WENDELL STEAVENSON
T here haven’t been elm trees in Nine Elms, in south west London, for 300 years. When the railway reached the south bank of the Thames at Battersea in 1838, the area was a swamp dotted with windmills. By the end of the 19th century, when Charles Booth mapped the socio-economic classes of London, the area was industrial, and included a coal wharf, a saw mill, gasworks and coke works. A few tenement streets were marked in black which, according to Booth’s categorisations, designated “the lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal.”
On the A-Z London map from 2000, there are no longer any residential streets in the area. Instead there are only the brown outlines of HM Stationery Office, New Covent Garden Market, a Sorting Office and Battersea Power Station (disused). Two access roads end in a beige unmarked territory, as if there were nothing there at all.