HS2, the proposed new Euston-Birmingham rail link is promised to shave perhaps 33 minutes off the 79-minute journey. Not really Vauxhall Society territory, perhaps but a local conversation threw up this local titbit: after the Southampton line reached Waterloo in 1848 the journey from Woking to Waterloo took 28 minutes. A friend travelled the line yesterday, and his train was on time; the journey took one minute longer than in Victorian times, 29 minutes…
Your help is needed! The Friends of Durning Library have launched a survey to assess how best to plan for the library’s future. They say: “Lambeth Council is currently considering the future organisation of its library service. We know that there are to be severe budget cuts and if the community does not step in, our library may not survive. “As the library’s Friends, we need your help to decide how best to plan for its future, and so...
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...
Researchers beware – Lambeth Archives is closed for stocktaking from Monday 23 January to Saturday 4 February. Staff won’t be dealing with personal, phone or written enquiries – this is Lambeth, remember. Normal service (and history) resumes on Monday 6 February, and The Minet lending library in the same building will be open as normal throughout. Lambeth Archives
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.
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.’
Residents in the streets around Tradescant Road (Walberswick Street, Meadow Place, Old South Lambeth Road, Heyford Avenue) are launching a new association (TARA) on Wednesday 11 January at 7pm, with an inaugural meeting held in the Ruby Lounge upstairs at the Griffin pub in Wyvil Road. Tradescant Road and South Lambeth blog has more details. Please email tradescantroad@gmail.com
Like to put a spoke in Lambeth’s plan to sell off historic public library buildings like the Durning and the Tate South Lambeth and either move the libraries themselves to or merge them in some dreary municipal ‘space’? You have until 12 January to post or email your point of view on the value of your library to the Parliamentary Select Committee on library closures.
The Vauxhall Society sends you all, members and non-members alike, season’s greetings. Please remember that becoming a member of TVS gives you an arena to voice your opinions about Vauxhall’s rapidly changing landscape, excellent local networking and regular news updates. Join online here -> www.vauxhallcivicsociety.org.uk/join
The Northern Line Extension project has been shunted into a siding, where it now blocks developers’ drive to canyonise the Battersea-Vauxhall riverside (VNEB) with skyscraper apartment blocks. Banks have repossessed the key Battersea Power Station site (and NLE terminus) from REO/Transport Holdings. This Irish development consortium was the cheerleader for NLE and said that the whole VNEB development hinged upon the new Tube line’s being built. Now Richard De Cani, TfL’s Director for Strategy and Development, has called...
An invitation from Friends of Tate South Lambeth Library to attend a talk given by Ferrous Auger about the history of Brunswick House. Brunswick House Lassco is a Georgian townhouse in the middle of the gyratory system in Vauxhall. In the eighteenth century Brunswick House (originally Belmont House) stood in five and half acres of parkland with its own jetty and a handsome frontage. Now some two and half centuries later it casts a rueful glance at five lanes...
