"A New Identity For Vauxhall" Ideas Go On Display At The Garden Museum

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By M@ Last edited 131 months ago
"A New Identity For Vauxhall" Ideas Go On Display At The Garden Museum
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Entries from a competition organised by RIBA and the Landscape Institute, imagining the future of Vauxhall and Nine Elms, go on show from today at the Garden Museum. The competition attracted entries from 21 countries, including professional architects and students.

We're going to be hearing a lot about Vauxhall and Nine Elms over the coming decade. The new US Embassy, dozens of new residential and commercial buildings, a new Tube extension, and the nearby regeneration of Battersea Power Station make for a heady brew of construction that will see the area transformed — so developers hope — into a continuation of the Southbank.

But it's not all about buildings. As the Olympic Park demonstrated, open spaces, decent landscaping and coherent design are vital. Without them, new developments attract words like 'soulless', 'identikit' and 'windswept'.

The images above show a few of the entries to the competition. They range from the fanciful (giant flowers over the rail tracks), to the historic (a resumption of balloon rides and the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens), to the pragmatic (arches and parks turned to general cultural use).

The exhibition runs at the Garden Museum in Lambeth until 19 April.

Last Updated 08 April 2013