Wandsworth Council’s innovative development will add 14 new flats to the existing estate near Lavender Hill, while also upgrading communal gardens and addressing longstanding issues. The project, part of the ‘Homes for Wandsworth’ initiative, cleverly extends existing kitchens into the new buildings and incorporates sustainable features like air-source heat pumps.

A mark of the Labour administration in the borough, something fairly rare’s happening: some new social flats are being built, by the Council! Wandsworth plans to add 14 new flats to Tyneham Close, an existing 64-flat estate just north of Lavender Hill (seven of them one-bed, and seven two-bed), by some ingenious building work in the two squares shown in the picture below:

One of the new buildings will take over a paved area that was originally designed as a space to hang out laundry, pictured below. It sees occasional use as a childrens’ play area, but it’s essentially abandoned, and as a piece of land that the Council already owns it’s an obvious candidate for redevelopment.

The new building will have five storeys, loosely echoing the style of the existing flats through use of somewhat similar brick and a similar flat roof approach, but it will also come with bigger windows, proper balconies, and generally speaking a design that looks much more up to date than the rest of the estate.

One thing you may be wondering, comparing the two images (above and on top of this article), is – what about the windows of the existing flats? They have a kitchen window and a bedroom window (as well as a tiny boiler cupboard window) facing straight in to the site of the new building. And this is where something quite clever is being done.

Innovative design and resident benefits

This project has been in development for over ten years, and the first version tried to keep all those windows in use. It got a planning approval way back in 2016, but the project then went on the back burner for years. When the project was revived someone at the Council had a closer look, and clearly thought – there has to be a cleverer way of doing this. They worked out that if they scrapped those windows, and extended those existing Tyneham Close flats right in to the new building, they could give them a bigger and better kitchen, with a window facing the other way – and a new balcony.

The extract of the floorplan below shows what this means in practice: the pink bit labelled “Kitchen extension” is a new kitchen extension added to the existing flats, with the old kitchen becoming a dining area. A new balcony is also added opening from the kitchen.

By removing the need to do awkward things to the layout of the new building to keep those windows in use, and allowing the whole of the plot to be used for development, this also allows bigger and better flats in the new-build part of the development. Of course the people living in those existing flats, who are a mix of leaseholders and tenants, would need to all agree – and discussions were held with everyone affected to see if this approach would be workable.

It seems that a whole lot of extra space and new balcony, and a brand new kitchen – in exchange for some disruption and losing an old window – was an offer too good to refuse, and everyone agreed.

There are other interesting design details in the plans – two of the flats are duplexes, with their own front doors to the street, and internal staircases up to the first floor, to use the ground floor space efficiently for living areas while not having bedrooms on the ground level.

Some of the windows that face in to the courtyard are also pointed in particular directions to avoid overlooking existing flats. The plan is to use air source heat pumps rather than gas boilers for heating, to make the new flats more sustainable and cheaper to run.

The other new building is more or less a mirror image to the first, and will take over a small walled courtyard that was originally built as a mini 1950s-style sports pitch. It’s more heavily used than the old laundry area on the other corner, but it has been very neglected for the last decade or so and is looking quite run down!

The new building on this side will look like this, seen from Shirley Grove – with its own entrance to the street. A similar approach has been taken with the kitchens, again extending the existing flats and adding new balconies, in exchange for moving the existing windows around.

Revitalising the estate’s central garden

As part of the project a bundle of improvements will also be made to the existing estate, in particular the central garden. It is a surprisingly large space, and should really be an oasis in an otherwise very built-up area, and somewhere that can be used by the many residents and families in the estate – but it is really not well used at the moment.

This is partly because like the estate it’s been designed in a very traditional late-1950s way with a single pathway and not much else – without anything in the way of play equipment, no seating (there was some but it was removed some years ago), and really not a lot to offer other than a green view out of the window.

The whole garden area will now be completely redesigned, with a wavy path running round the courtyard, new planting, new seating, and lot more variety in the layout. At the moment the grass runs right up to the windows, the plans will instead see decorative planting introduced round the edges to give a bit of privacy to the ground floor flats.

There will also be a proper childrens’ play area in the middle of the courtyard – labeled ‘6‘ on the plans below. The large trees will be pruned to let a bit more light in to the space. The aim is to make this feel like a place people want to be, and remove the somewhat abandoned no-man’s-land feel it has at the moment.

Managing access has been an ongoing problem with the current gardens – they’re supposed to be a private residents-only area, but the three existing access gates keep being broken and left open, which leave them open to all sorts of dodgy characters, street drinkers, and the like – as well as large and not-very-friendly dogs running free – all of which has understandably put residents off using them.

The current flimsy gates will be replaced with proper new gate controls on the ground floor of the two new buildings, that will make the gardens a proper ‘residents only’ space. The rather hidden away gate to Woodmere Close (and Lavender Hill) which has proved especially hard to secure will be permanently closed, with the stairs removed and new bushes and planting blocking off that entrance route for good.

The “Ruffians’ corner” seating area hidden away at that corner of the gardens, pictured below – which has been a magnet for antisocial behaviour – will also be reduced in size and linked better to the garden.

There will also be improvements to Ashley Crescent, where two large areas of paving (one pictured below; the other is at the end of Dunston Close) will be replaced with new areas of landscaping with wildflower gardens and bushes. This is partly in an attempt to compensate for some loss of greenery with the new buildings, but is mainly designed to provide a rainwater-absorbing area, in an area that has seen localised flooding.

The floods are sometimes caused by rainwater flowing down the hill when drains and gulleys get blocked – but a long-lost river also runs right underneath these planned rainwater-absorption areas – it was originally a side channel of the Thames known as the Battersea Channel, and later became a somewhat manky river called the Heathwall (more information on Lavender-Hill.uk), before being more or less completely buried, emerging only to surprise people when it occasionally bursts out of the drains in big storms.

Rubbish and parking upgrades for Tyneham Close

The planned development will also involve changes to Tyneham Close’s rubbish collection arrangements, which have been an a bit of a shambles for many years. At the moment rubbish has to be taken some distance, either to a poorly designed bin shed that that’s far too small (and which has repeatedly been taken over by rats), or to a series of open air recycling bins scattered around the estate, most of which are an absolute haven for flytipping.

The ground floors of the two new buildings will each include a fully-enclosed rubbish storage site, built to modern standards. By including enough indoor space for all the bins, and having a gate system to limit access to residents, this should remove the ugly and messy outdoor bin areas (pictured below) that previously attracted so much flytipping.

The estate has five car parking spaces that are a bit of a free-for-all at the moment, facing Tyneham Road. These will be reorganised to have two blue bage spaces, and some secure cycle parking (34 internal spaces, four external ones, and four for visitors). This represents a small overall loss of parking space, but for the first time existing residents will have secure & lockable cycle storage in the estate, rather than having to take bikes up to upper level flats.

Wandsworth’s ongoing housing push

This is the third and final stage of the building programme in Tyneham Close & the Gideon Road estate. We’ve reported quite a lot on the series of small Council-led building projects off Lavender Hill – from when they were first proposed, when work started, only to be followed by a long pause while it was all half-built, to reporting on the generally decent results of the first phase.

There’s a second set to get building at some stage soon, behind The Crown pub – where again the plans have evolved with time (see article on Lavender-Hill.uk and here), in that case the project is ready for construction to start.

Wandsworth has a fairly solid track record on building new Council houses – the ‘Hidden Homes‘ programme was created by the Conservative council in the early 2010s, with the aim of using up scraps of land on existing Council-owned estates to create new affordable housing.

Most of the funding came from the money developers of shiny new flats would pay the Council when they said they couldn’t fit the affordable housing portion on the main site. The current Labour one has continued with the programme, albeit with the new name ‘Homes for Wandsworth‘, and with the aim of delivering 1000 homes for council level rent on council owned sites.

You might say that this small development of 14 small and mid-sized flats is a drop in the ocean – after all, the 2023 local plan has year-on-year target at 1,950 homes a year up to 2028! – but these are nevertheless good quality flats being built, and the wider works should improve the estate as a whole. It is likely that most of the residents of these new flats will be people relocated from the York Road estate as part of the rebuilding and redevelopment programme there.

From ruins to renewal: The story of Tyneham Close

As Tyneham Close sees its first significant building work for decades, it’s maybe worth a brief historical detour.

Tyneham Close was built in 1948-50, by architects Howes & Jackman – it was one first post-war housing schemes of any size built by Battersea Borough Council, and also represented the Council’s first employment of private architects for housing.

It replaced a more traditional road running right through the middle of the estate and linking Tyneham Road to Lavender Hill; the photo below from the planning documents shows the old buildings roughly where Tyneham Court’s central entrance is, just before they were demolished. The pathway behind the bollards is what would become Shirley Grove, the same view now looks like this.

As the ‘bomb damage’ map below shows (where the new buildings’ location is marked in red), these houses had been badly bomb-damaged and were clearly deemed beyond rescue at the time. What is maybe more surprising is that large numbers of perfectly seviceable houses both east and west of the ste were also demolished, to make way for the Gideon Road estate and the Ashley Crescent Estate.

It’s not too clear why this was done – the costs involved must have been considerable, and because what was built in the place of the terraced houses was broadsly similar density to what was there before, the overall amount of housing presumably remained much the same. The Victorian houes were no doubt old and tired, but this part of Lavender Hill had been built to decent quality.

Before Tyneham Close, Howes & Jackman architects had previously designed several very smart 1930s projects, and Tyneham Close was clearly a fairly happy project for everyone involved as they went on to design lots more housing in Battersea over the next 25 years – including being the architects behind Battersea’s more architecturally debatable York Road estate in the late 1960s.

Back to the present – the latest proposals for Tyneham Close are currently in consultation.

If you’d like to see the detailed plans, and make comments, search for planning application 2025/0661 at wandsworth.gov.uk/planning. Comments can be made until the 17th April (and in our experience, late comments are often also accepted where it’s feasible for the planners to do so).

These plans have already involved a lot of consultation and meetings with residents, and we don’t expect them to be controversial. And somewhat unusually, the Council is applying to itself for permission (which is allowed in cases like this, under Regulation 3 of the Town and Country Planning Act) – so realistically it’s likely it will be approved!

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