With around 5,000 homes completed over the past five years, and a further 15,000 in the pipeline, it is now possible to get a sense of what kind of place is being created here, what effect the planning policies of the past decade will have in reality. Competing stacks of luxury flats have sprouted along the river, replacing the elm trees that once stood here with a forest of concrete and cladding, a garish collage of mirrored glass, coloured plastic panels and fake bricks.
Once a place of low-slung warehouses and logistics depots, it is now a very visible presence on the London skyline. When Boris Johnson, as mayor of London, launched the plans in 2012, he described it as “the greatest transformational story in the world’s greatest city”, the “final piece in the jigsaw” of central London. Stretching across a 230-hectare riverside swath from Vauxhall Cross to Battersea Power Station, straddling the boroughs of Lambeth and Wandsworth, the Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea (VNEB) “opportunity area” has been trumpeted as the biggest regeneration project in Europe. Photograph: Miles Willis/Getty Images for EcoWorld Ballymore The Sky Pool being installed at Embassy Gardens. We have a mortgage and we pay our rent, but every day we are made to feel inferior, like the have-nots of Nine Elms.” “I grew up in South Africa, in a country that was racially segregated, but in London there is still really bad class segregation. “There’s a reason they’re called ‘poor doors’,” he said. Nobody expects these amenities for free, but we’re not even given the choice to pay for them.”įor Iqbal to reach his two-bed flat – valued at £800,000, of which he owns a quarter and pays rent on the rest – he must walk past the grand, hotel-style main entrance to the complex, flanked by supercars with personalised number plates, to the back of the development, past construction fences and piles of rubble, to a small door located between ventilation grilles and a bin store, facing on to a railway line. It’s only there for us to look at, just like the nice lobby, and all of the other facilities for the residents of the private blocks. “But the sad thing for us, living in the shared-ownership building, is that we will never have access to it. “We have a front-row seat of the Sky Pool,” he told me. But, although he lives in Embassy Gardens, Iqbal and his neighbours will never enjoy the thrill of going for an aerial dip.
It has been billed as the world’s first swimming-pool bridge, a dazzling feat of acrylic engineering that will span the 14-metre gap between the two buildings and give residents the feeling of “floating through the air in central London”. But last week the scaffolding was taken down to reveal a bright blue rectangle hovering against the leaden January skies, 10 storeys up in the air – just outside the 30-metre bomb blast seclusion zone around the new neighbouring US embassy. It was dismissed as a “crackers” PR stunt when the plan was unveiled by Irish developer Ballymore in 2015, a fantastical aquarium of captive high net worth individuals for the rest of us to gawp at from far below. This is the Sky Pool, the latest addition to the luxury residential enclave of Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms, south-west London – one absurdist step beyond the private cinema, indoor pool, gym and rooftop lounge bar.
A crisp oblong of crystal clear water now hangs in the air between two apartment buildings opposite his balcony, a liquid blue block suspended against the sky with the gravity-defying quality of a Magritte painting. E very morning, when Nadeem Iqbal wakes up and walks into his living room, he has a view of a miraculous world first.
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