Clapham Common’s new café marks a significant transformation of a derelict public toilet building, which had long been a neglected eyesore. Following extensive renovations, the site now offers a vibrant community space with modern amenities, while retaining its historic charm.

Battersea Woods has long been home to a derelict toilet building that has piqued curiosity and concern. Our partner Lavender Hill’s community website has covered its history in detail before, including an extensive look at its crumbling interior in a previous article. In short, the toilets were abandoned at some stage in the late 1990s, due to a combination of falling budgets, repeated vandalism, and late night shenanigans. Lambeth tried to knock them down a few times on the grounds that the building was beyond repair, but Wandsworth’s planners – who had the final say on whether it could be demolished – weren’t convinced, and it all ended up in a sort of stalemate with the building just being left to rot away.

The brambles went a bit mad, the whole structure started to lean a bit, and most of the original roof tiles mysteriously went missing. After twenty years or so Lambeth had a go at letting the building as a cafe or gallery – well, anything that could demonstrate some public use, and hence be allowable on Common land – but with the sizeable caveat that anyone taking the place on would have to start by repairing the building at their cost.

It was worth a go at letting the place out – but with plenty of other places to run businesses on Lavender Hill & Battersea Rise that were good to go with little more than a coat of paint and some furniture, tenants weren’t exactly queuing around the block to take on somewhere that could easily need a six figure sum spending before they could get trading at all, no matter how interesting the location.

Sanderson Weatherall’s video of the interior (linked below) shows the state of it before the recent works started – it’s a decent space, with some features intact and (importantly, from a keeping-costs-under-control perspective, what look like working water and power supplies), but a general air of extreme dilapidation.

The still from the video below shows the roof – in remarkably good condition given how long the place had been left to itself, and showing that with the right investment, the building could be quite a decent space.

A year or so ago, in a move that came as a slight surprise to many, Lambeth changed their minds abut the place – and in these more enlightened times, decided it was worth rescuing the original building, and putting investment in to bring it back in to use. It would now become both an accessible public WC, and a cafe space that could be used to provide a small drinks and food offer that’s a bit lacking in this particular bit of the Common, as well as to generate long term commercial income.

The plans above show what’s now been built. There’s a small servery / kitchen area, with the middle of the site given over to seating, and an internal WC attached to the cafe. A separate fully accessible WC has a door opening directly outside, bringing an accessible bathroom to this part of the Common for the first time.

Works got going quickly, with a completely new roof made with heritage style terracotta tiles, and quite a lot of the external brickwork replaced in the areas where it had dissolved. New windows have gone in throughout, and the doors have been replaced and in some cases moved to put access in more sensible locations.

The outside has a mixture of paved and gravelled seating areas, with the existing railings round the site repaired. Rather like the Pear Tree Cafe, we expect that this outdoor area will see plenty of use in the summer – as it’s just far enough from the main road to avoid the impact of the traffic.

On the inside, a nice touch is that the original white glazed brick that lined a lot of the walls has been kept and repaired – keeping a bit of the original style of the place.

We understand the works came in at about £150,000, which isn’t bad given the state of the place before, and how it has got back to being a usable facility with scope for income.

The next step is to get it up and open! There remains some uncertainty on whether the cafe will be leased out (as was the case with the central bandstand cafe, where the Pear Tree Cafe took over an existing lease; and as is also the case with the building that houses Megan’s), or whether it will be run in-house by Lambeth (we’ve heard both – from different sources).

January’s not going to be peak season for any business on the Common – but there’s time to get things running smoothly before the summer, when this is likely to be a rather profitable site.

So there we have it. A building that looked to be doomed to eventual demolition, has come back from the brink – and been restored to a high level of quality, as an asset to Clapham Common. Some may say it’s a vindication of sorts for the anonymous Wandsworth planning officers many years ago who pushed back on the proposed demolition – they were right that the building would be better saved than replaced with a big green shipping-container-type structure as had been proposed at the time.

But above all it’s a moment to say hats off to Lambeth, whose taking a fresh look at the building’s potential has brought this small but characterful building back to life. Nothing is simple when you’re building on a Common, and it’s even harder when you’re doing it as a cash strapped local authority – and we know there will have been a lot of hard work behind the scenes to assemble a decent level of investment for this project. But this is a result to be proud of.

This article was originally published on lavender-hill.uk.