Area in Focus: Nine Elms – Central London’s Newest Location
Autumn 2014

For a 100 years, the South Bank was the capital’s central industrial district, dominated by river trade and more recently by Bankside and Battersea Power Stations. Although County Hall and the Royal Festival Hall were rare interventions into this industrial landscape, the closures of the power stations at Bankside in 1981 and Battersea in 1983 were the catalytic events which changed the landscape.

Nine Elms

The district of Nine Elms, stretching from Vauxhall to Battersea, is the final chapter of an extraordinary regeneration story for the South Bank – London’s ‘Third City’. Bordered to the north by the river and to the south by a 19th century rail viaduct, and extending some eight miles from Tower Bridge to Battersea Park, this most central of locations has come alive in the last 30 years with a series of new hubs of urban development, social activity, and world-class culture.

Industrial activity has given way to a stunning array of districts, both new and reinvented, in the heart of the capital. City Hall and More London, Borough Market, the Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre, the South Bank Centre, the London County Hall and the London Eye, St Thomas’s Hospital, Lambeth Palace and the Archbishop’s Park – all have created a tidal wave of successful residential, commercial, retail, cultural, and leisure development over the last 30 years.

Nine Elms is currently going through a magnificent and profound metamorphosis creating a new landmark riverside district for central London. Nine Elms, in its planning and architecture, benefits from the visionary thinking of one of the foremost practitioners in the industry, Sir Terry Farrell. Sir Terry was given the task of master-planning the regeneration of the area in 2009.

A key element of the overall master-plan for Nine Elms is the Linear Park, running from Vauxhall Bridge to the Battersea Power Station site, providing a sustainable, green backbone to the new quarter. The inspiration for the Linear Park comes from New York’s High Line, a mile long park built on an elevated section of the former New York Central Railroad, running down Manhattan’s Lower West Side. It has now been reclaimed and planted as an aerial greenway, which has in turn had a phenomenally positive regenerative impact upon the entire district.

At the core of Nine Elms sits the US Embassy. The decision to move the embassy to Nine Elms was made in 2008. Architectural competition winner Kieran Timberlake’s iconic design for the new building and its landscaped surroundings gives imaginative form to the need to create a holistic, highly functional, environmentally sound, secure space, which is at the same time welcoming to the community. The presence of the embassy could possibly attract other diplomatic missions to relocate to this area.

Finally, the new Union Square is a rich mix of restaurants, bars and cafés, hotels, shops, and enterprising businesses that promises the neighbourhood a lively, busy street life with the cosmopolitan feel London has become famous for.

• The Communication Group Plc;
• KieranTimberlake.com;
• TransportForLondon.gov.uk.