It’s rare to see new houses rather than flats in Battersea – but six of them are coming to a sliver of land you’ve probably never noticed, hidden away behind two rows of Victorian tenement flats on Theatre Street and Latchmere Street. The picture above shows their location (shaded in red) – where they will replace a series of small workshops that are spread along a thin passageway, almost completely hidden from every angle (apart from a glimpse through a gate on Heathwall Street, shown below).
The buildings are on the right hand side of the alleyway, spread along a long slope with lots of different sections at different floor heights, and they seem to have been built at the same time as the houses either side of the alley. The heritage assessment by Bridget Sheppard notes they were built by the original developer of the houses, Albert Bussell – who planned to use them as his own builders’ yardand workshops.
Albert’s original approach was unfortunate with hindsight, as it meant the already-very-small back gardens of his new flats ended up being truly minuscule – however he does seem to have at least built everything to a reasonably robust quality. The current buildings may not be especially pretty but they’re clearly solid, with brick walls and iron roofs, and have stood up to 150 years of use. The buildings are mostly in much the same state as when they were built, but those nearest to Heathwall Street have seen more recent changes, mainly to adapt them for use as garages.
The new plans will convert all the existing single storey buildings to six terraced houses. There’s no change in height, and the overall shapes of the buildings will remain more or less the same (even to the extent of keeping most windows and doors in the same place), which will make sure that they don’t block the light of the small neighbouring bakck gardens – but with the modern insulation, better roofs, and the more robust doors and windows that new housing needs. The plans suggest that the slightly industrial style of the buildings will be preserved in the new development.
The cluster of current buildings at the top bit of the slope nearest Lavender Hill – just inside the gate shown below – will become four houses, and a separate cluster of buildings at the bottom of the slop will become two more houses – with the proposed floor plans shown below. The houses, which will be a mixture of one- and two-bedroom properties, will all have small private front balcony areas – and there’ll also be a small area of shared green space in the middle of the development.
The general principle of conversion of these buildings from workshops to housing already has planning permission, following an application by the developer last year. Those plans received four objections and two general comments – with concerns including fear that these houses could become an Airbnb-type party zone, concerns about how foundations and party walls would be handled, worries about how fire safety and access would be maintained if the alley was to become partly used for balconies (which the Council has asked the developer to provide details of before work starts), and the lack of parking for the new houses.
There’s currently another neighbour consultation underway on the details – including the design and appearance of the new houses. This includes, for example, the plan to include wildflower green roofs – which we hope is followed through with (even if in practice these elements seem to be consistently abandoned when the actual building work starts!), the way the doors and windows will look, and how most of the development will use a brick- and bronze- focussed set of materials. We don’t expect that any of this will be particularly controversial (and that’s despite the buildings being right in the middle of the Town Hall Road Conservation Area – the pdf map’s here – albeit not getting any mention in the associated planning guidance, probably because no one noticed them). Neighbours have fed in concerns that the developer’s proposal to remove one of the larger trees between the two sets of buildings, but go some way to reinstating greenery with a green roof on the buildings, needs to be made a ‘binding’ commitment (which is a fair concern: as as we have often found, greenery gets thrown in liberally at the planning application stage, but more often than not gets dropped when it comes to actually building projects).
Getting planning permission may be fairly straightforward – but this still won’t be an especially easy development to take forward: it’s a tight site, and the current buildings are old and tired, and weren’t originally built to be lived in and there will be quite a big job to get them up to modern standards. We suspect this may well end up being more of a ‘rebuild’ than a ‘refurbishment’ in many cases. However if the development goes ahead it should make a small but helpful contribution to local housing needs, and should create quite an interesting and quirky set of properties, hidden away in a quiet little mews right in the middle of Clapham Junction that hardly anyone knows exists.
This isn’t the first unusual houses plan on Heathwall Street – back in 2022, the local website lavender-hill.uk wrote a post about the a planning application for some of this row of garages, just opposite Theatre Street Mews; which would have seen five of the six demolished, and replaced with a cleverly deigned two-bedroom house with quite a large basement, helped by a generously sized lightwell to create a bright and airy living space. That got planning (and it was the third similar planning application that had gone on for the site, with the previous two also both having been approved but both timed out after a few years without any development) – but we’re three years down the line and nothing has come of that application. Maybe the Theatre Street mews will see more action.
To see and comment on the detailed plans, visit wandworth.gov.uk/planning and search for planning application 2025/0034.
This article was originally published on lavender-hill.uk.
