New station for SW6

The long-awaited new station at Imperial Wharf is due to open later this month freeing up an area of south-west London previously starved of good transport.

Imperial Wharf station will link Sands End (the triangle bounded by Wandsworth Bridge Road, King’s Road and the Thames) to the London Overground network.

By 2011 there will be four trains an hour between Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction, and Southern Trains will also run an hourly service from Milton Keynes to East Croydon - a trip to the vast Westfield Shopping Centre will take only nine minutes.

Sands End has traditionally been the cheap end of Fulham because of its distance from Fulham Broadway Tube, not helped by the congested Wandsworth Bridge Road being the principle route in and out of the area.

Anthony Bell, of the Fulham branch of Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward, said the lack of a station had kept house prices in the area 15 per cent lower than in neighbouring districts. “This is a good time to invest,” he insists.

His firm (www.kfh.co.uk) is currently selling a large four-bedroom family house on Querrin Street, SW6, for £799,950, and two apartments on Glenrosa Street and Stephendale Road, both on at £375,000.

The station was funded by Imperial Wharf developer St George as part of its giant Imperial Wharf development of 1,800 new homes set in 32 acres bordering Chelsea Harbour. The final phase of the development - Octavia House - is now under way, with prices from £350,000.

An upmarket new scheme is The Gallery SW6, on the former site of The Chelsea College of Art, in Elbe Street. There are more than 100 properties, including one-bedroom flats priced at from £340,000, and three-bedroom town houses from £870,000.

James Thomas, a director of Jones Lang LaSalle, the agents marketing the development, says prices in Sands End were up to 25 per cent cheaper than in the more fashionable end of Fulham: “The station can only have a positive effect,” he added.