A new lifeboat station will open later this year at the Riverside Wandsworth development, cutting rescue times on the Thames by an estimated one minute and 20 seconds – enough to save lives, according to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).
Plans to convert the currently empty building into a base station for four permanent staff – which sits 80 yards from the river – have been in place for years and the RNLI launched a £2.7m fund-raising appeal to buy the building.
It applied for planning permission in July and Wandsworth Council approved it last week. According to the plans, construction will start and finish next month.
As well as lifeboat staff, the building will hold educational and community events including water safety courses and a RNLI shop. The lifeboat itself will be docked on the existing pontoon for Clipper boats.
Chiswick replacement
There are four lifeboat stations on the Thames, with the nearest to Putney located at Chiswick Pier. However the RNLI’s lease on the building is due to expire and the RNLI is looking for a larger and more modern alternative to replace it.
There’s another advantage too: Wandsworth’s position further down river means that lifeboat crews will be able to reach emergencies faster: up to 80 seconds faster according to the RNLI; a difference that could mean the difference between life and death. About 70 per cent of the call-outs that the Chiswick station receives are to the east i.e. towards Putney, so a new station in Wandsworth should mean faster responses for those in trouble in the tidal river.
In the past 20 years, nearly 200 lives have been saved by launches from Chiswick. There have been just over 4,500 launches which has assisted over 2,500 people.
The application itself (2024/2572) has been welcomed by all the local neighbourhood groups, including Frasers Property, which owns many of the buildings in the area. Locals hope that regular use of the building, which served as a marketing centre for the apartment blocks on the development but has sat empty for some time, will bring such much-needed life to the area.
“Nice to see the area being upgraded and maintained and especially for such a worthy cause,” the Friends of Wandsworth Park wrote in response to the application. “We fully support their application and hope [we] might be able to work with them on some projects and events in the future. ” One local resident said he hoped the new plans would “deter antisocial behaviour.”
As well include some sleeping rooms and cooking facilities for the two shifts of lifeboat staff and volunteers, the plans will replace the current timber walkway in front of the building with new white stone paving and create a new visitor entrance. Three storage boxes will be put on the pier and a new radio antenna on the roof.
Redevelopment of oil site
The Riverside Wandsworth area was formerly a Shell Oil Terminal Site which was redeveloped starting in 2011 for over 400 flats. The area contains a dozen new buildings, many of them tower blocks 10 storeys high.
Despite the riverside location and new roads and infrastructure, it has not been a commercial success with almost all the retail space currently empty, save for a supermarket and several small businesses including a cooking school. The area suffers from only being accessible by car through a single road underneath the train tracks. It also has to deal with an intermittent bus service, and as a result is often viewed as a social dead zone, with few pedestrians and little in the way of outdoor activity.
As well as saving more lives on the Thames, the new lifeboat station will hopefully bring more life to an area of Wandsworth full of potential.
