Planning

Vauxhall-based property company CLS Holdings has applied for planning permission for its ambitious ‘Vauxhall Square’ redevelopment plan at Vauxhall Cross. CLS Chief Executive Officer Richard Tice stresses that the project does not depend upon the Northern Line extension from Kennington to Nine Elms being built. ‘Vauxhall Square’, would occupy the whole of the CLS-owned block bounded to the north by Parry Street, to the west by Wandsworth Road (with the exception of a terrace of listed houses), and by...

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The 32-storey student skyscraper proposed for 30-60 South Lambeth Road, would ‘overshadow’ Vauxhall Park and so further disadvantage people in an area of social deprivation that is short of open space. This and more is what the Friends of Vauxhall Park say in their objection to the scheme, sent to Lambeth planner Jonathon Fullelove and copied to Oval Ward councillors Ishbel Brown, Jane Edbrooke and Jack Hopkins.  What the Friends of Vauxhall Park say: Dear Jonathan Fullelove, Ref: 30-60...

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The traffic at Vauxhall Cross may get a lot heavier if Wandsworth Council has its way, according to Vauxhall Society affiliate the Fentiman Road and Richborne Terrace Residents Association. The cause? The skyscraper developments Wandsworth Council is giving the OK to along Nine Elms Lane. Wandsworth Council (it is reported but not yet confirmed) is insisting that all the traffic leaving the new Nine Elms developments should be forced to turn towards Vauxhall Cross so as to avoid adding...

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The Vauxhall Society has objected to the application for planning permission to build a 32-storey skyscraper of 572 student apartments overlooking Vauxhall Park. So too have the Friends of Vauxhall Park. Nice though it would be to have the swimming pool promised for 30-60 South Lambeth Road, the skyscraper is so big and so tall that, as the developers admit, it would shade Vauxhall Park. This application, like the consultation before it, is not the first to be dogged...

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Vauxhall developer CLS Holdings has put in a planning permission application for the Spring Mews redevelopment on the northern fringe of the site of Vauxhall Gardens. While some might vote it an improvement on the ragbag of buildings presently on the site, from the illustrations in the consultation material others may conclude the buildings bland, dull and well down to the standard of recent design in that quarter.

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No? Opera house, then? Two more ideas for what to do with Battersea Power Station from Spectator correspondents, following a suggestion in the 7 January issue that BPS would make a splendid ‘super crematorium’. The 14 January Speccie brings a ‘world-class opera house’ and then ‘a low-ash coal-fired thermal power station’. In his ‘Any Other Business’ column, Martin Vander Weyer says the idea for an opera house (with rail link to Victoria) comes from a reader. Much of the...

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When Sue Foster, Lambeth’s head of regeneration, was guest speaker at The Vauxhall Society AGM in October she revealed that yet more money was to be spent on consultants to prolong 20-odd years of council dithering about what to with Vauxhall Cross, the polluted, one-way traffic roundabout that seethes and fumes at the south foot of Vauxhall Bridge.

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There’s newspaper clamour for Battersea Power Station to be pulled down to make life easier for developers. John Buckingham, in a letter to The Spectator (7 January), strikes a different note: ‘With its four wonderful chimneys’, Mr. Buckingham writes, Battersea Power Station is ‘splendidly set up as a central crematorium’. The walls could accommodate bags of urns, and ‘customers’ could come in by barge ‘obviating the wasteful need for travel to Golders Green and other distant parts.’

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