In pictures: Arding & Hobbs at Clapham Junction starts to emerge from the scaffolding

Posted on July 8, 2023 by David

We’ve posted many times about the redevelopment of Clapham Junction’s flagship building, the Arding & Hobbs department store – from the first plans, to updates on the works, and the latest finds in the building as the building work progressed. Under the ownership of real estate firm W.RE, work has advanced pretty well – and the last few weeks have seen quite a lot of the scaffolding come down, revealing the restored facade of the building.

Maybe the most noticed change has been the addition of two new storeys at the top – which have the unusual feature of being a giant golden crown! This is quite striking and has seen lots of attention – although the gold won’t be sticking around; it’s essentially the colour of new copper but has already started to go darker and will end up as a less prominent brown shade within a year or so.

This will accommodate a generously sized office space, including a roof terrace facing Lavender Hill, which is likely to be very popular with its occupiers.

We caught an unusual view of a large container of plants being craned up to the top of the building, where they will form part of the future roof garden! –

The (temporarily) golden crown is not especially visible from most angles – but does make an appearance when looking along the Falcon Road –

It does look pretty consistent with the original plans for the extension –

The entrance to the offices on the upper floors has also started to take shape on St Johns Road, with the girders to support a small canopy recently being installed, echoing (in a small way) the much larger 1970s one that was removed earlier in the works.

This will lead to a new office reception, in what was the ‘handbags & escalators’ bit of Debenhams. The plan had been to retain the escalators to preserve some of the classic ‘Department store’ look, albeit w have yet to see whether this remained the plan given the increasing electricity cost of running escalators all day; the store was originally designed with a grand staircase here and the escalators only came later.

The main facade is almost scaffolding-free, revealing the restored windows along the first floor. The corner entrance will be to a new pub / restaurant, the Albion & East, described as “Open all-day & late-night with early-morning coffee, brunch & hot-desking in the day to cocktails, wood-fired pizza & DJs at night and everything in-between“.

Round on Ilminster Gardens, the part of the building that had been looking particularly neglected has had a heavy duty cleanup – with the brickwork cleaned, most of the windows replaced with new ones with darker frames and double glazing. Many of these windows had been boarded over from the inside, but they have now been reopened to let light into the new office spaces on the upper levels.

One set of windows that hasn’t been replaced is the leaded glass on the upper ground floor, which us having some minor restoration works.

This is the same window before works started (thanks, as ever, to Google Street View) – showing how two of the stained glass panels that were completely missing have been recreated, and also how a load of pipes and clutter has been stripped from the wall to the right, and how a doorway that had been crudely bashed in to the right side of the window is being removed and replaced with leaded glazing! Few will notice this sort of detail round at the back of the building, but this is what sets a quality project apart from a ‘good enough’ one and we’re pleased to see it being done properly.

The other windows were previously in even worse condition, having had huge drainpipes bashed right through them, and big bits replaced with boards. We have reason to believe that the brown bit below the windows in the street view capture above used to also have elegant stained glass in it – indeed, some of the stained glass was still visible before the works started, shown below –

It’s hidden away behind the construction hoarding for now, but fingers crossed that this heritage glazing will also be restored during the works.

Meanwhile the space with the big windows up on the first floor of the building – which was the menswear department in the final year of Debenhams – had originally been envisaged as office space. We felt (and reported) at the time that the part closest to the Lavender Hill entrance would be better suited to a commercial use, with access from the pink arrow labelled ‘retail entrance 2’ in the diagram below – although W.RE at the time said they had not seen a lot of interest to take on first floor commercial units.

Well things changed, and the good news is that Third Space, one of the major tenants W.RE have already signed up, has taken space over three floors: most of the basement, the sort of mezzanine area that used to be the Debenhams ‘show boutique’ and then the ‘Joe and the Juice’ concession, but also a decent slice of the elegant first floor space – so this first floor will remain part of the Lavender Hill commercial space after all. We reported the Third Space signing back in March (with thanks to our ever-observant readers for the tip off!); they will be opening a large new gym and spa whose entrance will be at the corner pictured below, next to Nando’s.

It’s a sizeable investment for Third Space, who already run several similar venues in the City, and who are close to opening one in Wimbledon. It’s not Third Space’s only big investment in Battersea as they are also currently fitting out a large club by Battersea Power Station, due to open later this year. That one is based in the Gehry-designed buildings close to the tube, next to the recently-opened branch of Wagamama –

The Battersea Power Station venue is also large – our photo taken a couple of months ago as they were getting started on the internal fitout shows the scale of the site!

The new Third Space club at Arding & Hobbs will be designed by architects RHE, with an industrial design style. It will feature five studios, to host classes such as Reformer Pilates, Hot Yoga, a high-intensity studio with immersive light and sound, and a cycle studio. It will also have a track and rig area complete with assault bikes and ski ergs, and strength and cardio equipment. A separate part fo the club will have a wet spa with a sunken massage jet hydro-pool, cold plunge pool, steam room and a sauna whose walls are made of Himalayan sea salt; we’re not wholly sure how this is all being fitted in but the artists’ impression below gives a feel for the design approach this part of the club will be taking.

As the Battersea Society have noted, from the perspective of keeping a dynamic town centre at Clapham Junction that attracts the trade to support a wide mix of businesses, it’s a bit of a shame to see the plans for Arding & Hobbs’ shop space shift towards a members-only club, with the overall amount fo the building that passers by can visit on a ‘just drop in’ basis now rather smaller than what had been originally envisaged (where half the overall ground floor and a quarter of the basement would be for retail, and the rest for uses like office space and members’ clubs – this is now down to under a third of the ground floor and none of the basement). However this needs to be set against what is clearly a committed and high-quality restoration project for the building as a whole; and Third Space are a quality tenant who will both find a receptive local customer base, and establish a generally high threshold of quality for the development as a whole.

We have yet to see who is occupying the remaining office space on the upper levels, whose planed design is pictured above – and who is taking over the one remaining ground-floor shop unit (which had been linked to Amazon for one of their cashier-less stores, until they halted their UK expansion plans and pulled out – frankly maybe not a great loss). They may not be the most exciting tenant but we still suspect Boots may yet be interested, give they are planning a major rationalisation of their stores – and that at Clapham Junction they have one huge but not-ideally-located store whose lease expires in 2024, and one store a few doors down from Arding & Hobbs which is an odd layout and far too small to really work. As ever, we’ll keep you posted.

If you found this interesting, you may want to see our many previous articles on the Arding & Hobbs redevelopment, as well as our articles on retail and business topics in the Lavender Hill area.

Posted in Arding & Hobbs, Business, Planning, Retail | 3 Comments

All change, as the old Tearoom des Artistes on Wandsworth Road is reduced to rubble.

Posted on July 7, 2023 by David

We’ve written before in some detail about the abandoned cluster of buildings at the junction of Wandsworth Road and North Street in Clapham. Once home to the Artesian Well & Lost Society, and before that to the Cafe des Artistes, the last few years have seen them become particularly run down: the owner gave up running them as bars after becoming embroiled in a series of license disputes, and they then changed hands a few times while being intermittently occupied by squatters and Property Guardians.

Both were ultimately bought local developer Marston Properties in 2016, a local firm responsible for quite a few developments in the Lavender Hill area. Marston knew this area well: they just happened to already own the Plough Brewery across the road (which they have converted to an office complex). The year before, in 2015, Marston had also bought the former Plough Inn next door to it – which had been trading as Mist on Rocks, under the same licensee as the Artesian Well and Lost Society. With these purchases, Marston found itself in the interesting and unusual position of owning four neighbouring buildings – three of them former licenses premises – so had quite an opportunity to reshape this bit of town. They got going on a comprehensive refit of the Mist on Rocks building at the very end of 2020, and have recently finished work – creating two flats on the upper levels, facilities for the business centre next door on the lower levels, and the ground floor currently up to let as a cafe that will be open to the public as well as to those working on the brewery office complex next door. It’s looking pretty decent – a nice touch is that the original windows and the pub tiling have been carefully restored.

The larger of the two properties currently in construction work, formerly Artesian Well, has been a pub of one form or another for most of its existence, and Marston plan to refurbish it to house a new gastropub at the ground floor and flats on the upper floors. It will be the only licensed premises remaining, where there were three. The building was stripped out quite early on, with the shell pictured below – but it’s only in the last few months that works have properly got going.

It’s now comprehensively covered in scaffolding – with works well underway. The construction work’s pretty substantial – a complete replacement of everything in the building other than the shell and the basic floor structure.

That said, there are no plans to change the exterior: the artists’ impression of what it will look like is shown below (which, to be frank, is about what it looks like now – but tidied up a bit)

The story’s a bit more complicated for the smaller white building next door. The planning extract below shows the planned layout of the new ground floor – which sees the old Artesian Well and Lost Society buildings joined together as a single property.

There’ll also be a small new building between the two, the one with the black front shown in the aerial view below, which will include some flats as well as the access stairwell to the upper level of both buildings.

The smaller Lost Society building isn’t remaining as a bar, but will instead be converting to an entirely residential use, creating 9 flats in all spread between the two buildings, with the entrance to all the flats being in what used to be the bar’s garden area. A maybe more surprising part of the proposals, in a conservation area, was that the building was to be completely demolished, and replaced with a similar looking but brand new structure. The planning application reported that the years of rather limited maintenance hadn’t been kind to the building (whose front wall was indeed noticeably cracked), and it was in a rather poor state that made its conversion to anything like modern building standards not cost effective.

The building works kept the old building in place for longer than we expected, as substantial amounts of material were extracted from the old building and extensive digging took place. We did wonder at one stage if the building – or parts of it – had maybe had a partial eleventh-hour reprieve. But then the whole lot rapidly disappeared…

…leaving nothing but a large gap in the terrace. It’s a shame to lose this particularly old building with a long history, maybe going all the way back to the 16th century when it was a barn on the Clapham Manor estate and would have been on an isolated hilltop. After stints as a as a motorcycle showroom and garage, a tyre depot and an antique emporium “called Ageless” – whiel also being said to be haunted by the ghost of Rose Devereaux, a flower seller who died in tragic circumstances at the turn of the century – it became the Tearoom des Artistes in 1982, and was for many years quite a unique venue. For those of us who never saw it in its prime, Bill Hicks’ recollections as well as the article comemnts are well worth a read –

The Tearooms des Artistes… was a rare survivor of a genuine late-60s style alternative meeting place space. Part bar, part cheap veggie restaurant, part art-gallery, nightclub, performance space – a veritable mini-arts lab for the shrinking bohemian populations of SWs 8 and 4 and 11. Somewhere you could sit and read and talk most of the day, or just find a dark corner to hide in. Occupying what felt like farmyard buildings (and it did apparently incorporate much of a 16th century barn and -according to some accounts – slaughterhouse), with low-ceilinged rooms and passageways going off in directions, plus a garden area if you were adventurous, creaking floorboards and furniture, it seemed, sourced from skips across all 35 boroughs.

As he commented when we last wrote about this cluster of buildings –

“I used to spend good time at the Café des Artistes, in the 1980s it was a fabulously anarchic place, and it remained so up til the 90s. Then it became Lost Society. But the building was – and it still is – an amazing relic of the pre-suburban era, when Clapham was a village deep in countryside. You sensed its age, especially upstairs. I loved this place and wish to god some sort of preservation order had been made, forbidding its falling into the hands of property developers, however “sensitive” they might seem.”

The new building (pictured below) will look distinctly similar to the old one (above) but – being new – allows rather more practical layouts for some of the flats. But there’s no doubt that we’re probably losing the oldest and most historically interesting building of the set here.

That said – generally speaking this looks like a thoughtful and careful treatment of this site – and Marston’s decent work on the Plough Inn opposite generally bodes well for the development. They have previously restored and let a pub (in Fulham) and we suspect they won’t have too much trouble letting this new premises, even though it’s pretty unlikely the one remaining commercial unit at this crossroads will ever regain the level of crowds and action it saw at its peak as Artesian Well, let alone as the Tearoom des Artistes. Though after so many years of years of dereliction and decay, it’s good to see this cluster of buildings finally start to come back to life.

If this was of interest, our previous article about this bit of town goes in to the history of the Plough Brewery opposite, and also explores the controversial plans to redevelop parts of North Street Mews to the south of this site, as well as the large and rather messy house that was previously the Silverthorne Cabs office to the east.

Posted in Business, Food & drink, Housing, Local history, Planning | 2 Comments

It all goes wrong at Donna Margherita on Lavender Hill

Posted on May 30, 2023 by David

We’ve written a few times about Donna Margherita, at 183 Lavender Hill – one of our longest serving Neapolitan restaurants with two decades on Lavender Hill. Donna Margherita’s owner Gabriele Vitale moved to London from Italy about 30 years ago. He lived in Kilburn for 12 years , at first working as a waiter and sales rep selling coffee machines. But he felt something just wasn’t right – he was missing food from home – especially the pizza that his hometown of Naples is famed for. He found there was no shortage of trattorias and pizzerias, but they lacked a certain Italian authenticity! He concluded that if he couldn’t be a satisfied customer elsewhere, maybe he should start one himself. This was how he came to set up his own restaurant, Donna Margherita, in Lavender Hill in 2023, supported by his pizza chef Ayrton, and of course a proper wood burning oven.

Named after Queen Margherita – who gave her name to the Pizza Margherita, after she sampled three pizzas in Naples and declared it her favourite – Gabriele focussed on doing traditional pizza well, as well as a wide range of pasta dishes (Gabrielle’s favourite was the Spaghetti Vongole , a Venetian white wine clam pasta that started life as peasant food and became an Italian classic). The business was an immediate success, becoming a firm favourite with locals, with good reviews in Time Out helping to spread the word further afield about this Battersea business.

Gabriele and his team of eight weren’t averse to a bit of experimentation though – for example switching from pizza dough made of the most widely used ’00’ flour, which is a very finely sifted one, to a coarser ‘type 1’ flour that is sifted less, so as to retain more of the original bran and wheat germ. The restaurant also started to develop a wider gluten-free menu.

Everything was going well. They made it through the nightmare of the Coronavirus – opening a delicatessen along the way to serve the takeaway trade, with a wide range of Italian produce. But as the Coronavirus faded and they reverted to being a restaurant disaster struck – with a major fire in the kitchen in April 2021 causing quite substantial damage and leading to immediate closure. Undaunted, and following the usual insurance uncertainty, the owners set about to create something brighter and fresher than what had gone before, with a new look – including bringing light in to the back of the restaurant area, a curved new feature ceiling in sky blue, and a crisper, simpler overall design – while of course keeping the all-important pizza oven at the back of the space.

Things were actually coming on pretty well, to the extent that by September 2021, five months after the fore, we could start seeing what Donna Margherita 2.0 was going to look like; and the builders we spoke to were proud of the way things had progressed. Donna Margherita’s Instagram was clearly showing the enthusiasm too:  “Ciao Amici! We’re still full-on working hard on our Donna Margherita 2.0, works are proceeding great but unfortunately, it might take a few more months before we can safely open our doors.We appreciate every single one of you reaching out and we hope to see you as soon as we open! This is the longest break we took in over 20 years and it will probably be the longest one we’ll take ever, we love our job and making you smile with our food!“.

But progress was slow, with lengthy pauses. The first time everything stopped we hoped it was just a case of struggling to find people to do the finishing touches in a very tight market in the building trades. But weeks turned in to months, and we were unable to detect any signs of activity, or contact anyone involved. Back in May this year, over a year after the fire, our post “Donna Margherita: Is this goodbye?” got a fair bit of attention, and if nothing else it showed that there is strong loyalty to a proper neighbourhood restaurant that has been with us for so long. There were clearly still people hoping that the restaurant could return – but the site remained as in the photo above for many more months. Extended closure is a dangerous place to be for any business, with business rates to pay but no income, no matter how understanding the insurers are, and amid the silence many started to wonder if it was all over for Donna Margherita.

Some time later we reported that work had resumed, and the restaurant was finally finished. Our photo above shows new fridges and delicatessen at the right hand side of the premises, electrics fully finished, the floor polished, seating in place and pictures up on the wall. It had been quite a journey for what the owners initially hoped would be an eight week renovation – but finally Donna Margherita coudl get back to what it could do best, serving good food in a good atmosphere. But in a story that had already had a few twists and turns, yet more bad news: just when the restaurant was ready to reopen, notices from ‘Dukes Bailiffs’ have appeared on the door confirming that the premises has been repossessed by the landlord, presumably on the grounds of unpaid rent.

We’re not sure what precisely went wrong, although we’d hazard a guess that it took a lot longer to rebuilt and refurbish the premises after the April 2021 fire than anyone expected, and the insurance money wasn’t sufficient to cover all the rent and costs being stacked up during the works. These things happen – we understand that the renovation threw up all sorts of headaches, as is often the case in older buildings – and no-one could really have foreseen how long it would have taken to get things up and running again. Many of the running costs keep on costing even when a business isn’t trading, and there are maybe echoes of the similar recent eviction at China Garden where overrunning building works seem to have led to the collapse of the business. But it’s a rather cruel end to Gabriele’s restaurant after two decades of trading, especially after he’d battled through the Coronavirus, and a near-complete rebuild of the premises, to the point of being right on the brink of reopening. Some lucky new tenant may be able to trade in a freshly refitted restaurant with a brand-new pizza oven. But for Gabriele, we can only really express our sympathy, and hope he’s able to find a way forward.

Posted in Business, Food & drink | 2 Comments

The surprising history of a smelly alley behind some bins near Battersea Park

Posted on May 19, 2023 by David

It’s not the most obvious spot for a landmark in the history of flight! Hidden behind a load of bins next to a Battersea petrol station, along an alleyway whose smell reveals its other role as a surreptitious urinal, is a blue plaque revealing that the Short Brothers, the pioneers of flight, ‘worked here’. It’s nowhere near an airport, indeed it’s little more than a run of railway arches. So what on earth were they doing here?

It all started in 1897, when 21-year-old Eustace Short – the one on the right in the rather blurry photo – bought a second hand hot air balloon (which was filled with coal gas). Hot air balloons were a new and fashionable market at the time, and when Eustace and his younger brother Oswald (on the left in the photo, and then in his late teens) visited the 1900 world fair in Paris, they saw balloons made by Édouard Surcouf that who had perfected the art of making perfect spheres. Clearly inspired, they set up a balloon-making business, perfected their own designs, and started offering balloons for sale in 1902. The next year they landed their first contract, to make three military observation balloons for the Government of India. The superintendent of the government’s ‘School of Ballooning‘ (a training and test centre for Army experiments with balloons and airships) was very impressed with the quality of the balloons they had made – so much so that he introduced the brothers to Charles Rolls – another familiar name, because he was the co-founder of Rolls Royce. Charles asked the brothers to make a large racing balloon that he could use to compete in the prestigious Gordon Bennett international balloon race.

And this is where the link to the mildly malodorous Battersea alleyway comes in. The Short Brothers had made their very first balloons in an upstairs room above a business run by their older brother Horace in Hove. They didn’t stay there for long, because in 1903 Horace moved location to set up a new project developing steam turbines development with Charles Parsons (which went on to become a successful venture – but that’s a story for another day). Eustace and Oswald briefly relocated their business to some rented accommodation in Tottenham Court Road, before finding a more permanent home in two railway arches just off the Queens Circus, near Battersea Park station.

Embed from Getty Images

Charles Rolls is pictured above in his racing balloon, called Britannia, which was the first one that the Short brothers made in their new Battersea factory. The buildings in the background are the long-lost Battersea gas works. As far as we can tell the balloon they built for Charles didn’t win the race, but it did provide excellent publicity for the Short Brothers and led to a whole bundle of orders, turning their balloon-making venture in to quite a thriving business.

The move to Battersea was a wise one: railway arches were cheap to lease, they had loads of available space suitable for industrial uses, and maybe above all, these particular arches were conveniently situated right next to the Battersea gas works. Unlike modern ‘hot air balloons’, these early balloons weren’t filled with hot air, but instead with the ‘town gas’ that powered the UK’s gas system for decades until we started to use North Sea gas. This ‘town gas’ was a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which was made from coal at the gasworks. It was rather toxic and dangerous, but the hydrogen content meant that it was lighter than air – perfect for filling balloons! And being right next to one of the biggest gasworks in London was very handy for someone designing, testing and selling these balloons.

The photo below, taken in 1906 and part of Getty Images’ Hulton archive, shows a balloon being made in the arches – with canvas and rope being assembled to make the tethering structure.

Embed from Getty Images

This photo shows another part of the Battersea balloon factory, with the ‘cutting table’ where the fabric was shaped to be stitched in to a balloon shape. Again the railway arch is very visible.

Embed from Getty Images

The below is a rare view of the balloons in context, with a pair in front of the railway arches – and one of the now-demolished Battersea gasholders visible to the right. These would have been quite a sight for the neighbours, and it’s maybe surprising how few photos of balloons being tested seem to have survived.

The Short brothers made about thirty balloons while they were in Battersea. Most of them were sold to members of the Royal Aero Club, and stemmed one way or another from that balloon they had sold to Charles Rolls.

Eustace and Oswald were themselves appointed to the Aero Club in 1907 – and the following year they were appointed as the club’s ‘aeronautical engineers’, reflecting a growing interest within the club in aeroplane flights. They were clearly pretty interested in the possibilities of aeroplanes – building their first glider aeroplane the same year. That said, while it was one thing to make a balloon or a glider, making a working aeroplane was a rather different kettle of fish, needing lots of mechanical expertise. The brothers were excellent balloon makers, but they knew they only had a limited knowledge of the more mechanical aspects – which is why they quickly brought their older brother Horace on board, the one who they had previously rented a workshop in Hove from (who had gone on to a steam turbine business where he had acquired a lot of useful mechanical skills).

With all three brothers now working in Battersea, the aircraft business grew quickly. The first two orders for aircraft arrived almost straight away – both from members of the Aero club. And sure enough, one of the first orders was from Charles Rolls, who had ordered the racing balloon from the brothers a few years beforehand! Horace started work on two aeroplane designs as soon as he arrived in Battersea, and the Short No.1 biplane – or at least the wooden frame, as it wasn’t quite finished yet – was shown off to the public in March 1909, at the first British Aero Show at Kensington Olympia. The picture below shows the Battersea-built aeroplane. Unfortunately the plane wasn’t especially well designed and never actually flew! The brothers had all sorts of headaches getting an engine that was light enough, while also being strong enough to fly without making the plane overbalance. On the fourth test flight the plane very nearly took off but stalled, and its undercarriage and propellers were damaged.

You might think this would be a disappointment to the buyer, Francis McClean – but despite having crashed his new plane before even managing to get is to take off he clearly found all this pioneering and sometimes messy activity in the very early days of flight rather exciting, and immediately ordered another plane! Conveniently the Short brothers had also obtained the British rights to build copies of the American Wright aeroplane design, and made him one of these – which he clearly also liked, as he went on to order several more.

The Short brothers’ aircraft business grew fast. They received a £1,200 order for six aeroplanes in March 1909 – the same month they exhibited their first aeroplane – which was the first contract for a batch of airplanes in the UK. This was the beginning of mass production, and the brothers realised they needed a large site with space for aeroplanes to take off – and a gasworks in Battersea wouldn’t work for that – so they developed a site in Sheppey, with a factory right next to an airfield. In October the same year, their second airplane, the Short biplane No.2, became the first plane to fly a mile – and in doing so won a £1,000 prize from the Daily Mail. Starting from a railway arch in Battersea, the brothers had made history as the UK’s first sellers of a working plane, and this was the start of the UK’s aircraft industry.

The Short brothers went on to become a world-famous name in aviation, building a wide range of aeroplanes and flying boats. Horace died in 1917, and Oswald took over responsibility for design – doing pioneering work in all-metal aircraft construction. The firm’s planes gave important service in both World Wars, and in the 1940s the company moved from Kent even larger premises in Belfast. Shorts became a major maker of commercial aircraft, eventually being acquired by the Canadian company Bombardier in 1989.

As the aeroplane line of the Short brothers’ business went from strength to strength, the focus gradually drifted away from the railway arches in Battersea. The brothers carried on making balloons and ‘lighter than air’ craft at the site for a surprisingly long time, even when it had become clear that the aeroplane business was the future, and only finally left Battersea in 1919. The arches behind the petrol station at Queens Circus are now home to a mix of small businesses – hidden away just out of sight of the crowds of people at the power station, the railway stations and Battersea Park. But for those who do venture down the alleyway, the blue plaque stands as testament to how this overlooked corner of Battersea gave birth to the UK’s aerospace industry.

We’ve also posted an article about how Hilda Hewlett, one of the pioneering women of Battersea, set up a fully fledged airplane factory just down the road from Clapham Junction. And if you find our occasional local history articles of interest, you may enjoy a long article on the complicated history of the Cedars Road estate, a similarly detailed look at the past of Culvert Place, a photo story about the Shaftesbury Estate drawing on its conservation designation, an article about the cluster of derelict buildings around the old Artesian Well bar on Clapham North street, a very detailed history of Rush Hill Road, and an article about the area around Falcon Lane that dives in to the area’s messy past and some scary 1970s road-building projects that very nearly got built! We’re grateful for the more detailed information provided on the Battersea balloon & aeroplane factory by English Heritage, as well as the particularly rich history that’s well worth a detour at Graces Guide.

Posted in Curiosities, Local history | 2 Comments

After decades of service, Hill Launderette fades in to history

Posted on May 6, 2023 by David

Hill Launderette is one of the longest established businesses on Lavender Hill – we don’t know when it started but it has spanned many decades. It stayed surprisigly well used, even as washing machines & tumble dryers became more widespread in houses and flats. The combination of quick and efficient washing for even the largest items – some of the machines were huge! – with big, powerful dryers that can deal with a large load in 20 minutes, clearly remained attractive. With fourteen washing machines and seven dryers, queues were rare.

Prices varied from £3 for a wash in the 16lb machines, to £6 for the biggest 40lb machine. Three minutes in the dryer would set you back 20p, and these dryers were quick! Many launderettes feel a bit of a throwback to the 1960s (and as somewhat iconic locations it’s not been unusual to see them as backdrops for photography) and the Hill Launderette certainly had quite a classic appearance. But it had moved with the times – with a fairly comprehensive website including detailed prices and services, and a small social media presence.

As a fully staffed launderette, it offered quite a wide range of services, going beyond the self service clean options to include dry cleaning within a day, and repairs and alterations, as well as a duvet service, and expert cleaning of curtains, rugs and soft furnishings. Dry cleaning a suit would be £5, a jacket £2, and you could have ten shirts washed & pressed for £10.

But the launderette closed a couple of months ago, initially with a note on the doors referring to ‘technical problems’, with a number to contact for enquiries. As days stretched in to weeks, it started to look as though the technical problems had turned in to a more fundamental issue about the future of the launderette, and sure enough – the machines started to be removed, presumably being sold to other launderettes.

In case there remained any doubt that this was the end of the line for Hill Launderette, at the end of April a planning application was made to the Council to change the use of the site from “Commercial, Business and service uses” (which includes launderettes) to “Financial & Professional Services“, which includes things like estate agents and employment agencies.

And as time went on, the underlying infrastructure also disappeared – with dry cleaning equipment removed, and revealing plumbing and electrics that had been hidden away for decades. We’re hoping someone rescues the pot plants before the strip out is completed.

Some of our readers will have long memories of watching clothes spin round here, and even more occasional visitors like your author appreciated the helpful and friendly service when we dropped in for duvets and complicated items. And as it fades away into Lavender Hill’s history we’d like to pay tribute to Hill Launderette – less glamorous than the bars and restaurants that increasingly surround it on the street, never the sort of place that makes the headlines – but one of those little things we all take for granted, with the team keeping it open for long hours seven days a week, and quietly and efficiently helping keep Lavender Hill’s clothes clean for decades.

It’s not all over for local launderettes. We still have the Lavender Launderette a few doors down at 13 Lavender Hill – pictured above at some point in the early 1960s (when it had a rather impressive sign spanning Wix’s lane, and when there was an empty ‘space ‘bombsite’ space where Caffe Nero now sits that lasted for decades until it was rebuilt in a joint project with the similar-looking building opposite that houses Sainsbury’s). We also have Lily’s Launderette nearer Clapham Junction at 229 Lavender Hill – both of which are still going strong.

(former) Hill Launderette, 41 Lavender Hill, London SW11 5QW.

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A takeaway disaster: was this Lavender Hill’s shortest-lived business?

Posted on May 6, 2023 by David

The grand opening banner is still up at China Garden, Lavender Hill’s newest Chinese takeaway. It had a busy few weeks, and was generally decently reviewed. A lot of effort (and money) clearly went in to fitting it out to create a clean and functional kitchen and service area. Indeed the business was already on to its second sign, as the initial red one was replaced with a black one as the building was smartened up. But look more closely, and there’s an eviction notice on the door – they’ve already closed down! Things have gone badly wrong here, and this looks like the fastest opening and shutting down we have ever seen.

What went wrong? No-one knows for sure, but summary termination nearly always means the rent’s not being paid. The new business is linked to an existing local pizzeria on the Battersea Park Road, and having distributed menus to the whole district, it looked to be making a pretty healthy turnover in the short time it was up and running. There were a few areas to refine to maximise profitability – for example, it’s always worth offering a 20% or so collection discount to encourage in-person pickups (because that’s still more profitable than the 32-35% cut that Deliveroo and the like typically take), which they didn’t do, and they weren’t great at answering the phone when they were busy – but nothing suggesting the business was struggling.

Maybe the issue is that there were months of fitting out work before the takeaway actually opened, as the unit had a comprehensive refit. There were several points where it sat empty for weeks and weeks with seemingly nothing happening (back in December last year we were already commenting on the slow pace of works) – maybe utility supply issues, maybe equipment stuck in the post, or maybe just a difficult build project. We suspect that the time the unit was ‘in development’ was significantly longer than any rent-free period initially offered by the landlord (which in this case is Unit Management Ltd, owners of the Battersea Business Centre), and that by the time the business started trading a significant rent bill had already stacked up and not been paid. This is a risky thing to do – particularly because the notice stuck to the door makes it clear that China Garden had a licence, rather than a lease – an arrangement which doesn’t give much security of tenure, and means they can be thrown out very quickly if they don’t keep to the terms of the agreement with the landlord.

It’s always sad to see someone’s project go wrong, and a lot of time and money involved have gone to waste here. This business had potential, as a well-equipped business and one of relatively few Chinese takeaways on Lavender Hill, and it was still in its infancy. Maybe things will be patched up somehow, but chances are this tidied-up unit is now going to be up for lease again.

China Garden Express Clapham, 103a Lavender Hill, London SW11 5QW

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A rare high-rise industrial building being planned for Havelock terrace

Posted on May 6, 2023 by David

Battersea’s industrial spaces are an endangered species! Developers regularly go scouting around the lesser corners of the Borough looking for anything that looks a bit ‘industrial’, with a view to converting it to new residential development. This can be a bit of a problem – as we still have thousands of small and medium sized businesses, which create lots of local jobs and are an important part of the local economy – but which are finding it harder and harder to find locations as their unglamorous-but-useful premises are destroyed.

Which is why a planned development on Havelock Terrace is interesting. The location – pictured above – is a whisker south of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. Chances are you won’t immediately recognise it, as it’s not the most exciting bit of Battersea – a pair of dreary industrial buildings from the 1970s, trapped between a variety of other light industrial buildings. Just the sort of site that is very much on the ‘endangered’ list right now – so much so that its neighbour is already being rebuilt by student accommodation specialists Urbanest to create 174 student flats and a large office building. That vast construction project is shown below, with the about-to-also-be-rebuilt industrial building just visible peeking through the railway arch to its right.

But this particular industrial building has proved a surprisingly successful one. It’s owned and managed as a business centre by Workspace, who own and manage 58 business centres across London – from converted factory buildings to co-working hubs and purpose-built managed business centres. They keep things simple and flexible with an ‘all inclusive’ approach where all bills are included, leases are short, and tenants can grow or shrink the space they need at quite short notice, which seems to be working as they now host around 3,000 small and medium-sized businesses.

Workspace’s Battersea business centre is home to myriad small tenants doing everything from IT startups to clothing design. It has particularly high occupancy levels, and they receive a steady stream of enquiries from new tenants, despite them not doing any active marketing at all. They expect demand to ramp up even further now the previously-somewhat-isolated site is about a minutes’ walk from a Zone 1 tube station. All of which explains why redevelopment is on the cards – but not for replacement with flats.

Workspace are planning to demolish everything and build a new 15-storey building specifically aimed at businesses and light industry – creating a lot more space and bringing it all up to modern standards, with generous high floor to ceiling heights. The planned new building pictured above, will have a mix of of unit sizes which have been designed to be flexible and good to work in – the smaller ones have double-height break out spaces with communal terraces and outdoor spaces, while the medium-sized open plan units have larger private terraces. The ground and first floor have the largest units, aimed at light industrial workshops that are likely to be moving big and heavy things around – so are equipped with access to a loading bay, directly or via a dedicated goods lift, as well as high ceilings, and extra-wide doors and corridors.

The new building will also include communal facilities – with a cafe, and meeting / reception areas, as well as a communal roof terrace. There will be a retail unit next to the main entrance, as well as cycle parking, showers and lockers in the basement. Workspace aim to start construction in the first half of next year. Obviously one question is what happens to the existing tenants during the works: in the longer them this will create more space, but for some time it will be a hole in the ground! Existing tenants will be given a minimum of 4 months’ notice before development starts, with the option to move to Workspace’s other local sites, which include Morie Street Studios and The Light Bulb (both in Wandsworth town centre).

This isn’t the first proposal for higher-rise industrial use – maybe because the site is within the Battersea Design and Technology Quarter, an area shown in orange in the map above which is being deliberately developed as a home to business. We’ve written previously about some of the projects underway on the ‘Ingate Place’ part of the site, and two other similar proposals are also being developed in the Havelock terrace area, shown in orange and light green below –

Another small industrial building at 16-48 Havelock Terrace, directly across the road from Workspace’s project, has planning permission to be replaced with a pair of new buildings – one of them thirteen storeys and one nine, which will together provide 15,000 square metres of flexible workspace as a ground floor communal facility. The approach being taken is similar to what Workspace are planning but on a slightly smaller scale – with scope for light industry at the lower levels, and flexible office and workspace on the upper levels.

The image above shows these two buildings from Nine Elms Lane, and the one below shows these two buildings on the left, with the planned Workspace building not shown but set to be built just behind the brick wall pictured on the right. It may take time for these buildings to take shape – but the future for this little-known corner of Battersea looks quite high-rise! This spot between the railway lines is a location where it makes sense to build upwards, and it’s good to see that we’re not losing the space for the businesses that create local jobs and opportunities. As ever, we’ll keep you posted on developments.

Posted in Business, Housing, Planning, Retail | Leave a comment

Clapham Junction’s Lidl supermarket is growing

Posted on April 19, 2023 by David

We’ve previously reported on the various projects to expand, or replace, Clapham Junction’s Lidl supermarket. It’s a busy shop, being a rare full-range branch in inner London, with car parking and right next to a major train station. Unsurprisingly, it’s one of their best-performing supermarkets, and whiel it always seems to be crowded, the success of the store has also proved to be one of the biggest challenges when it comes to improving or extending it.

The store has seen a series of minor changes in recent years, to get as much out of it as possible – with a small extension that added one more aisle in 2006, followed by another small extension in 2012 to create an in-store bakery (pictured below – a venture by Lidl which has been quite successful, and given them a good point of differentiation compared to largely bakery-less rival Aldi).

But the store was still too small, and too crowded – it’s about half the size of their more recent store in south Earlsfield but rather busier. So Lidl thought big, and developed plans to completely rebuild the whole site – creating underground car parking with a much larger store on top – an artists’ impression of the view from Falcon Road is shown below. These ambitious plans would have seen the store completely knocked down, and a new building built that would stretch right up to Falcon Road, replacing the rather bleak brick wall that supports the car park with a proper entrance to an extended store, that would sit on top of two storeys of car parking. These got planning permission, but were never implemented.

Proposed view from Falcon Road

The reason wasn’t a lack of money or enthusiasm on Lidl’s part – but rather, the thorny question of where to put the store during the building works. The willingness to invest and upgrade this branch is there, but no suitable temporary sites could be found – and closing this flagship site for a major rebuild represents quite a cost to the business as well as a headache to the established customer base. As a sort of stopgap, a couple of years ago the shelving was all replaced to increase the height and density of stock, and self-scan tills were brought in to increase capacity.

Lidl went back to the drawing board, and the latest plans instead foresee yet another extension to the existing building, but also a more general restyling and refurbishment. The current roof will be replaced with new one that will let more light in to the store, and a second storey will be added right at the back of the site near the railway lines, which will allow the staff back office section to be moved upstairs and free up a bit more space on the shopfloor. The store will be extended closer to Falcon Road – replacing the current paving and trolley storage area pictured below to create up to five metres of extra space.

The store will have better green credentials too: new glazing on the south side of the building means there will be more natural light inside the store, a small ‘green roof’ is planned on the two-storey section of the store, and there will be over 300 solar panels on the new roof. Four of the 61 current parking spaces will go, to create an extra 34 cycle parking spaces (compared to just eight current bike stands), and two electric vehicle charging points will be added. One interesting thing in the planning report is that the overgrown railway sidings between Lidl and the tracks are an officially designated “Grade II Site of Importance to Nature Conversation” – in the map below the green squares represent ‘scattered shrub, the brown circles are ‘tall herbs’, and while no actual animals were identified in the most recent site survey, these slightly wild spaces are part of the local wildlife habitat.

These new plans aren’t controversial, and this new investment, assuming it does go ahead unlike the previous set of plans, will make this a better store. It updates the general appearance of the place, which was built back in 1996 and is now looking distinctly dated. It gives a little more space to the store, partly by taking over the paved area facing Falcon Lane, and partly by allowing some of the back office / administrative space currently housed on the ground floor to be moved to the new upper level. The project as a whole creates an additional 720 square metres of internal floorspace (growing the store, whose existing surface is 1443 square metres, by about 50%).

However it’s also fair to say that they’re not really taking advantage of the full potential of this site, which could be developed to bring this rather ‘suburban retail park surrounded by parked cars’ area in to being a proper part of the town centre it sits in the middle of, and which would improve the frontage along Falcon Road. Wandsworth’s planning policies – the ‘site specific allocations document’ – already has the whole area with a blue line around it in the map below earmarked for high density mixed-use development, and it’s one of relatively few similar sites in the Borough that has yet to see any action. The planning department’s report on the latest proposals does give the impression that they were hoping for something a bit more ambitious, noting that the plans “would not deliver the area’s aspirations in regard to a high density mixed-use development“, but that “the proposal results in an acceptable continuation of the existing use for when a more suitable and comprehensive re-development of the whole of the SSAD site comes forward in the future”. However Lidl’s plans are consistent with the local policies that favour retail in town centres (for the planning geeks out there – part (b) of policy DMTS1, and also the emerging Local Plan policy LP42 on ‘development in centres’).

The current project will no doubt see Lidl remain a single-storey store for at least a decade, although we suspect in the long term we will, eventually, still see a redevelopment to provide retail on the lower levels and either flats or maybe some office space built above. This would likely end up looking like what we have seen happen in the vast redevelopments at Sainsbury’s sites in Fulham and Nine Elms, or indeed on a rather smaller scale at some other Lidl sites such as their store in Chessington (below) which includes flats with large balconies designed to fit in to a more suburban location.

Maybe this sort of redevelopment will happen sooner with the other big supermarket buildings on Falcon lane. As our previous detailed article on the longer-term future of this site, the station itself and the other retail sites around it noted, in the longer term we’re likely to see the Asda site grow and accommodate far more within the space. The large branch of Boots next door’s lease also ends next year, so that site may also be coupled with the soon-to-be-redundant railway signalling site behind it (which is now under the same ownership) and see higher-rise construction work. We’ll keep you posted on these wider sites – but for now, while it’s a little disappointing that we did not get the full bells-and-whistles upgrade that was previously being considered for the supermarket, it’s good to see some probably overdue investment in modernising the local Lidl.

Very early stage masterplan for Clapham Junction station redevelopment – note that this builds in the Asda site. Note this is, at this stage, a very early design…
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Controversial but useful – new offices & workspaces coming to Culvert Road in 2024

Posted on March 7, 2023 by David

Local business premises are an important way of ensuring there are readily accessible jobs that don’t involve commuting across the city, but they’re also quite endangered, and always under threat of being converted to flats. That said, there are more pockets of light industry still going in Battersea than many people realise (as we’ve touched on before) – many of them in the somewhat hidden-away areas that don;t lend them selves to ‘luxury’ residential development. One particularly little-known local ‘industrial’ site is Culvert Court, a sliver of land trapped between the railway and the Battersea Park Etate, which is packed full of storage units and small workshops. There’s 22,000 square feet of space overall – not a huge area (for comparison, T.K. Maxx at Clapham Juntion is about 30,000 square feet) – but what makes it particulatly odd is that the space is split in to 128 tiny little units! The small size and really rather basic condition of most of these ‘micro units’ means that they are very affordable – which is probably why the site has ended up as home to a bewildering array of small local businesses (we wrote about one of these – AL Coffee Roasters – a few months ago). Useful as this site is, it’s fair to say that the buildings are tired and have definitely seen better days, so some sort of redevelopment was almost inevitable.

The site was bought by new owners in June last year, and proposals quickly emerged for a complete rebuild of the site. The plans will create a site worth about £30m, with the building floorspace growing by about 50% – to 36,500 square feet. But maybe more importantly, it will see a mass of rudimentary single storey lockups demolished, and replaced with three more advanced modern buildings that allow for larger spaces to be rented. By creating two- and three-storey structures more space will be freed up between the buildings, even as the development creates more overall floor space. It’s being developed by Avanton, who have developed two other notable projects in Battersea – the brand-new headquarters for the Royal Academy of Dance on York Road (which was accompanied by a large residential development), followed by the redevelopment of the Academy’s former site at Battersea Square to become an extension of Thomas’s school.

This project – whose layout is shown above – was very controversial when it went ion to the planning process. An impressive 48 objections were received to the planning proposal – many of them carefully written and very detailed, and mainly from residents of Rowditch Lane and Sheepcote Lane who are likely to be the most affected (indeed, some people objected more than once). A particular concern, which we very much agree with, concerned the proposed creation of a large cluster of new ‘dark kitchens‘ – which are hidden-away kitchens that make food that’s branded as coming from restaurants you will likely recognise, but aimed directly at serving the delivery market. Culvert Road has already got several dark kitchens run by market leader Food Stars, hidden away deeper in the Parkfield industrial estate between the railway tracks. While there’s nothing wrong with the kitchens in themselves which clearly serve a significant local market, the amount of trade there has led to an absolute explosion in motorbike traffic – with the noise and danger that that entails. In our experience, some riders are very considerate – but some very much aren’t! – and the road network here was never really designed with that level of traffic in mind. The route is also the only access road for students from north of the railway to the John Burns school, which creates particular dangers when a load of speeding motorbikes are added to the mix. Problems with antisocial behaviour by the occupiers of some of the existing units at Culvert Court are also frequently mentioned. Concerns were also raised about the effect of a three-storey development on daylight in the houses immediately to the north of the site.

Sensing the level of concern about the initial proposals, the developers went away and changed the plans. The height of one of the buildings was reduced from two storeys to one, and the other buildings were slightly lowered as well, reducing (but not removing) the overshadowing of neighbouring houses and gardens. And maybe most significantly, the large cluster of proposed new ‘dark kitchens’ was completely deleted and replaced by a building providing standard industrial floorspace instead. The revised plans didn’t resolve all the concerns – and still saw another 17 objections – however the changes were actually quite significant, and this is maybe a good example of a situation where local concerns can actually lead to changes.

Following these changes, the development went to the full Planning Application Committee (rather than being decided by planning officers – which is how less controversial ones are usually decided), and it received planning permission – with 36 fairly detailed conditions that need to be met before the development can be occupied and while it is in use, stretching from evidence being needed on urban greening and rules on opening hours, to a ban on any telecoms antennas or roof terraces. It is worth noting that the planning department’s 54-page-long report was quite impressively thorough and detailed – going through the impact on houses along Rowditch Lane on a house-by-house basis and looking at the daylight impact for each property. Avanton have started work to appoint a lettings agent for the new development, and now plan to get going as soon as they can – aiming to finish by early summer 2024.

Now there’s frankly no getting away from the fact that these will not be particularly beautiful buildings! The image above shows what the entrance to the site will look like after the works are complete. They are mostly clad in grey metal, with few windows. The plans include ‘green walls’ on the northern side facing Rowditch Lane – the greenish area in the image – that could soften the industrial appearance the building when viewed from neighbouring houses. However anyone with some familiarity with the planning process will conform that these ‘greenery’ plans usually vanish from the plans once building work gets going – indeed Wandsworth is littered with planned green walls that never got delivered!. Maybe this will be the exception to that general rule…

However these non-beautiful buildings will be modern, efficient, functional ones – that are well suited to their planned use. All the new buildings will provide a good standard of flexible workspace and be easy to subdivide to a mix of unit sizes, and so be ready for use by a wide range of occupiers. The plans meet Wandsworth’s requirements that new business spaces should provide suitable loading facilities, ceiling heights of at least 3.35m, space on site for commercial vehicles, and goods lifts with a minimum loading of 500kg. In this case the plans provide flexible floorplates that are mostly free of awkward columns, and decent size doorways. The new buildings will also be up to modern energy efficiency and insulation standards, meaning that they can be heated (which was a real challenge with some of the old structures, that are a mix of old fashioned garages and repurposed shipping containers) – with both solar panels and air source heat pumps helping keep energy costs down. The second floor of ‘Building Two’ – the tall one about half way along the site – would be designated as 329 square metres of ‘Affordable Workspace’, rented out at a minimum discount of 20% to market rent. This would be backed by a legal agreement with Wandsworth Council to ensure that the space remains affordable and is properly used.

This will be a big change for Culvert Court, and it won’t please everyone as even the revised plans do not address all the neighbours’ concerns. However a redevelopment of some sort was long overdue at this useful but increasingly tatty site, and this is clearly good for business and creating local jobs. There has been quite a sharp rise in demand for warehousing and business space in central London, driven partly by the huge amount of delivery activity that we now see – at the same time as London lost almost a quarter of its industrial space over the last 20 years, mostly to housing development which tends to be willing to pay higher prices for land. This site right by the railway is well suited to business use, and we suspect that these units will be easy to let, given they are now a short walk from Battersea tube, and close to the established Parkfield industrial estate. Chances are we’ll see a similar mix of businesses as the nearby industrial areas – albeit those are bewilderingly wide, and include breweries, furniture makers, coffee roasters, gyms, builders, fashion designers, all manner of local services, and of course the rapidly growing ‘last mile’ delivery services. We’ll keep you posted as this project develops.

If you found this interesting you may also want to see our posts on the history and future of Culvert Place, including a new development site just south of the Culvert Road tunnel, one on a cluster of planned office developments around Queenstown Road station, and a wider article on the various commercial developments in Battersea.

Posted in Business, Environment, Planning, Street by street | 2 Comments

New opening: Remedy Kitchen

Posted on February 27, 2023 by David

At the very eastern end of the street up on the Wandsworth Road, the big and beautiful corner unit that was home to Sinclair Till’s collection of carpets, fabrics and furnishings (until they moved to a new store that was somewhat smaller – but with the advantage of being right in the heart of Chelsea’s interior design heartland at Pimlico Road) has opened for the first time today – as Remedy Kitchen. Remedy Kitchen specialises in food that’s fast but also fresh, colourful and healthy – with a keen eye to the environmental impact of the business. Expect a mixture of healthy vegan & vegetarian bowls, wraps, soups and stews, including a range of breakfast pots.

Owner Fadi Chafi founded the business in 2020, as a delivery-only kitchen based in the huge complex of kitchens next to Battersea Heliport, before expanding to open an actual branch open to the public on Haverstock Hill near Belsize Park the following year. It’s clearly been a success – being shortlisted by Deliveroo for a ‘best newcomer of the year’ award, and Fadi is now returning to Battersea in a bigger way with an actual branch. The last few weeks have seen quite extensive works to the site, which has had everything restored and repaired, as well as a repaint from grey to teal that works rather well. The business has a local following thanks to the delivery operation, and this very visible new branch will bring Remedy Kitchen’s offering to a whole new audience.

It’s also good to see the new activity up at this end of the street – complementing Maiella Worth‘s recently refurbished Cafe/restaurant next door, which has found considerable success with freshly cooked Arrosticini, to the point where prebooking is definitely wise in the evenings. Further to the east, after a fairly long pause, work has now also got well underway at the former Lost Society / Artesian Well buildings, which we wrote about quite some time ago – which should bring a new Cafe and one other commercial unit back in to business. We’ll bring you an update on that site in a future post.

Remedy Kitchen. 791 Wandsworth Road, London SW8 3QJ. @remedykitchen_uk

Posted in Business, Food & drink, Retail | 1 Comment