New Covent Garden Market Exhibition (photos all viewable from booklet)

(Image taken from p23&24 of The Garden at New Covent Garden Market Public Exhibition March 2011 Booklet )

Just a quick note to say that I dropped into the New Covent Garden Market exhibition in Nine Elms / Battersea today.  Had I known that all of the exhibition boards (including photos) were available from this booklet online, I might not have made the trek!  However, if you want to see the photos in their huge blown-up form, it might be worth a trip.  I was also given a very useful introduction to the exhibition by one of the Market's representatives on site, who noted that their plans are only in outline, and that if all goes to schedule the proposals will be submitted to Wandsworth Council this summer (2011) and decided at a Planning Committee to be held at the end of 2011.  (Clearly, that's a big "if", but maybe Wandsworth are very proactive).  If the development went ahead, building works would likely start some time in 2013.

I might add further comments on the New Covent Garden plans at some stage.  Most controversially, they're selling off the Flower Market, currently sited at Vauxhall to pay for a new combined wholesale and flower market on the Nine Elms site.  On the old flower market, there are plans for two very tall towers, billed as the "gateway" to the linear park (which is interesting, considering I vaguely thought that Vauxhall Square (CLS) was billed in the same way.  Considering that we're doomed to end up with all of these towers, a few more won't make any difference, right?

Folk from the Vauxhall end may be disappointed that many of the outlines in their book didn't contain any of the towers that are currently proposed eg. Vauxhall Tower (CLS) or Vauxhall Island site (Kylun) or Bondway.  Their diagrams only show the buildings that have been agreed, so it's tricky to imagine from the images how it might look if all of the proposed developments were present.