Nine Elms Sainsbury’s is a store I know incredibly well. I don’t think I’ve ever known a supermarket so intimately. Nine Elms and its aisles to me are the like the body of a long-standing lover. I know where everything is. Nothing about it surprises me. I keep going back there even though I’m a little tired of it.
This Nine Elms store, which has been there for around thirty years now, is being closed down next summer to make room for a further redevelopment of the area, which is rapidly changing now. The store is to make way for a much bigger store, a behemoth, as they turn it into some kind of village including residential homes
That really bothers me. These changes have been going on now since the late nineties but have really gathered pace now. Some I think have been good, others like the massive St George’s Wharf Complex at Vauxhall Cross have been completely lacking in any imagination, and have predictably brought with them the Tescos, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s mini stores that weren’t interested in the area when it was largely working class.
The bit I do like, which troubles me, because there will be no affordable housing in the area until 2025, is the tower. It’ll be Europe’s tallest residential block.
It is beautiful even though I know it’s not for people like me. I doubt I’ll ever get past reception there. And it’s going to have the highest swimming pool in Europe, located on the 27th floor. I like the idea of getting into a lift in your Speedos.
This is the tower that was in the news back in January when that helicopter tragically hit the crane and some of the debris fell onto this disused petrol forecourt which is what the Sainsbury’s Nine Elms is going to leave the locals with for three years. An overpriced little convenience store. It’ll mean locals probably have to start shopping at the Clapham Sainsbury’s – not me, I don’t give a single penny to Clapham, the most soulless and exclusive of the gentrified areas that haunt South West London’s working classes – or the Victoria Sainsbury’s market, which is actually quite a nice store.
I don’t like that supermarkets are trying to be more than supermarkets. Why do they need to be villages? I don’t want to be going into some manufactured village just to be buying my shopping. And if I were a resident, I wouldn’t want to be setting up my new life above a supermarket. No doubt these new residential developments will have balconies too. Balconies in the city are overrated. They rarely come with anything remotely approaching a view. These new, almost inevitably white middle class residents, out of towners, their properties paid for by daddy, are going to be sitting on their balconies drinking their expensive coffees just watching the locals emerging from the new big Sainsbury’s below them. That there will be their view.
London is losing its character. The buildings that have sprung up in Vauxhall remind me of architectural designs I first saw in Canary Wharf when I worked there in the early nineties, and they were okay. That was the first time I’d been in East London with any regularity and I thought, if this is what East London looks like or is planning on looking like from now, fine. Every area should have its own distinct character, but then those same designs start sweeping west across London, and this great city starts to lose its character. So many parts of London are trying to be more, and in attempting this, they are ending up being less. It is disappointing.
A Nando’s has just opened in Vauxhall that will impact on the sundry independent Portuguese and Brazilian cafes and restaurants in the area. Earlier this year, a new fancy burger bar opened just two doors away from the Nando’s. Going towards Battersea down Nine Elms Lane, new monstrous developments are starting to obscure the view of the river we’d long stopped taking for granted. Vauxhall is starting to get as greedy as Clapham and Brixton. It’d be a shame if its gentrification matched or even eclipsed what has happened in those two areas that played a massive part in my childhood.