So you think you live in a democracy? Look again at Transport for London’s Transport and Works Act Order (TWAO) application to the Secretary of State for Transport for permission to build and operate ‘NLE’ Northern Line Extension that is be pushed through Vauxhall. You can have a hard copy of all the documents for a mere £850.There are more than 75 of them, detailed and highly complex, and will have taken many highly paid “experts” many months, if...
The Dutch Embassy’s rumoured move from Hyde Park Gate to Nine Elms is now official. The Kingdom of the Netherlands has done a deal with Embassy Gardens developers Ballymore Group that will see the embassy move in 2017 a 50,000 sq ft site next to the US Embassy on Nine Elms Lane. For the PR hype: www.embassygardens.com www.nineelmslondon.com/news/dutch-embassy-coming-to-nine-elms
The Vauxhall Society and Vauxhall MP Kate Hoey are among those backing the objection of residents of flats around the Albert Embankment to a planning application to build extra storeys on the Plaza Riverside Hotel. Lambeth has turned down the application before because this is a particularly densely-populated part of an overcrowded borough. The development would further deprive many dwellings – among them ‘affordable homes’ – of daylight and sunlight. But Lambeth Council now stands to pocket £220,000 or...
Businesses moving into the Vauxhall Nine Elms ‘Opportunity area’ will have their business rates payments channelled directly into paying for the Northern Line Extension, the Vauxhall Nine Elms Partnership (VNEP) says. When businesses start paying, how much and for how long VNEP (i.e. Wandsworth and Lambeth Councils) do not say. No mention is made of dipping into Council Tax money. Lambeth Council leader Lib Peck is the ‘co-chair’ of VNEP and has put her name to the VNEP statement...
Transport for London’s draft application to Parliament for sweeping powers to push through the Northern Line Extension is a stinker, The Vauxhall Society has told TfL (details below). TfL asked for comment by 9 April, but isn’t publishing those comments (as would happen in a planning application). Nor will TfL recirculate the proposed final draft. All that’s happening is a cynical PR stunt in which TfL will ignore or twist unfavourable comment to kid MPs that there is universal...
Our news of moves to establish a Friends of Vauxhall Bus Station to stop Lambeth demolishing the station and scattering the bus stops has got people signing up at vauxhallcs@gmail. Critical mass is building quite nicely, so if you would like to hop aboard, just email your name, address and phone number. Issues to be aired at a forthcoming inaugural meeting of the Friends include: Bus station brings all stops together under cover and next to train stations: 100%...
In 2007 Stephen Bayley, design writer and Vauxhall Society member, forecast in The Observer that BT would sell its Keybridge House offices in South Lambeth Road when subletting and other contracts ran out in 2011. Bayley was right. He upbraided Ross Cook, BT’s director of media relations, for BT’s corporate arrogance in making Vauxhall people pay ‘an ugliness tax’ by allowing Keybridge House to fall into a ‘shockingly run-down state with filthy windows, broken blinds, stained concrete’. This ‘drab, grey...
You couldn’t make it up. In an Economist article on VNEB (16 February,pp 25,26) Simon Jenkins describes tall-buildings policy as ‘corrupt’, not because people are stealing money but because nowadays councils get a rake-off from planning proposals they OK. Hence ‘a wall of glass from Bermondsey to Battersea’. Now comes news that, three and a half years ago, having OK’d the 34-storey Vauxhall Sky Gardens skyscraper at the junction of Wyvil Street and Wandsworth Road, Lambeth councillors are now...
Councillors, officials and developers like to say how great a place the Vauxhall, Nine Elms & Battersea (VNEB) area will be live. Or will it instead be a depopulated desert in the evenings and weekends, rather like large parts of Dockland? The two local authorities, Lambeth and Wandsworth, look forward to collecting lots of tax (writes Martin Stanley), but do not appear to be expecting many families to live there. It also appears that the proposed ‘affordable housing’ will...
Martin Stanley of TVS affiliate the Fentiman Road and Richborne Terrace Residents Association has come up with three questions worth Vauxhall people asking at the public meeting on the Vauxhall Nine Elms ‘regeneration’ and the Northern Line Extension that Lambeth is holding at 7pm on Wednesday 20 March at the Wheatsheaf Hall, Wheatsheaf Lane, SW8 2UP. Does Lambeth’s requirement that ‘all development proposals must demonstrate that they will have reduced or at the most a neutral traffic impact’ apply...
