The open days will include information on:

• Suggested draft principles to guide development
• Plans for a new linear park (in Wandsworth)
• Information on how new infrastructure such as schools and community facilities could be paid for

The material on show will also be available online.

Timeline:

• March 2012: Feedback collected on cards and via website that will help shape the revised draft SPD
• March/April 2012 Ongoing community engagement work (full engagement strategy being written)
• May 2012: Draft SPD to cabinet, May 2012
• June –September 2012: Statutory consultation on draft SPD (full engagement strategy being written

Thanks to Andrew at Tradescant Road and South Lambeth blog – and his sources – for this information.

One Nine Elms

There will be a public exhibition (on the site) of the proposed ‘One Nine Elms’ development of the Market Towers site tomorrow Friday 24 February (4-7pm) and Saturday 25th February (10am-2pm). The exhibition information will also be made available on their website: www.onenineelms.co.uk.

www.vauxhallone.co.uk

• London’s second busiest bus interchange after Victoria
• Vauxhall Railway Station, and the Waterloo main line, both atop a viaduct
• a congested, five-lane gyratory hinging upon one of London’s busiest bridges, Vauxhall Bridge

Stephen Bayley

Author, Vauxhall resident and TVS member Stephen Bayley has stepped into the debate about the skyscraper-and-shadow redevelopment of Vauxhall Cross and Nine Elms. Bayley does so not in a book or newspaper article (not yet anyway) but in a pronouncement to a TVS affiliate, the Fentiman Road and Richborne Terrace Association.

Bayley calls for development proposals to be met with ‘enthusiasm and optimism and ingenuity’, not ‘Canute-like’ with ‘reactionary bleating, whining and groaning’. The author imagines that ‘specially backward tribes greeted the missionaries’ gift of life-saving sanitation with similar bewilderment and reflex negativism’. Vauxhall, he argues ‘is at the centre of a global megalopolis. It’s not a holiday resort. They have shadows in Manhattan too. No-one there complains.’

Bayley’s stepped into a tall-building debate in which Simon Jenkins is setting the pace. Sir Simon has spoken of London’s mayoral ‘monuments only to insipid steel and glass’, buildings ‘not even intended for jobs but mostly for luxury flats and hotels. None has any civic significance or planning coherence. None makes any contribution to its immediate surroundings or is designed in some context, merely crashing to the ground as if plonked by a child from outer space. Totems of the deregulated money economy of the 1990s and 2000s, the towers are rising as random obelisks, littering the London skyline in perpetuity’. TVS would be delighted to publish Stephen Bayley’s blueprint for the Vauxhall that he would like to see. His latest book is La Dolce Vita: The Golden Age of Italian Style & Celebrity (Fiell Publishing).

Simon Jenkins writing in The Standard

Stephen Bayley:

There is (almost) always a presumption of calamity when local interest groups comment on proposed developments.  This is dismaying.  I imagine specially backward tribes greeted the missionaries’ gift of life-saving sanitation with similar bewilderment and reflex negativism.

I’d like to encourage a more intelligent, out-going and responsible attitude to the many changes occurring in this area.

For longer than anyone can remember, Vauxhall has been a depressed area.  Self-feeding forces of under-investment and neglect have pushed this wonderful part of London on a descending helix whose path is decorated with rubbishy shops, mean facilities and public spaces that are dirty and dangerous.

To welcome new developments is not to encourage a supine and uncritical response to the developers themselves.  Hard and soft influences should be vigorously used to ensure public provisions generously exceed the basic assumptions of “planning gain”.

But let’s do this with enthusiasm and optimism and ingenuity, not with reactionary bleating, whining and groaning.

Many of the criticisms express anxiety about traffic management.  Fair enough, but this a problem that affects the whole city.  Seeking to isolate Vauxhall from larger urban traffic patterns has both a preposterous Canute-like character and also, I think rather dangerously, suggests that a majority of locals prefer to live in a run-down inner-city netherworld.

Then the question of shadows cast by tall buildings in Vauxhall Park after 4:00pm is often raised.  I have not yet done the calculation of exactly how many days precisely what area of Vauxhall Park enjoys the full blast of strong sunshine in late afternoon, but when I have a figure it will be interesting to attempt a rational cost-benefit of what may be lost in terms of sun-bathing and what may be gained in terms of new investment.  Besides, Vauxhall is at the centre of a global megalopolis.  It’s not a holiday resort.  They have shadows in Manhattan too.  No-one there complains.

Everyone should be vigilant about civic responsibilities.  But civic responsibilities take many forms.  On the whole, new developments in Vauxhall promise to bring the area levels of prosperity and amenity not enjoyed since the eighteenth century.  But I don’t want to go back to the eighteenth century.  The twenty-first century offers better possibilities.

Let us make the very best of them.  It’s a serious mistake not to.