You will not find a St Mary's Park - or for
that matter, any park - in St Mary's Park ward. The name pertains to
Battersea Park, which once used to be part of this ward, but has not
been since 1978.
St Mary's Park covers the heart of medieval
Battersea - the area you enter or leave via Albert or Battersea
Bridges respectively.
This is a diverse and rapidly evolving area,
ranging from the exclusive mansions overlooking Battersea Park to
the terraced streets around Battersea High Street, to the post-war
council estates of Surrey Lane, the Ethelburga, Somerset and
Goulding House. These were added to in 2002 by the boundary
commission with the blocks of Badric and Totteridge Houses in
Yelverton Road.
And most recently of all, St Mary's Park's
riverside is being transformed by huge residential developments: all
the way from the Gargoyle Wharf site beside Wandsworth Bridge, then
Plantation Wharf, then the new Candlemaker's Wharf - in between this
and the next riverside apartment block can be found Battersea
Heliport - past the Richard Rogers designed cantilevered Montevetro
building, then Thorney Crescent and Paveley Drive, over Battersea
Bridge to Riverside One and the Norman Foster designed Waterside
Point, a doughnut-shaped metallic construction.
It is this massive level of exclusive riverside
development that has transformed the political allegiances of St
Mary's Park: this was once one of the strongest Labour parts of
Wandsworth; when Labour lost almost every seat in 1968 due to the
unpopularity of the mid-term Labour government, St Mary's Park
stayed Labour. Today, it is one of the stronger Conservative
wards in the borough, yet Martin Linton - who represented the ward
as a councillor in the 1970s - won here in the 2001 general
election. |
Facts & figures
Population: 12,395
Housing tenure:
Owner-occupied: 34.4%
Public sector renting: 29.5%
Private sector renting: 22.1%
Household type:
Detached/Semi detached: 5.3%
Terraced: 10.9%
Purpose-built flats: 66.9%
Multi-occupancy house: 14.5%
Employment:
Full-time employed: 49.0%
Self-employed: 11.1%
Unemployed: 4.4%
Retired: 7.1%
Students: 8.7%
Socio-economic bands:
Professional/Managerial: 44.6%
Skilled/unskilled manual: 24.9%
Ethnicity:
White: 77.5%
Black/Minority Ethnic: 22.5%
Source: 2001 Census |
