Clapham Junction is about to lose its last round-the-clock police presence. Lavender Hill Police Station — the only 24-hour front desk left in Wandsworth — is set to close, alongside stations in Kensington and Wimbledon, as the Met slashes public counters to save money. Once a safety net for people fleeing danger or seeking reassurance face to face, its closure will leave more than a million Londoners sharing, on average, just one 24-hour desk — raising sharp questions about trust, access, and what ‘neighbourhood policing’ really means in an era of deep cuts.
The news was leaked long before it became official: Lavender Hill Police Station, which currently has a 24-hour front desk you can visit anytime, is set to close to the public.
It’s not the only one: Kensington and Wimbledon are also doomed, as part of a wider plan by the Met Police to roughly halve the number of ‘open’ police stations. Even some of those that will remain open will have reduced service, with just eight open all hours – leading to the rather impressive statistic that London will have an average of well over a million people per 24 hour police station!
We thought we’d already seen the worst of the police cuts – they started to be closed way back in 2014, when we had 140 police stations with public access. A previous cost cutting exercise back in 2017 saw several nearby police stations close, including Wandsworth.
At the time Sadiq Khan made a Manifesto pledge to maintain at least one open-all-house police station in each of London’s 32 boroughs – and it was reported at the time Clapham Junction was the survivor in Wandsworth, but with an expectation that the Lavender Hill Police Station would move to somewhere else nearby within three years.
That move never happened – but we’ve hit even tougher economic times, and the Home Office (who fund the police) got one of the worst deals in the 2025 government spending review – an outcome so bad that it was widely claimed that Yvette Cooper was on the brink of resigning.
London has also suffered from a series of national governments whose attitude to London ranges from mild dislike to outright hostility – and the latest round of cuts to London’s police budget have been particularly savage: the Met needs to find £260 million in savings this financial year.
The best of a bad set of options?
Sadiq Khan put a brave face on these new cuts, saying the closures are ‘pragmatic’.
Frankly he doesn’t have a lot of choice in the matter given the budget he’s been handed, which is becoming smaller and smaller in the hands of a government [Note: also Labour, like the Mayor] that seems to have a somewhat tense relationship with him – he described the cuts as ‘devastating cuts to policing’.
But he has also argued that given that the Met faces a stark financial situation, putting the police counters on the chopping block is the least-worst approach, and will improve safety for Londoners – on the grounds that very few people used the counters and their running costs could be better spent on neighbourhood policing.
And he’s probably right on this front. Staffing up the front desks at all hours, for the relatively small number of people who still go there to make enquiries, report crimes, or meet officers in person is an expensive process: staff need to be employed on late night shifts, and there need to be enough people involved for the building to be safe for those staff to work in.
The huge majority of crimes are now reported online or by phone (with just 5% of crimes now being reported in person at the remaining police stations, and 1% of crimes being reported in person at night).
A fair bit of wider police work with residents and businesses is done in other locations – with our local Lavender and Shaftesbury & Queenstown Ward teams holding regular meetings at Lavender Hill’s cafes and sometimes pop up street stalls, as well as the quarterly Ward Panels where you can hear what the police team has been doing, feed in any particular new concerns, and steer what the priority focus of the ward team should be for the next quarter (we’d recommend our readers with an interest join these, they are a good insight in to the work behind the scenes to keep us safe).
In a world where a lot of residents are out at work all day, day today contact is increasingly now using the new MetEngage platform, which you can sign up to to receive updates sand alerts.
There’s also plenty of data now published like the monthly crime map – which shows what offences were recorded where in the area, and tracks local trends and patterns in crime.
Some people will be hit harder by the closure
Technology is changing a lot of how the Met police works. This used to be very much a pen and notepaper affair – but is now increasingly being done by videoconference as part of the National Police Digital Strategy – which is probably more convenient and efficient for everyone involved.
But the police station front counters aren’t just for reporting crimes that have just happened, they are also often used as bases where the public could go to make witness statements.
Some residents will clearly feel more confident reporting crime in person, and the police stations do act as a place of safety for people escaping difficult and dangerous situations – there are well documented cases of trafficked people and those trapped in modern slavery, and those fleeing domestic violence, escaping to – and finding refuge in – police stations.
The police are designated as ‘first responders’ within the National Referral Mechanism framework, which provides a pathway to support and protection for victims; there are other options like Council offices and hospitals – but the 24-hour and local nature of police stations was particularly useful in some cases.
So yes, the world is maybe moving on from front desks at police stations. However the impact of losing the front desks won’t be felt evenly. Most customers won’t notice the difference if the counter closes, and we doubt any of our readers will.
A small saving with dire consequences
The savings from closing all these police stations are surprisingly small: 7 million pounds a year.
The bigger story is on how all the rest of the savings will be made. You can only get so far with efficiency gains and new technology, before you have to really accept that there will be fewer police, and more crime.
The Met Police have said that they are prioritising neighbourhood policing, response policing and public protection – which includes the frontline teams you will see in and around Lavender Hill – while rather vaguely noting that they are “reducing some services and staff numbers”.
Some of the areas to be chopped are known – and include police horses, police in schools and parks – but there’s also an expectation that there will be about 2,000 fewer police in London.
Time will tell how significant the wider impact is. We don’t tend to cover crime much on CJI but did publish a special report on local crime last year, at a time when there had been a really noticeable increase in many types of crime that was significantly affecting a lot of traders and residents, and seemed to be spiralling out of control.
Local crime has fallen back from that peak, due to various factors – notably including some very solid neighbourhood policing by our local police team, tracking down criminal movements in detail and working with affected residents who took the time to report what was going on and ensure that the police had the intelligence and information they needed – as well as some of the most recurrent criminals being moved on from a hostel near the Cedars Road.
There have been some high-profile local incidents – but on balance it’s fair to say our local police team deserve significant credit for calming things down. But you’re never really out of the woods in a big city, especially as the area around Clapham Junction is currently the Borough’s hotspot for antisocial behaviour – and there’s always a risk that the severe cuts to London’s policing will unleash a new explosion of trouble.
Last but not least, there has been the controversy on the new rough sleepers hub, that we covered at large on CJI.
In particular the risk that if it was managed poorly it could increase local crime, was partly offset by the presence of a police station just across the road; clearly that will now not be the case which is likely to reawaken some concerns.
Will the whole local police operation close alongside the front desk?
Another question is – if the front counter closes – will the police station itself also close, and will our local Ward teams end up based much further away, and maybe more detached from the Wards round Lavender Hill?
As our Councillors note, we are already seeing far too many instances of our police being taken out of the area and sent to neighbouring Lambeth and Central London, and this will surely only increase with the closure of the station.
There’s a degree of uncertainty about this at the moment. Lavender Hill police station is relatively small, and it’s not really the kind of building the Met Police especially want to use any more.
It used to house custody cells, but these (and a similar set in Tooting) were relocated to a newer and more modern 30-cell facility in Wandsworth town centre back in 2012. Wandsworth police station no longer has any public access – but is still very much in business and being used by the police.
It’s considerably larger than the Lavender Hill site, and is home to the investigation teams that make up Wandsworth’s Criminal Investigation Department – and it also has a far larger and easier to use parking area for police cars and vans than the Lavender Hill site.
The latest closure round of front counters is partly based on an assessment of ‘how well individual counters are aligned with custody suites and local investigative teams’ – so losing those custody suites back in 2012 has probably in a way fed in to the downfall of our local police station. Fingers crossed this doesn’t happen (but if you have any behind the scenes insight on the long term future of the building – get in touch).
What may happen to the building
Even if the whole police station closes, it doesn’t mean the government (who own the site) can just sell if off to some developer for a quick buck, as a site for redevelopment.
The police building is part of a complex of three interlinked buildings built in th emid-1960s that were originally built as a joint project. The largest of the three is Lavender Hill Magistrates Court. It’s one of the main ones in London – with four courtrooms, and some specialities including traffic offenses and bulk-processing of fare evasion cases, including being the prototype for some innovative approaches to speeding up cases.
- Read our article: Lavender Hill Magistrate’s Court: CourtWatch London seeks volunteers
It’s where the Archbishop of Canterbury was famously fined for speeding – and where Stormzy pleaded guilty to the rather bizarre act of driving a Lamborghini whose windows only let 4% of the light through.
The court isn’t going anywhere soon – it’s a fairly up to date premises, and while there is a need for further upgrades in accessibility and facilities, it has had ongoing maintenance and upgrades.
The third bit of the complex is a small office building facing Latchmere Road which houses the London probation Service. The Probation Service’s building isn’t in the best condition, which is fairly typical situation for their properties – which maybe isn’t too surprising given that London’s Probation services have been stumbling from crisis to crisis for some years.
Selling part of a wider government building off won’t work especially well for any developer – so we wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the court took over some of the police space.
The campaign to limit the damage
The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have both kicked off campaigns to save Lavender Hill’s police station – with the Conservatives noting that they were successful last time round in saving it from the 2017 cuts and optimistic that they can do it again.
Council leader Simon Hogg has noted that the closure would be the first time in living memory that there’s no full-time police station open to the public in the Borough, with clear concerns on how trust, visibility and community reassurance will be maintained without a local police station.
Meanwhile for those who do need to visit a police station in person, Lavender Hill’s nearest police station that will be staying in business as a place you can actually go and speak to a police officer looks likely to be in Brixton.
There’s some sense to that location being the last one left, with Brixton in general (and Brixton’s Windrush Ward, which that police counter is inside, in particular) being an area with far higher crime levels – but it’s not somewhere that anyone in Wandsworth or Lavender Hill is likely to want to go to late at night to escape from a dangerous situation.
While very much support the good work by our Ward policing teams, and it’s hard not to be concerned at what a sharply reduced budget will mean for them in the next few years.
This article was originally published on lavender-hill.uk and edited for CJI.
Lavender-hill.uk is a community site covering retail, planning and development and local business issues, and sometimes posts like this one on transport and the environment – all centered on the Lavender Hill area in Battersea.
