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.
This post looks at a bundle of changes affecting traders at the end of Lavender Hill nearest Clapham Junction – including several of the most long-established local businesses. The first change is at the Kitchen Shoppe – which has been trading for over 20 years, and is one of the last remaining general household stores in Clapham Junction. They stock a product range that includes a selection of DIY goods, cleaning products, small furnishings and accessories, buckets and storage boxes, art supplies, a trademark feature of somewhat fluorescent floral garlands, and of course a big mix of kitchen equipment – pans, glassware, utensils, cookware, and the like. It’s up for lease, at just short of £90,000 a year, with the basement potentially available separately for £22,000. The Kitchen Shoppe has turned a modest profit over the years, but as an honest purveyor of household goods there’s no way the current owner can generate that sort of income for the premises, so the “Everything must go!” clearance signs have been put up. We understand the team is hunting for somewhere else to continue trading from, but the current location will close in the next couple of months. It’ll be sad to see the end of one of our original traders, after many years as maybe not the most fashionable or glamorous business in Clapham Junction, but an undeniably useful one run by a helpful and pragmatic team. This also really illustrates the way rental rates have been climbing up: despite all the talk of everything going online, rent costs keep climbing, and in a story that’s all too familiar, many of of our more established traders haven’t a chance when a major lease renewal and the associated huge jump in rent arrives.
So what happens next? The Kitchen Shoppe premises at 248-250 Lavender Hill is a big one in a busy location, and it also has a sizeable basement. For slightly complicated historic reasons (which we’ll write a future post on in our local history series), the building goes much deeper than the neighbours, and cuts in to what would logically have been the back gardens of the terrace of houses on Mossbury Road. This means at 3,700 square feet, it’s far too big for some retailers, and would be more in the size range for a Tesco Express-type supermarket… if it wasn’t for being a rather complicated shape – spread over two levels (2,500 square feet on the ground floor, itself split to two levels, with the rest in large basement area), a relatively complicated situation when it comes to delivery access, and also the area being somewhat saturated with food stores (Tesco are the only big chain not to already have a store in the immediate vicinity – and they’re moving their not-too-distant Falcon Road store this weekend to a rather larger unit across the road, so won’t want another this close).
This probably means food and drink use is a more likely outcome here – as there’s easily the space for a kitchen and a decent size dining area. It’s a growth sector for a busy and fairly wealthy town centre like Clapham Junction, and there aren’t that many places of this size available around the station. If this looks like the place for you, you’ll want to contact Galaxy Real Estate.
Change are also afoot at the Party Superstore, who have been trading on Lavender Hill since 1994 (and who gained a degree of fame when it was completely destroyed in the 2011 London riots, costing its owner Duncan Mundell over £200,000 – only to bounce back within weeks in space lent by Debenhams next door, and later reopen in the Lavender Hill unit bigger and brighter than ever). We wrote a whole separate post about this particular set of plans a week ago, and there’s much more detail included there – but in short our mini investigation suggests at least part of the unit may be becoming branch of Rudy’s Pizza, whose 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. They’re a small chain with 30 or so branches – including the one in Soho pictured below.
Further up Lavender Hill, high street plastic surgery chain sk:n closed very suddenly last summer when the entire business folded overnight, to the surprise of many of its staff and customers, many of whom were part way through prepaid treatments when it all fell apart. It seems the lingering impact of a complete shutdown during the pandemic, coupled with many customers having tighter budgets, and rapid growth in the sector that had maybe led to too many people offering these services, got the better of it. After several months of closure the good news is that part of the business has found a buyer in the form of Lorena Cosmetics Holdings, who have reopened a cluster of the 70 original branches (re-hiring about 150 of the previous staff in doing so) – including the one at 263 Lavender Hill.
Further along Lavender Hill, Sugar Cane bar has been sold – after owner Alfred Zega decided that after 17 years it was time to move on. The business and the lease of the premises was put on the market last year as a going concern for an up front payment of around £100k. Again this is a big place – with a capacity for around 100 customers standing and 80 seated, as well as a basement club with a capacity of about 70. It’s a busy place with an annual turnover of around £740,000 net of VAT. A 25-year lease, of which five years remain, will transfer onto the new owner who would then take on rent at £80,000 per annum.
The business was sold by Christie & Co; and the buyer is A Taste of Africa Limited, a newly created hospitality business. There’s not much information out there on who the buyers are, but they have been reported to be experienced bar and restaurant operators, who plan to bring in a new offering to the market. This means the bar is set for change – but ultimately this will remain a business that sets out to deliver a strong late-night experience
Over on St John’s Road, we’ll be seeing a new branch of Pepe’s Piri Piriat No. 18 – a small unit that has had a lot of uses in recent years including an opticians and a travel agent – it’s the one that is STA Travel in the rather vintage Google Street View photo above. Pepe’s have a loosely similar range to Nando’s, including their own range of sauces – but a more takeaway focus, which is just as well as the unit is pretty small – the proposed frontage from the planning application is shown below. They have been growing fast via a franchise model, and have just over 200 stores around the UK, including 40 or so in London, with the nearest current in Balham.
Bear with us for a short historical detour. A little known fact about the premises is that this rather shabby row of small buildings are among the oldest houses in Clapham Junction; they were a little terrace of farm workers’ cottages way before the railways arrived, when this was all fields; the Falconbrook river flowed along their back gardens, with a farm track in front. The map below shows the layout in the very early days of Clapham Junction station, with both front gardens & the still-not-buried Falconbrook river visible.
Maybe surprisingly, these particular shops are also locally listed buildings. The picture below shows them in the late 1800s when shop extensions had been built in their front gardens. The one with the awning saying G.J Brown, Bucher is he one that’s set to become Pepe’s, it is still just about recognisable even though the shop has gained a second storey.
Back on the subject of local businesses – the former Fitness First that (as we reported at the time) closed very suddenly back at the end of 2023, and whose future had been a bit of a mystery, is now well on the way to reopening. It’ll still be a gym, this time run by Anytime Fitness – who already run lots of gyms all over London and around the country; their nearest current branches are in Clapham Park and Acre Lane so maybe it’s not surprising they pounced on the opportunity to take over this large and well-presented building, that offers three big open floors with lots of natural light. The site had new windows fitted last year, and a fair bit of internal work has been going on, with early membership sales ongoing.
Mystery surrounds the future of the Sports bar and Grill next to The Falcon pub – which has vanished, after five years in business. We’ve seen some minor signs of activity inside, but there’s not much sign of either a refit, or of the property being up for lease. This is a big, expensive space in one of the busiest bits of the town centre; let us know if you know what’s going on here.
Much the same goes for the former William Hill at 164 Falcon Road (also known as Unit 13 of Shopstop, as despite being somewhat detached, it is linked to the shopping centre at the station). We posted way back in 2019 about the sudden disappearance of almost all the betting shops on Lavender Hill, drive mainly by changes in rules on fixed-odds betting machines. All the shops in question quickly found new tenants – well, all except this one, which has been vacant for more than five years! The landlord’s on the hook for business rates for the empty premises (over £15,000 a year!), which makes it strange that they’ve not even put a popup charity shop in here just to keep the place ticking over more cheaply. It is ‘To Let’, and while it’s on a rather trafficky corner it is in a very busy spot, a 900-square-foot unit here should normally be very lettable, even if at circa £75k a year it’s not a cheap option. If this is the space for you, get in touch with Forge or JLL…
And finally as sister site Clapham Junction Insider has reported, the biggest site of all, W.RE’s redevelopment of the Debenhams / Arding & Hobbs site, has found the first major tenant for the new and very smart office space on the top floors, as workspace provider x+why take over the whole of the third floor. They will be one of the office tenants; but they will also operate the building’s amenities including the roof terrace and front-of-house services. They plan for a range of memberships (starting at about £400/month), with the possibility of renting spaces for special events, and booking spaces even when not working regularly on the third floor. As a business already managing over 430,000 square feet of flexible office, meeting and events spaces, reception and club space buildings across ten sites in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Milton Keynes, this is a solid start for the last piece of the Arding & Hobbs jigsaw, and speaks to the strong confidence in the overall town centre.
Update (April) – In a bit of good news we hear that both the Kitchen Shoppe, and the Party Superstore, could potentially be continuing to trade in smaller parts of the current shops. The planning application for the Party Superstore still hasn’t properly activated (maybe because of technical issues, maybe because relevant documents are still needed).
We post from time to time on retail 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 Party Superstore is one of the most well known shops on Lavender Hill. It’s been trading for thirty years – since 1994! – and gained a certain fame when it was completely destroyed in a major arson attack in the London riots in 2011, costing its owner Duncan Mundell over £200,000 – but bounced back to reopen just six weeks later in space lent by Debenhams next door, and then finally reopened in the original shop two years later after a full rebuild, bigger and brighter than ever. It has a huge range, over two floors and spreading over what were once four separate shopfronts – and sometimes sees quite impressive queues before key fancy dress times of the year.
However we’ve spotted a mysterious planning application that suggests change may be afoot. Application 2024/4363 went in not long before Christmas, proposing the “change of use of 270 Lavender Hill from a fancy dress shop to a pizza restaurant” with the installation of a new shop front and of a new roof lantern to rear flat roof. It also proposed the installation of a new extraction duct to the rear elevation, presumably to serve a kitchen. The further details needed to get a planning consultation going were never provided, so it’s not clear if this covers the whole of the Party Superstore site (which was originally four units and so goes much wider than just No.270), or just that section of it.
Mission Mars are a Manchester-based group in the food and drink sector, they created Albert’s Schloss (a set of four Bavarian beer halls serving “Europe’s best tankards of bier, Alpine plates and seven days of showtime”) and Rudy’s Pizza (a small chain specialising in Neapolitan pizza, with thirty branches, including seven in London, who have been expanding rapidly and sold over two million pizzas a year). If our speculation is right this proposal may therefore be for a new branch of Rudy’s Pizza, whose 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 Soho branch is pictured below.
It’s an obvious location for Rudy’s Pizza – a decent sized unit right in the middle of a busy town centre, and one that seems to have a fairly insatiable appetite for Neapolitan pizza if the experience of our other traders (including highly-rated and ever popular Pizza Pellone at the other end of Lavender Hill) is anything to go by.
Rather mysteriously, the application for a change of use has now timed out without ever going live. This can mean many things – sometimes it’s because particular documents needed as part of applications weren’t supplied in time, sometimes it’s because plans changed and no-one needed to follow through. Nothing seems to be happening any time soon – so those working at the party superstore shouldn’t panic. However this may mean a change for one of our longest-established traders, and we’ll keep you posted if this develops further.
Update (April 2025) – the plans are still not out for consultation, though we hear that the proposal may well (as we slightly suspected based on the way the address was described) only apply to one side of the party store. So this might mean a reduction in the size of the shop, but this is not the end of the business.
We’ve reported several times on the long-abandoned toilet building in Battersea Woods. The details, and lots of interior shots, are in something we published a few months ago, here – but the short version is that these toilets were abandoned at some stage in the late 1990s, due to a combination of falling budgets, repeated vandalism, and late night shenanigans. Lambeth tried to knock them down a few times on the grounds that the building was beyond repair, but Wandsworth’s planners – who had the final say on whether it could be demolished – weren’t convinced, and it all ended up in a sort of stalemate with the building just being left to rot away.
The brambles went a bit mad, the whole structure started to lean a bit, and most of the original roof tiles mysteriously went missing. After twenty years or so Lambeth had a go at letting the building as a cafe or gallery – well, anything that could demonstrate some public use, and hence be allowable on Common land – but with the sizeable caveat that anyone taking the place on would have to start by repairing the building at their cost.
It was worth a go at letting the place out – but with plenty of other places to run businesses on Lavender Hill & Battersea Rise that were good to go with little more than a coat of paint and some furniture, tenants weren’t exactly queuing around the block to take on somewhere that could easily need a six figure sum spending before they could get trading at all, no matter how interesting the location.
Sanderson Weatherall’s video of the interior (linked below) shows the state of it before the recent works started – it’s a decent space, with some features intact and (importantly, from a keeping-costs-under-control perspective, what look like working water and power supplies), but a general air of extreme dilapidation.
The still from the video below shows the roof – in remarkably good condition given how long the place had been left to itself, and showing that with the right investment, the building could be quite a decent space.
A year or so ago, in a move that came as a slight surprise to many, Lambeth changed their minds abut the place – and in these more enlightened times, decided it was worth rescuing the original building, and putting investment in to bring it back in to use. It would now become both an accessible public WC, and a cafe space that could be used to provide a small drinks and food offer that’s a bit lacking in this particular bit of the Common, as well as to generate long term commercial income.
The plans above show what’s now been built. There’s a small servery / kitchen area, with the middle of the site given over to seating, and an internal WC attached to the cafe. A separate fully accessible WC has a door opening directly outside, bringing an accessible bathroom to this part of the Common for the first time.
Works got going quickly, with a completely new roof made with heritage style terracotta tiles, and quite a lot of the external brickwork replaced in the areas where it had dissolved. New windows have gone in throughout, and the doors have been replaced and in some cases moved to put access in more sensible locations.
The outside has a mixture of paved and gravelled seating areas, with the existing railings round the site repaired. Rather like the Pear Tree Cafe, we expect that this outdoor area will see plenty of use in the summer – as it’s just far enough from the main road to avoid the impact of the traffic.
On the inside, a nice touch is that the original white glazed brick that lined a lot of the walls has been kept and repaired – keeping a bit of the original style of the place.
We understand the works came in at about £150,000, which isn’t bad given the state of the place before, and how it has got back to being a usable facility with scope for income.
The next step is to get it up and open! There remains some uncertainty on whether the cafe will be leased out (as was the case with the central bandstand cafe, where the Pear Tree Cafe took over an existing lease; and as is also the case with the building that houses Megan’s), or whether it will be run in-house by Lambeth (we’ve heard both – from different sources).
January’s not going to be peak season for any business on the Common – but there’s time to get things running smoothly before the summer, when this is likely to be a rather profitable site.
So there we have it. A building that looked to be doomed to eventual demolition, has come back from the brink – and been restored to a high level of quality, as an asset to Clapham Common. Some may say it’s a vindication of sorts for the anonymous Wandsworth planning officers many years ago who pushed back on the proposed demolition – they were right that the building would be better saved than replaced with a big green shipping-container-type structure as had been proposed at the time.
But above all it’s a moment to say hats off to Lambeth, whose taking a fresh look at the building’s potential has brought this small but characterful building back to life. Nothing is simple when you’re building on a Common, and it’s even harder when you’re doing it as a cash strapped local authority – and we know there will have been a lot of hard work behind the scenes to assemble a decent level of investment for this project. But this is a result to be proud of. We’ll keep you posted on when this opens for business (and as ever, if you know who is likely to run this – get in touch!).
We mainly cover the Lavender Hill area, but sometimes also report on developments on Clapham Common. 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.
Lavender Hill was the birthplace of pizza takeaway chain Firezza. It was founded in 2001 by Adnan Medjedovic and Edin Basic, both Bosnian war refugees who had fled the conflict in 1992, and who spent the following years in a variety of catering sector jobs round London. Firezza was inspired by the tradition of pizza sold by the metre in Naples; the idea was that each quarter had different toppings. They hired a couple of pizza chefs, bought a pizza oven, and rented a shop at the cheaper end of Lavender Hill, calling on friends including an architect, builder and graphic designer who helped develop the site and create a brand. A key early feature was Firezza’s extra long pizza boxes, designed to accommodate a double length pizza for people who collected in person. Their idea was an instant success, and Edin went on to open a second branch in Wandsworth, and then bring in venture capital funding and grow Firezza to a 22-strong chain. It was a popular business, with good quality ingredients and a proper Neapolitan theme that made it rather different to many of its rivals. Much was made of the Buffalo mozzarella being flown from Italy every week (the most popular toppings were Bufalina and Capricciosa), while and the dough for the bases was made fresh in the restaurants every day.
Adnan and Edin sold the chain in 2016, to Hony, the owners of Pizza Express, for about £5m (Edin went on to run the Red Lion pub in Ealing for five years). The company planned to use the acquisition to super-charge their entry into the pizza delivery market. The new owners quickly opened six more sites, including (in 2017) a sit-in branch on Dean Street in Soho that included a Marana Forni rotating pizza oven capable of producing more than 250 pizzas an hour. The sit-in venue was well-reviewed by TimeOut (‘Firezza’s remit is pizza all the way, and it rolls with the best of ’em‘), but the small original Battersea venture kept going strong with a loyal following, doing an impressive level of turnover.
Overall though the Pizza Express takeover didn’t really go to plan – and they exited the business in November 2017 after less than two years, nursing a loss of more than £11m. The chain went through further changes that saw it lose an employment tribunal where claims had been made of claims of unlawful deductions from wages and unpaid holiday pay, and seemingly narrowly stave off collapse at one stage with many of the remaining branches closing on 2023. Towards the end the happy days of Adnan and Edin’s tenure were long gone, quality dipped and it became clear that corners were being cut; the rival unit right next door meanwhile was going from strength to strength (and attracting Italians from far and wide) as top local pizzeria Pizza Pellone.
Firezza’s original Battersea branch finally succumbed to the inevitable and closed in January 2024 when the landlord reclaimed the premises following non payment of the rent (though the chain lives on in a much reduced form: three other branches of Firezza survived and are still trading under new ownership in Canary Wharf, Dulwich and Streatham, and are well reviewed).
This left 175 Lavender Hill looking for a new tenant. It’s an awkward and somewhat tired-looking building – but it’s also one with a lot of potential. The whole of the Firezza operation was on the ground floor, but there were extensive basement areas that were more or less abandoned, including vaults extending under the front window, and a bit of a maze of storage rooms. The steep slopes along this bit of Lavender Hill (which is the very southern edge of the old Thames estuary) means the ground at the back of the property is a whole floor lower than the street frontage – opening in to the alleyway pictured above, which links to Ashley Crescent. There was also a small building built in the back yard that was mainly used for storage, and two floors of flats upstairs accessed from the back of the building.
There’s now planning in to make a more logical use of the building. It’s not a controversial proposal, but we’re covering it as an example of the way these buildings along Lavender Hill are evolving, and the often ingenious ways every scrap of space is being used. The first thing that has been done is splitting off the retail premises from the lower level, making a somewhat smaller unit focussed only on the Lavender-Hill-Ground-floor level, but one that should still (just about – storage for chilled foods will be rather tight) be big enough to be capable of running as a pizza takeaway. A small store areas will be created at the back, with the rear entrance out to the passageway kept in use. The premises, pictured below, is currently to let with Graham & Sibbald estate agents for around £29,000pa.
The second part of the plans sees a new two-storey structure built at the back, which will create a two-bedroom flat. The new building will be connected to the back of the main terrace, with one room in the basement level of the main building. The challenge with this layout is in getting enough windows that give light but also a degree of privacy, and in creating an outdoor space for the flat.
A small courtyard will be created between the back of the existing building and the extension, as shown in a extract of the proposed development plan for the basement level below (where we have shaded the area dedicated to the flat in pale blue), with a corridor running along the side to connect to the room in the basement. This is quite a common approach with small overlooked sites like this one, and it means the downstairs rooms can all get decent sized windows facing out on to a private area. These aren’t straightforward developments to make work – the typically poorly documented mix of access rights to the back passageways, things like rubbish storage and collection, and making extraction systems from the commercial units that are compatible with flats, can be complicated.
From an architectural perspective working with a whole load of differently designed extensions along the back of these terraces, all trying to get some combination of light and outdoor space, while not overlooking each other too much also takes some doing – but it can be done when there’s enough money to be made from the resulting flats, which is why most of the buildings along Lavender Hill do now have some form of development in these back courtyard areas.
The third part of the 175 Lavender Hill development looks to use the basement of the building on the Lavender Hill side, the bit shaded in green above. This isn’t an easy space to use as it’s underground, with vaults extending under the front forecourt – and it was until recently a rather dark and useless space. Some of the other properties have dug out deep lightwells to make profitable use of these bits of the buildings (an example is 64-66 Lavender Hill, where grills on the street side give access to a lower lightwell), while others have made the room share part of the shop front window (like at E Street Barbers on 26 Lavender Hill, where a small cutout in the shop window leads to the room downstairs, which is connected to a basement flat). Here, another approach has been taken, of installing a series of glass pavement lights in the front forecourt, to allow light to the basement vaults – pictured below.
Somewhat unusually, the newly-improved basement with its new pavement light bricks doesn’t have its own entrance, or a staircase to the unit above. Instead it has been leased separately to the shop on the ground floor – and it’s instead being fitted out as an office space and connected, by a new doorway, to the basement level office space at No 38 next door – the one in the right in our photo below. This gives lots more space to neighbouring business the Zebra Property Group, who currently have a small two-storey office that was created when the rest of that property was converted a good few years ago from a large and rather derelict sauna (Star Steam) to flats. Zebra is a developer specialising in high-end extensions and property improvements – so are, of course, someone more than capable of managing a clever extension to their own premises.
This is an interesting proposal in that it shows the often complicated way many of these Victorian commercial buildings are laid out, and the way they are evolving – in this case to create three different property types at once (retail / catering, residential, and office) with three different access routes. This is also one of the ways London is slowly accommodating its growth – far away from the glamorous big high-rise developments of Battersea and Nine Elms, much of the city’s growth is being accommodated thanks to thousands of small projects like this that pass largely unnoticed, where developers turn under-used spaces in to new flats. As long as these developments make accommodation that’s of decent quality (which seems to be the case here), and keep the street-facing ground floor units in commercial use (to avoid creating awkward gaps between the retail units, with badly designed flats facing right on to the pavement), these seem a sensible approach.
For further details of the plans for the flat, see planning application 2024/3783 on the Wandsworth Planning website, where some of the finer details are out for neighbour comments. If you found this of interest, you may want to see our wider articles on local environment, planning and housing issues. To receive updates on new posts on lavender-hill.uk by email, sign up here.
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.
Lavender-Hill.uk : Supporting Lavender Hill 
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