Aroma sweet home

Battersea smells better these days. The odours of what one resident graphically described as a mix of “rotting animal feet” from the Garton’s glucose factory at Plantation Wharf, gin fumes from the distillery in York Road, and pungent yeast from the Guinness Brewery, have all vanished along with the factories that produced them.

Battersea’s former industrial riverside is now a swathe of brick, glass and steel as the factories are steadily replaced with offices and expensive apartments. Inland, workers’ terraces on the Shaftesbury estate shine with fresh paint, and windows hung with slatted wooden blinds give glimpses of bookshelves and designer furniture. People carriers and Volvos jostle for the limited parking spaces. Battersea and its neighbours, Wandsworth and Clapham, are no longer less-fashionable destinations for people who could not afford Chelsea or Fulham; they have become soughtafter places to live.

Battersea: taking shape

Convenient for: Chelsea and the King’s Road, and Waterloo station.

Change started: Slow start in the mid-1980s.

Why? Rising prices in the property boom of the late 1980s pushed Chelsea and the more recently gentrified Fulham out of reach of Sloane Ranger first-time buyers and young families, forcing them across the river to Battersea, where the absence of a Tube station kept property prices lower.

The change: Three- and four-storey Victorian terraces in roads off Lavender Hill and Northcote Road are now well-cared-for family homes or large conversion flats instead of the downmarket bedsits of 20 years ago.

“Battersea is a highly acceptable area now,” says Avril Butt of estate agent King Sturge. “You get parents living in Knightsbridge putting down deposits for their children on their first flat south of the river.” Home improvements are going on in almost every street, with houses encased in scaffolding skips scattered along the roadside. Battersea Park Road is full of interior-design and antique-fireplace shops.

According to John Cumming, who moved with his wife, Valerie, to nearby Prince of Wales Drive nearly 30 years ago: “It has changed. It used to be a bit seedy, with one estate agent and one Viennese cake shop. It’s crawling with estate agents now.”

Northcote Road market now sells olives and spices and speciality breads rather than fruit, vegetables and cheap meat. “Battersea was a respectable working-class area and always had a market,” says Catherine Athill, who moved to Battersea in 1973. “St John’s Hill was very unfancy, though, very plain with no trendy shops. You used to have to go to Soho to get coffee beans.”

Battersea residents are not all wealthy — check out bus stops along St John’s Road or the council blocks opposite riverside developments on York Road — but plenty of the area’s more recent residents are very upmarket. The river is lined with apartment blocks bought by “City people, empty nesters, people trading into fashionable new-build from older homes in Chelsea or Belgravia, and celebs”, according to King Sturge’s Avril Butt, who is marketing Albion Riverside, the Hutchinson Wampoa development taking shape beside Battersea Bridge.