Arms as well
Bohem’s own beer unsurprisingly has pride of place in their pubs – however they go well beyond this, with a range of imported Czech wines and spirits, rotating guest beers, and a variety of foods including some Czech specialities. All Bohem’s beers are brewed using imported double decoction brewing equipment, and traditionally lagered at low temperature for a minimum of six weeks. The beers at the Queen’s Arms will be served from Lukr side-pour taps (which are a rare thing in London – they’ve been imported from the Czech manufacturer), pouring beer directly from a cold storage room in the authentic Czech style.
The Queen’s Arms is an excellent purpose-built Victorian pub – with high ceilings, loads of space, lots of light, the choice seat being the one below in the corner – as well as the option to use a sunny pavement area that has the benefit of being off the main road. However the challenge of the site has long been just that, that it is just off the main roads, so the landlord needs to be a little better known to attract custom. Bohem’s unique offer of a beer lover’s dream, with beers you can’t find anywhere else around, live music, classic pub games, proper Czech pouring techniques, together with the strong popularity of their existing two venues, looks like just the thing to relaunch the Queen’s Arms.
While the work is ongoing we explored the whole of the site, incuding the surprisingly extensive basement – which has lots of separate sections and is a bit of a labyrinth, much of it with a just-slightly-too-low ceiling that makes it not especially useful other than for beer storage.
However something we didn’t know is that one of the high-ceilinged sections of the basement includes a fully fitted modern kitchen, which will open up considerable catering possibilities. The Nicholas Nickleby has developed a reputation for quality Czech pub snacks, and the plan is to do something similar here.
There’s still lots of work to do – but the aim is to open within the next few weeks. It’s good to see the return of the Queen’s Arms, and especially to see it with suah an enthusiastic team behind it – bringing something quite different to Battersea. We’ll keep you posted in the countdown to the opening – and do make sure to pay our new local a visit when it opens.
The Queens Arms, 139 St. Philip Street, Battersea, London, SW8 3SS – opening soon. In the meantime Bohem Brewery‘s Instagram, including reports on the work in progress, is here. We post from time to time on developments in the Lavender Hill area of Battersea, London – if you found this of interest you may want to see our other recent posts on food and drink and retailin the area, or to sign up to receive new posts by email.
It’s rare to see a church turn in to a building site – especially one as prominent as the Holy Trinity, which is surrounded by part of Clapham Common. We reported back in 2021 that plans were afoot to extend the building and modernise its facilities, and works have now started – with half the church surrounded by construction hoardings.
The project is essentially a set of extensions and changes to make the church a more flexible building, and open it up to wider set of uses. The north vestry will be extended to add four new meeting rooms spread over two floors, and the former south chapel will also be extended to include a disabled accessible entrance, ‘meet and greet’ space including tea and coffee facilities (pictured below), new fully accessible toilets, a new kitchen facility, and a lift and stairs down to the basement (a well as new lightwells to bring daylight to the basement).
Now having mentioned the new lift to ‘the basement’ – there’s not currently a basement in the church! Just a series of narrow arched vaults and passageways, with a couple of larger crawl spaces at the south east corner of the building – as shown in the basement floorplan below. As part of the extension work, some of the baement is being excavated and turned in to usable space.
The extensions are essentially going to make the two parts of the church that stick out at the sides, now stick out a bit further – in a pretty similar style to what is already there. And works are now well underway – with the aim of finishing by the end of the year. At the north side of the church a small brick wall is in place, which looks like the edges of a poured-concrete foundation for the extension.
The south side now has the foundations for the new basement in place, which are just about visible in the picture below behind the area of new tarmac surfacing.
The first floor of the extended south wing (pictured below) will include the relocated stained glass window – and the scaffolding visible in the above photo is likely to be preparing for its temporary removal.
A whole load of site cabins are currently scattered around the site – some as site offices, but most serving as temporary accommodation for activities that would normally take place in parts of the church that are closed for building works.
There will be works to the landscaping, including a new entrance gate with curved railings and seating at the south east corner of the church crounds, which will lead to a new outdoor terrace for gatherings (to be called The Wilberforce Terrace – the bit in grey in the diagram below – and named after former local resident, and leader of the movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, William Wilberforce). There will also be a more richly planted area with new paths around the eastern side of the church, and a refresh of the lawns and some new trees.
One slightly intruguing sight on the building site is one of the old gates, which has been removed to widen the entrance route and allow larger construction vehicles in to the site. The whole structure including its foundation has bene lifted up and moved out of the way, supported by a wooden prop. The gate post has been stripped down at the same time to reveal the rough concrete core.
The original plans involved demolishing the portico, and rebuilding an extended version of it, which would have changed the overall proportion and appearance of the church quite significantly. This led to quite a lot of concerns – so the plans were revised to keep the portico much the same size as it is, but close off the entrances with glass (shown in the planning diagram below). This still proved controversial – so the plans were then revised a second time to make no changes to the front of the building.
Changes are also planned for the interior – in particular moving the pulpit, and removing the pews. This also proved controversial during the planning process, and it’s a frequent debate in the church world: on the one hand, pews are part of the core fabric of a church, and removing them fundamentally changes the original interior. On the other hand, they do really limit the use of the building to activities involving linear rows of seating, which makes it harder to use the building for anything other than the classic church service. Following concerns, including from the Clapham Society, the plans were changed to keep some of the pews within the northern upper gallery. There will be a new and improved audio-visual system so everyone in the building can clearly hear and see what is going on, including those in the galleries.
It’s a big and ambitious project. The church’s congregation has grown significantly over the last decade to over 700 people on a Sunday, and these works will help the building handle the needs of these much larger crowds. The church already has many calendar clashes in accommodating the various groups, courses and meetings that are part fo running a modern church, and has to use other spaces away from the church for the children’s groups that support Sunday services. The new meeting spaces in the extensions will be able to host all these at the main building, alongside the main services.
Regardless of whether you’re religious, it’s good to see this carefully thought through, sensitive project to refurbish one of the major landmarks of the Common and prepare it for the future. It’s a sizeable investment coming in at a shade over £6 million – coming from a mixture of some grant aid but mostly donations from 350 individuals. Holy Trinity are still looking for donations to complete the building works – partly because changes to tax rules have increased the overall cost. More details on what to do if you’d like to support the works, and the wider project, are here.
Update (May 2025) – one more photo of works well underway on the North wing. The windows have been removed for safekeeping, and demolition of the old end wall is now well underway –
We mainly cover the Lavender Hill area, but sometimes also report on developments on Clapham Common; we previously covered the Holy Trinity project in 2021. If you found this interesting, you may want to see our previous articles on planning and development, or on shops and food & drink traders in the area. To receive new posts on lavender-hill.uk by e-mail (for free, unsubscribe anytime), sign up here.
Something fairly rare’s happening: some new Council flats are being built, by the Council! Wandsworth plans to add 14 new flats to Tyneham Close, an existing 64-flat estate just north of Lavender Hill (seven of them one-bed, and seven two-bed), by some ingenious building work in the two squares shown inthe picture below:
One of the new buildings will take over a paved area that was originally designed as a space to hang out laundry, pictured below. It sees occasional use as a childrens’ play area, but it’s essentially abandoned, and as a piece of land that the Council already owns it’s an obvious candidate for redevelopment.
The new building will have five storeys, loosely echoing the style of the existing flats through use of somewhat similar brick and a similar flat roof approach, but it will also come with bigger windows, proper balconies, and generally speaking a design that looks much more up to date than the rest of the estate.
One thing you may be wondering, comparing the two images above, is – what about the windows of the existing flats? They have a kitchen window and a bedroom window (as well as a tiny boiler cupboard window) facing straight in to the site of the new building. And this is where something quite clever is being done. This project has been in development for over ten years, and the first version tried to keep all those windows in use. It got a planning approval way back in 2016, but the project then went on the back burner for years. When the project was revived someone at the Council had a closer look, and clearly thought – there has to be a cleverer way of doing this. They worked out that if they scrapped those windows, and extended those existing Tyneham Close flats right in to the new building, they could give them a bigger and better kitchen, with a window facing the other way – and a new balcony. The extract of the floorplan below shows what this means in practice: the pink bit labelled “Kitchen extension” is a new kitchen extension added to the existing flats, with the old kitchen becoming a dining area. A new balcony is also added opening from the kitchen.
By removing the need to do awkward things to the layout of the new building to keep those windows in use, and allowing the whole of the plot to be used for development, this also allows bigger and better flats in the new-build part of the development. Of course the people living in those existing flats, who are a mix of leaseholders and tenants, would need to all agree – and discussions were held with everyone affected to see if this approach would be workable. It seems that a whole lot of extra space and new balcony, and a brand new kitchen – in exchange for some disruption and losing an old window – was an offer too good to refuse, and everyone agreed. There are other interesting design details in the plans – two of the flats are duplexes, with their own front doors to the street, and internal staircases up to the forst floor, to use the ground floor space efficiently for living areas while not having bedrooms on the ground level. Some of the windows that face in to the courtyard are also pointed in particular directions to avoid overlooking existing flats. The plan is to use air source heat pumps rather than gas boilers for heating, to make the new flats more sustainable and cheaper to run.
The other new building is more or less a mirror image to the first, and will take over a small walled courtyard that was originally built as a mini 1950s-style sports pitch. It’s more heavily used than the old laundry area on the other corner, but it has been very neglected for the last decade or so and is looking quite run down!
The new building on this side will look like this, seen from Shirley Grove – with its own entrance to the street. A similar approach has been taken with the kitchens, again extending the existing flats and adding new balconies, in exchange for moving the existing windows around.
As part of the project a bundle of improvements will also be made to the existing estate, in particular the central garden. It is a surprisingly large space, and should really be an oasis in an otherwise very built-up area, and somewhere that can be used by the many residents and families in the estate – but it is really not well used at the moment. This is partly because like the estate it’s been designed in a very traditional late-1950s way with a single pathway and not much else – without anything in the way of play equipment, no seating (there was some but it was removed some years ago), and really not a lot to offer other than a green view out of the window.
The whole garden area will now be completely redesigned, with a wavy path running round the courtyard, new planting, new seating, and lot more variety in the layout. At the moment the grass runs right up to the windows, the plans will instead see decorative planting introduced round the edges to give a bit of privacy to the ground floor flats. There will also be a proper childrens’ play area in the middle of the courtyard – labeled ‘6‘ on the plans below. The large trees will be pruned to let a bit more light in to the space. The aim is to make this feel like a place people want to be, and remove the somewhat abandoned no-man’s-land feel it has at the moment.
Managing access has been an ongoing problem with the current gardens – they’re supposed to be a private residents-only area, but the three existing access gates keep being broken and left open, which leave them open to all sorts of dodgy characters, street drinkers, and the like – as well as large and not-very-friendly dogs running free – all of which has understaandably put residents off using them. The current flimsy gates will be replaced with proper new gate controls on the ground floor of the two new buildings, that will make the gardens a proper ‘residents only’ space. The rather hidden away gate to Woodmere Close (and Lavender Hill) which has proved especially hard to secure will be permanently closed, with the stairs removed and new bushes and planting blocking off that entrance route for good. The “Ruffians’ corner” seating area hidden away at that corner of the gardens, pictured below – which has been a magnet for antisocial behaviour – will also be reduced in size and linked better to the garden.
There will also be improvements to Ashley Crescent, where two large areas of paving (one pictured below; the other is at the end of Dunston Close) will be replaced with new areas of landscaping with wildflower gardens and bushes. This is partly in an attempt to compensate for some loss of greenery with the new buildings, but is mainly designed to provide a rainwater-absorbing area, in an area that has seen localised flooding. The floods are someimes caused by rainwater flowing down the hill when drains and gulleys get blocked – but a long-lost river also runs right underneath these planned reinwater-absorption areas – it was originally a side channel of the Thames known as the Battersea Channel, and later became a somewhat manky river called the Heathwall (which we’ve also reported on), before being more or less completely buried, emerging only to surprise people when it occasionally bursts out of the drains in big storms.
The planned development will also involve changes to Tyneham Close’s rubbish collection arrangements, which have been an a bit of a shambles for many years. At the moment rubbish has to be taken some distance, either to a poorly designed bin shed that that’s far too small (and which has repeatedly been taken over by rats), or to a series of open air recycling bins scattered around the estate, most of which are an absolute haven for flytipping. The ground floors of the two new buildings will each include a fully-enclosed rubbish storage site, built to modern standards. By including enough indoor space for all the bins, and having a gate system to limit access to residents, this should remove the ugly and messy outdoor bin areas (pictured below) that previously attracted so much flytipping.
The estate has five car parking spaces that are a bit of a free-for-all at the moment, facing Tyneham Road. These will be reorganised to have two blue bage spaces, and some secure cycle parking (34 internal spaces, four external ones, and four for visitors). This represents a small overall loss of parking space, but for the first time existing residents will have secure & lockable cycle storage in the estate, rather than having to take bikes up to upper level flats.
This is the third and final stage of the building programme in Tyneham Close & the Gideon Road estate. We’ve reported quite a lot on the series of small Council-led building projects off Lavender Hill – from when they were first proposed, when work started, only to be followed by a long pase while it was all half-built, to reporting on the generally decent results of the first phase.
There’s a second set to get building at some stage soon, behind The Crown pub – where again the plans have evolved with time, and our most recent article is here, in that case the project is ready for construction to start. We also reported on a separate bit of work to improve the gardens on the existing estate.
Wandsworth has a fairly solid track record on building new Council houses – the ‘Hidden Homes‘ programme was created by the Conservative council in the early 2010s, with the aim of using up scraps of land on existing Council-owned estates to create new affordable housing. Most of the funding came from the money developers of shiny new flats would pay the Council when they said they couldn’t fit the affordable housing portion on the main site. The current Labour one has continued with the programme, albeit with the new name ‘Homes for Wandsworth‘, and with the aim of delivering 1000 homes for council level rent on council owned sites. You might say that this small development of 14 small and mid-sized flats is a drop in the ocean – after all, the 2023 local plan has year-on-year target at 1,950 homes a year up to 2028! – but these are nevertheless good quality flats being built, and the wider works should improve the estte as a whole. It is likely that most of the residents of these new flats will be people relocated from the York Road estate as part of the rebuilding and redevelopment programme there.
As Tyneham Close sees its forst significant building work for decased, it’s maybe worth a brief historical detour. Tyneham Close was built in 1948-50, by architects Howes & Jackman – it was one first post-war housing schemes of any size built by Battersea Borough Council, and also represented the Council’s first employment of private architects for housing. It replaced a more traditional road running right through the middle of the estate and linking Tyneham Road to Lavender Hill; the photo below from the planning documents shows the old buildings roughly where Tyneham Court’s central entrance is, just before they were demolished. The pathway behind the bollards is what would become Shirley Grove, the same view now looks like this.
As the ‘bomb damage’ map below shows (where the new buildings’ location is marked in red), these houses had been badly bomb-damaged and were clearly deemed beyond rescue at the time. What is maybe more surprising is that large numbers of perfectly seviceable houses both east and west of the ste were also demolished, to make way for the Gideon Road estate and the Ashley Crescent Estate. It’s not too clear why this was done – the costs involved must have been considerable, and because what was built in the place of the terraced houses was broadsly similar density to what was there before, the overall amount of housing presumably remained much the same. The Victorian houes were no doubt old and tired, but this part of Lavender Hill had been built to decent quality.
Before Tyneham Close, Howes & Jackman architects had previously designed several very smart 1930s projects, and Tyneham Close was clearly a fairly happy project for everyone involved as they went on to design lots more housing in Battersea over the next 25 years – including being the architects behind Battersea’s more architecturally debatable York Road estate in the late 1960s.
Back to the present – the latest proposals for Tyneham Close are currently in consultation. If you’d like to see the detailed plans, and make comments, search for planning application 2025/0661 at wandsworth.gov.uk/planning. Comments can be made until the 17th April (and in our experience, late comments are often also accepted where it’s feasible for the planners to do so). These plans have alreay involved a lot of consultation and meetings with residents, and we don’t expect them to be controversial. And somewhat unusually, the Council is applying to itself for permission (which is allowed in cases like this, under Regulation 3 of the Town and Country Planning Act) – so realistically it’s likely it will be approved!
Lavender-hill.uk is mainly focussed on the Lavender Hill area of Clapham Junction. If you found this of interest, 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. To receive new posts by e-mail (for free), sign up here.
The Thames was once lined with a forest of cranes, which were central to London’s status as a city trading with the world. Battersea was no exception, with factories, warehouses, and docks lining most of the river from Vauxhall to Wandsworth, turning out all manner of things from candles and crucibles to flour and glucose. As the city moved on, the cranes started to melt away, gradually at first but then increasingly quickly as the industrial riverside caught the eye of property developers. Most were unceremoniously scrapped, but as we got down the last few, Londoners started to recognise their value as the last witnesses to a major part of the city’s history – and we have late-1980s developments to thank for the preservation of a handful of cranes in Canary Wharf, Silvertown and Canada Water.
And a couple at Battersea Power Station – where a couple of particularly large and powerful travelling cranes were built on the jetty, to lift coal from barges in to a huge coal bunker in front of the power station, from where it was put in to conveyors. Battersea Power Station was actually quite a late arrival to the Thames crane game, with its two large travelling cranes being built alongside the two wings of the main power station, in 1936 and 1947. They were both made by Stothert & Pitt of Bath, famous UK crane makers who built hundreds of cranes that once stood along both sides of the Thames, as well as around the country and further afield – they were described as ‘building cranes for the world’ (and they’re are still in business – making spares and aftermarket support for all their dockside and offshore cranes that are still in operation).
Our photos here are of a model of the power station from when it was still running, and show how these two cranes worked. Barges full of coal would moor up next to the jetty, the cranes would lower great big scoops in to them and lift coal out of the barges, and then drop it on to a pair of hoppers (also on rails) which then transferred coal to a conveyor that ran along the jetty, and – via a series more conveyors and another giant travelling crane – sent it to either a large store in the area between the power station and the river (where the park is now but which would have been a series of big hills of coal) or up to the power station boilers. The cranes were hugely powerful, and carried on unloading up to 240 tonnes of coal hour into the power station until it closed for good in 1983.
John Broome took over – with plans to turn the power station in to a theme park, building on his success at Alton Towers. He may have only paid the relative pittance of £1.5 million for the power station, but he spent £45 million of his own money on a huge programme of works, removing asbestos and much of the machinery in and around the site (as well as a large part of the original roof) and shoring up the foundations. This saw the big travelling crane over the coal storage area removed and destroyed in the late 1980s. The coal conveyors also vanished, although the space where the conveyor fed in to the riverside wall of the power station is still there, and is now the window of one of the flats in the power station (which – having one of the largest windows facing the river – was rumoured to be the one bought by bear Grylls).
All that was left after the big 1980s clearout was the two travelling cranes on the jetty. They used to be able to travel along rails covering the full length of the jetty, but only short sections of the rails remain in place. John’s plan was to keep them as a key historic feature, linking the power station to the river. Obviously that plan all fell apart, work ground to a halt in 1987, and the whole place spent a few decades in the wilderness. Your author took the photo below in 2007, when our cranes were still standing proud, if a little wistfully, over the wasteland that surrounded the power station.
Battersea, and London, has changed a lot since 1987. Following the demolition of the last few riverside warehouses near the heliport further west, our two cranes are now the very last trace of Battersea’s riverside heritage. Fortunately they’re now part of the listed building (the Historic England listing for the Power Station describes them as ‘parts of the original complex and now rare riverside features’). So they should be safe, right?
There’s just one small problem – which is that Battersea’s big cranes aren’t currently at Battersea. Worse – there’s a bit of a mystery about their current whereabouts. In 2014, both cranes were temporarily dismantled and removed from the jetty by the developers of Battersea Power Station. This was part of the linked project to extend the Northern Line to Battersea – the idea was that the earth dug out from three kilometres of new tube tunnels & stations (as well as works on the Battersea site) would be taken out to the pier on a modern conveyor belt system, and put in to a barge – and then floated off to Goshems Farm in East Tilbury in the Thames estuary where it was used to cover over an area of poor quality, polluted land and create new farmland. A clever reuse of the pier, and also an ingenious way of avoiding many thousands of lorry journeys through central London.
The cranes were taken by barge to the Port of Tilbury, which remains one of London’s largest ports, and the place where most of the things that are not ‘standard’ containers arrive. At the time the line was that the cranes were being taken to Tilbury for safe storage and specialist restoration; and that they were expected to return to the new Riverside Park three years later in 2017. The cranes definitely made it to Tilbury – there are a few photos of them being unloaded. But from then on things went very quiet. 2017 came and went without even a whisper of the cranes’ restoration. The new riverside park opened, the power station opened, the new riverside boat service opened, the Northern Line opened, even the pier the cranes once worked on opened to the public thanks to new footbridges and railings. It was all done to a very high standard – with a lot of care taken to preserve the remaining heritage features of the power station. But where were the restored cranes?
OK, so maybe there was a bit of a delay. There was clearly work to do on the cranes – they needed rustproofing, a proper repaint, and probably also some works to ensure their long term preservation. At least they were safe in the hands of specialist restorers, and they would no doubt come back to join the other preserved historical aspects in pride of place on the Battersea pier.
Or maybe not. Because more than ten years later, there’s still no sign of the cranes. We got curious about what was going on a while back, and so did a fair few others. You can’t just wander in to the Port of Tilbury – but you can get a feel for what is inside, thanks to Google! And after a certain amount of digging around, we established that the cranes have indeed been in ‘storage’ for many years at the Port of Tilbury. The two cranes are more or less in the middle of the photo above, in and among the scrap metal mountains and heaps of gravel and aggregate.
Unfortunately it’s not especially good ‘storage’. It would maybe be fairer to say that they seem to have been left in a hundred or so pieces spread along a thin strip between the large heap of gravel and a service road within the port.
The closer we look, the more we can see the state of the cranes – all the pieces are there, but this doesn’t look great for the promised ‘careful restoration’ – which we imagine means some stripping of old paint, some painting with rust resistant paint, maybe new glazing, and making sure the structures were able to continue as one of Battersea’s key riverside features.
Some might say it looks more like the cranes have been there for a decade mouldering away – without any restoration at all! The actual location of that storage is here – they are, at the time of writing, visible in the current Google maps aerial photo view, along the side of the gravel storage heap.
A bit of further digging led to some photos taken from the ground. Would this reveal that at least some work was underway?
Oh dear. This is one of the big pulleys, which you’ll recognise from the photos at the top of this post. Not looking too good.
Blimey O’Riley… not looking good at all. This is, or was, one of the main support legs, plus what looks like some old spray cans, some plastic sheeting, some unknown manky green stuff, and some weeds. There are also some worryingly brutal cutting lines in the steelwork where the cranes were chopped up for transport and storage..
The situation’s not much better when it comes to the operators’ cabs, which are also in a rather frightening condition (and we should note that these four photos aren’t ours – they were posted on X by @dsb_malloy).
Fortunately we’re not alone in being a bit worried about this key bit of Battersea heritage. The Twentieth Century Society, indefatigable campaigners to save the architectural heritage of the last century, are also on the case. In 2023 they published an article exploring the mystery of the cranes, and their case worker got on the case to try and work out what was happening.
They spoke to the Port of London authority, who confirmed that the crane components were still in storage at Tilbury Docks, but who also let slip that that to their knowledge no restoration work had yet been undertaken! The society also contacted a spokesperson for Battersea Power Station Ltd, who issued a short statement on their plans for the restoration and return of the listed cranes:
‘To date, we have been focused on successfully opening the restored Power Station which welcomed the public for the first time in October 2022 and since then, we have introduced new heritage items throughout Power Station Park, such as original turbine equipment and segments from the original chimneys. The cranes remain in storage at the port of Tilbury in Essex, and we will be bringing forward a plan for these in the future.’
Fair enough, the developers been busy, there was a lot to do on the power station, and we’ve all been impressed by the results of their work, which has rescued the main power station building from the last chance saloon, and created a thriving new destination. But reading between the lines it’s clear that the 20th Century Society weren’t especially impressed at being told that even making a plan for the cranes, nearly a decade after they’d been shipped off, was still ‘in the future’ – let alone actually doing any of the promised restoration work. They noted that they cranes are a key listed structure of the wider Battersea site and a rare original industrial feature, and the Society called on the developers to expedite their plans for the restoration and return of the cranes.
But wait, because it gets worse. A decade exposed to the elements in a mangled heap in Tilbury wasn’t great for the cranes, but they were at least in a secure perimeter in a busy port. Since then, word has reached us that the cranes aren’t in Tilbury any more…
So where are they? No one knew – and it took a bit of minor detective work to find out. We spotted an unrelated post on X that shows the laying of some new tarmac. It’s definitely a tidy effort, and who doesn’t like the satisfying sight of a road roller making a crisp clean new surface that’s immediately walkable and driveable… But in this case what we’re interested in is not the fine resurfacing work, but what can be seen in the background:
Yep – it’s Battersea’s cranes. We’d recognise those bits of tangled steelwork anywhere! More detective work ensued, to try and track down where this new location actually is. Helpfully there’s a dock crane in the background labelled ‘Cory Environmental’, which pins it down to London – where Cory, who grew a major business transporting coal up the Thames (where, in a curious twist, they used to supply the coal to Battersea), but who now specialise in transporting rubbish down the river – have much of their business.
The unusual design of the cranes helps too, because there aren’t many of those cranes left either. We’ve pinned it down to an abandoned landfill (maps link) at Mucking Marsh, way down the Thames. Not many people have ever heard of this and even fewer have been there, but many of us have contributed to it because it’s the site where millions of tonnes of London’s rubbish got dumped over the years – this was one of the largest landfills in western Europe. The aerial photo below shows the spot.
Mucking marsh landfill is a very remote spot. The dump closed in 2010, and it’s now a mix of bird sanctuaries, big skies, and simply empty space – you can’t really build anything on it because – like most old landfills – the land is slowly subsiding, and the rubbish beneath is still making methane. Now other than that bit of rather smart resurfacing work we saw earlier, this doesn’t feel like the sort of place anyone is about to do any specialist crane repair work – there’s nothing there except the three dock cranes that used to offload waste from barges, no buildings to safely store tools, not a lot of power, no water supply, nothing.
So why are the cranes way out here in the wilderness? The leading theory is that this is cheaper ‘storage’ than the Port of Tilbury, not least as the Port is within a security perimeter whereas this, realistically speaking, is a field. Maybe the space by the gravel heaps in Tilbury was needed for something more active. But maybe more likely is that this super-obscure location just another step to hoping we all forget about our cranes, or that they get vandalised to the point where they can be declared ‘beyond repair’.
Another photo of the cranes emerged a few months later, in August last year, suggesting the cranes were still there – there’s not so much clue as to the location other than there being a tree in the background (so clearly not Tilbury docks) – it may also be Mucking Wharf Landfill although there’s not a lot there either in the way of trees. Condition of the cranes again leaving rather a lot to be desired.
This part of the old landfill is not somewhere you can officially get to – it’s deep in to private land, even if in practice this is largely left to itself most of the time – the end of the road at the access checkpoint is shown below.
Which really raises the question – is this remote and forgotten landfill the end of the road for Battersea’s cranes?
We hope not, but it’s time we all made a bit more noise about them before we lose them forever, because this ongoing neglect of listed local landmarks just won’t do. It seems no work has yet been done on restoration, even though they have now been off site for over a decade, and were supposed to be back, on site and restored, in 2017. They’re a core part of a listed building, and a pretty famous one at that, one of London’s most recognised buildings.
This feels like a bit of a screw up by a developer who have otherwise not really put a step wrong, and who have to their credit used the heritage in the main building wisely. I’m not really sure why the cranes fell out of favour: they’re not huge, renovation isn’t a particularly big or pricey affair (we’re talking safety check on the various bolts and struts, bit of sandblasting, a few panes of glass, some red oxide primer and a couple of coats of grey paint really), and they’d make quite the landmark for the tourist trail.
Perhaps importantly, the cranes are easily compatible with the food and drink offer that’s being developed on the pier – which has been launched as an outdoor extension of the Arcade food court. In the original design for the redeveloped power station, the cranes and hoppers act as features on the boardwalk, and we don’t see any obvious reason why this wouldn’t still work. They’d also make the pier – which already sees huge crowds arrive by boat on the weekend, and even more arrive from the west alongside the riverside pathway – even more of a landmark feature.
The power station as a whole came off the ‘heritage at risk’ register four years ago, and the work by and large has been solid and carefully thought through. Killing off our cranes through wilful neglect (“oh no, they’re too far gone to be reused now…”) seems to be a real mistake. You only need to look at how the UK’s other heritage cranes have fared. Glasgow’s Finneston Crane, for example, has become an emblem of the city, guaranteed to feature in some form or other alongside the tartans and saltires in any tacky souvenir shop –
Bristol’s M Shed Cargo cranes, built in the 1950s by the same people as Battersea’s cranes and pictured below, have become a core tourist attraction of a similarly maritime city – and part of the adjacent museum’s core collection, drawing crowds to the M Sheds and the south of the dock; these cranes were listed in 2022. Saving the cranes wasn’t a walk in the park there either, and there was a battle to save the Bristol cranes back in 1974 when the docks were closed, as the Bristol Museums report:
Many of the remaining cranes were sold for scrap, including four of the eight that served M Shed. A group of local people recognised that the cranes were an important link to Bristol’s past and set up the pressure group City Docks Ventures in order to save those that remained. It was a very close thing, but City Docks Ventures managed to buy back two of the cranes from the scrap merchant they had been sold to, and Bristol City Council bought the remaining two.
Back to Battersea’s suffering cranes – the core point here is that Battersea Power Station development Corporation Ltd need to do the right thing, get their act together, and actually get the cranes back where they belong, as part of the listed building. We don’t want to become a repeat of the dismal scenes in Manchester where their last two cranes were summarily demolished in 2013 due to a lack of Council funding (and, frankly, imagination in Salford’s Council). With over 22 milliontourists already having visited the power station since its reopening, getting these features back is a no brainer. Restoring these is hardly rocket science from a technical perspective, the quayside’s ready to have them back, and considering the scale of the whole development the cost of renovating the cranes ids pocket change.
But regular readers won’t be surprised to hear we’ve also gone and had a dig through the planning documents to work out what’s gone on here and whose responsibility it is to sort this mess out. The full details are in the box below – and you probably only want to venture there if you have an interest in planning detail! – but the summary is that this is in the power station developers’ hands (even though TfL also have some role, as they used the jetty for a fair few years as part of the Northern Line construction work), and that the process is characterised by a long series of mysterious delays and vagueness. Ultimately these cranes are supposed to be put back – the commitments have been made, and it’s a requirement of the works to the listed building – but, as of yet, there is no sign of any real action or even planning for how they will be returned.
We asked Battersea Power Station Development Company about the status of, and plans for, the cranes, and their spokesperson said:
“The cranes remain in storage and we will be bringing forward a plan for these in the future. In the meantime, Battersea Power Station has appointed maritime consulting engineers to conduct regular condition reports to ensure they are being stored correctly.
Celebrating the industrial heritage of Battersea Power Station has always been a key priority throughout the redevelopment of the site and is evident in the transformational restoration of the Grade II* listed building itself, where we have preserved as many of the original features as possible. We have also continued to develop our heritage programme to provide new ways for visitors to connect with the landmark’s rich history, including the launch of the official guided tour of the Power Station, which offers visitors rare access into Control Room A, and the installation of heritage elements in Power Station Park, such as original turbine equipment and segments from the original chimneys.”
Fingers crossed the cranes’ stay at the very outer fringe of London is only a temporary one. But in the meantime please do spread the word about the cranes – as the more people know about them, remember them, and care about them, the more likely they are to one day make a return to Battersea. The last thing we want to hear is that they’ve been deemed ‘beyond rescue’ and disappeared forever.
The small print: The long, complicated planning history of the cranes
We’ve dug through the planning process, and it’s complex! The first big planning permission setting out the commitments to preserving and restoring the heritage elements dates back to 2004 (case 2004/1367 – these are all available in full detail at wandsworth.gov.uk/planning). This was a big planning case, covering most of the power station development (we remember seeing the paper version at the time, which was heaps of ring binders). It explained that the existing jetty would be retained and developed to provide facilities for riverboat transport, with new bridges going out to the pier, and boarding piers for three boats at once added on the outer side of the jetty. Most of the jetty surface would remain open as a notional extension of the riverside walk with sheltered seating. A new two-storey building, raised above the jetty, would provide ticket, information kiosks and toilet facilities for passengers, with a cafe on the top level. The two cranes would be refurbished and retained as features. The image below shows the sort of layout that was envisaged.
This was followed by a listed building consent (case 2004/4645) seeking approval for the removal of the grab buckets from the cranes, which was approved on the condition that a detailed photographic record be made of the jetty and structures and sent to the local authority as well as English Heritage (and the record is available online, it’s a high quality 64-page report). A somewhat grainy scan of it is available online. Another condition was that “following removal the grab buckets should be stored in a safe position on site in a location to be notified in writing to the local planning authority and shall not be broken up or disposed of without the prior written approval of the local planning authority”.
A couple of years later another listed building consent (case 2006/3346) was granted for repairs, alterations and additions to the jetty to provide pedestrian access, riverboat and associated facilities including the installation of a new pontoon with covered ramp and stair access; bridge links to the land, structures to provide ticketing, toilet, information/educational, and allied facilities; new surfaces, and associated works. The Power Station site changed hands to at the end of December 2006 through the purchase of the owning companies.
The big planning permission moment (from the perspective of the cranes) came a few years after this (case 2009/3577, approved in 2011– which was part of a bundle of four applications covering the whole development), which allowed the dismantling for the power station work- “Repair, restoration, installation of structures on, and other works to the jetty in association with its conversion to provide pedestrian access and a river transport facility including a passenger terminal building, a pontoon with waiting shelter, ramps, new surfaces, restoration of the cranes and hoppers and associated structures, bridge links to the land; and, works to the river wall including raising its height, and provision of infrastructure connected with the delivery of fuel from barges in association with the development of the former Power Station and adjacent land“.
This was a mammoth planning proposal, probably one of the biggest ever seen in Wandsworth; even the committee summary report is 312 pages long! This was a full / detailed application for the jetty and riverside structures as well as the power station itself – in other words, the works that are also subject of listed building consent applications – and a broader outline-level plan for some of the later phases on the site.
Under these plans the jetty would serve different purposes during different phases of the development. Its eventual purpose would be to serve as a passenger facility for a riverbus service and as a form of extension to the riverside path, and also as a facility for fuel delivery by river to the energy centre. In the interim, it would function as a muck away and materials delivery point for barges to facilitate the use of the river for construction and thereby relieve pressure on the road network (our photo below shows it in action, with the conveyor built to the pier). A temporary pier would be constructed to the west of the jetty, to accommodate a riverbus service until the jetty was no longer needed for construction purposes and the works to develop the jetty for its final purpose were complete. At that stage, the riverbus service would transfer to the new jetty facility and the temporary pier would be removed.
The works for the eventual form of the jetty would include the construction of a passenger terminal building towards the east end of the Jetty, and the installation of a passenger pier on its north side comprising of a floating pontoon (with its own passenger shelter). Two new wide bridges would connect the jetty to land. A key point is that the existing cranes and hoppers would be refurbished and retained in a position at the west end of the Jetty. The application noted that the jetty and two steel framed and clad cranes are important reminder of the historical industrial nature of the riverside location – and that the jetty, cranes and river wall are significant curtilage structures to the Grade II* Power Station giving a reminder of the historic link between the Power Station and the River and are therefore of particular importance in views along the river.
The planning application explained that the cranes would be refurbished in accordance with a method statement, providing for removal of deleterious and health threatening materials such as asbestos and bird droppings; transporting cranes elements and hoppers to Turbine Hall B (in the power station) for shot blasting, repairing components as necessary and repainting; and, the re-assembly of cranes and hoppers onto the jetty.
The plans noted that “Current thinking” expected the whole power station site development to be phased over a 14 year period (early 2011 to end 2024), divided into seven main construction phases. The Jetty was to be completed between May 2014 and June 2019.
The planning inspectors recommended approval – with a condition that prior to works commencing on the cranes, a detailed method statement should be submitted to and approved in writing by the Local Planning Authority to show how dismantling/re-assembling the cranes would take place – and that works should be begun not later than ten years from the date of consent.
Work finally got properly going – and the riverside park opened up. Our photos here show it part way through, when a huge excavation was udnerway to build (among other things) a huge heat and power plant underneath.
In 2019 temporary permission was granted for footbridges and decking so the pier could be opened to the public for the following three years (application 2019/1595), which went ahead and which has proved popular with visitors.
In 2022 the developers sought permission to keep the arrangements on the pier for another 18 months, albeit there was no mention of the cranes (application 2022/1449); they said at the time that “As previously discussed with Officers from the London Borough of Wandsworth and Historic England this temporary Jetty is intended to remain operational until the permanent Jetty solution is developed. The permanent Jetty solution will involve a comprehensive redevelopment incorporating a mix of uses to help activate the space and respond positively to the river, its use as well as the Power Station and its park.“. For reasons unknown, no decision was ever made on the 2022 planning application.
The 2022 application also said that “the design for the permanent Jetty solution, including the cranes, will be progressed early next year, with a subsequent application being submitted to [Wandsworth Council] and Historic England“. However several years later, there’s no sign of the promised follow up on the ‘permanent jetty solution’.
There was a second, rather similar, application made a couple of years after the main big one for Battersea project – but this one wasn’t by the developers, but by the Mayor of London & Transport for London. This one (case 2013/3009) sought permission for ‘the repair, restoration and installation of structures on, and other works to, a jetty in association with its temporary use to provide a river transport facility for the exportation of excavated materials in connection with the Northern Line Extension project, including the temporary relocation of cranes and hoppers, refurbishment works to the footprint, […] and subsequent restoration of the cranes, hoppers and associated structures and bridge links to the land.‘.
This TfL application was essentially a backup – so that even if the power station development was unpicked or somehow delayed, TfL still had what they needed to get the northern Line excavation works going. It is similarly unambiguous on the importance of the cranes, and the commitment to reinstate them. The heritage statement says, right at the start –
2.2 The Significance of the Structures: There is a consensus that the Jetty, Cranes and River Wall are significant curtilage structures to the Grade II* Battersea Power Station, their special interest being as a permanent reminder of the historic link between the Power Station and the River Thames, without which the building would never have been constructed. The structures, therefore, are of particular importance in views along the river, but also as a reminder of the industrial nature of the long use of the site.
In the end, this is a long way of telling us what we already knew – this is a key bit of a listed building, and restoring and above all returning the cranes to Battersea needs to be done. Dates and timelines have been left to run and run, and while (unlike start dates) there aren’t set dates for finishing developments, it’s time this was sorted out.
Our thanks to those who helped track down the cranes. Headline image adapted from this image by Mike Hudson, and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Lavender Hill for Me is a community website working to support Lavender Hill, a neighbourhood in Battersea, London and a home to about 250 shops, restaurants and small businesses. We take an active interest in developments that could improve Lavender Hill for residents, traders and visitors.
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