links for 2013-11-14

14 November 2013 » No Comments

As the planning consultation kicks off for the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, @diamondgeezer takes a look around the Transpontine Cathedral and ponders how the south side centre for industrial toil looks set to become a shell for boutique shops:

“And it was the artist’s impressions of these malls that made me silently weep. They showed a central atrium with shops and balconies and staircases that could have been any major shopping mall anywhere, say Lakeside or Westfield, the very epitome of nothing special.”

Office, retail and residential accommodation are the supertructure to fund the infrastructure, as yer man Marx probably wouldn’t have said. No surprises to see that DG didn’t find much room for manouvre in the usual closed question questionnaire:

“I support the new plans to regenerate the Power Station building.”

Um…

The default conflict theorist response is to simply sneer at the regeneration of Battersea Power and the whole VNEB development. It is highly convenient to adopt a ‘back in the day’ approach and bemoan yet another slice of Old London being glassed over in a semi-private riverside gatehouse hell hole.

But it’s all about the give and take.

Battersea Power Station is beautiful, but it is no use to anyone if it remains empty. We may live in an age of austerity, but that doesn’t stop BIG capital from investing elsewhere across town. If the playboys and girls of the Malyasian consortium can’t create a retail playground at VNEB, then they won’t hesitate to bugger off and do it somewhere else that is a little more welcoming.

The trick is to play redevelopment poker. Allow them to have the crappy boutique shop units, but build in a condition that the four chimneys ‘aint going nowhere. The boutique shops don’t open for business until the chimneys are restored - non-negotiable.

Likewise build in complete public access. The riverside shouldn’t be blocked for public access, no matter how silly the money gets for some poxy penthouse view.

Plus put cycling [PDF] at the top of the agenda. Whatever the London cycling community demands of the new development, the London cycling community should gain. This is a one-off opportunity in which to build a cycling infrasturcture in what is in essence a new town on the Transpontine banks of the Thames. Cycling needs to be the primary transport option.

But it won’t of course - the Northern Line Extension will see to that. Cycling isn’t the preferred transport option for the crappy boutique shoppers or poxy penthouse buyers as they shuttle in and out of VNEB each day. The vanity of the NLE in serving retail and not residents remains incredulous.

It really isn’t that far a walk down the Wandsworth Road to Battersea once you reach Vauxhall. Meanwhile Queenstown Road might as well be a ghost station.

Wait…

My local resident’s association is taking a healthy interest in VNEB. The regeneration zone borders the housing, public space and transport routes that define our patch. The consensus is broadly supportive, but with a guarded suspicion as to the economic factors that are driving the change.

It’s hard to see how any community integration can take shape bewtween South Lambeth and the other side of the Wandsworth Road. The NLE extension won’t exactly benefit us, unless we choose to take a tube to travel to Nine Elms Sainsburys, rather than the ten minute walk.

Still, at least the Battersea backdrop is providing my local resident’s association with the opportunity to organise together on a hyperlocal photography project. Wathcing you, watching us etc. The camera never lies.

“It seems the price of saving Gilbert Scott’s creation is to transform it utterly, as a generator of wealth rather than of awe.”

Meh.

Jesus’ Blood Re-visited

“The singing voice of an anonymous South London homeless man has moved people around the world long after his death. The composer Gavin Bryars built his piece Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet around a recording made in 1971. As he recalls:

In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song - sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads - and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet”. This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one.”

@Transpontine recalls the incredible piece of music that is Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood.

I could do without that bloody Tom Waits wailing come the close, mind.