Instead, they have been clipped and trimmed religiously since the village was built in 1929, while Japanese elms, Zelkova serrata and Japanese maples have been "bonsaied" and now have shapely trunks and elegant forms.
The Nine Elms projects will help to pay for an Underground extension to Battersea.
London's other two regeneration projects, Nine Elms in Vauxhall and the Elephant and Castle development, have both progressed painfully slowly, partly thanks to negotiations over infrastructure.
There are plans to extend the line to Nine Elms in Battersea.
The money will in time be paid back through a slice of the business rates.Tony Travers, head of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, calls Nine Elms a symptom of the "Hong Kongification" of the city.
At Nine Elms, on the border between Lambeth and Wandsworth, another undistinguished tower will be joined by several more over the next few years.
In neighbourhoods such as Bow, near Canary Wharf, such flats draw income-rich, asset-poor young professionals, helping to gentrify places that were once poor.As the housing market recovers, British investors are increasingly copying foreigners: flats at Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms were mostly sold off-plan to natives this year.
One is the inflow of foreign money, which has pushed up residential property prices London is now the second-most expensive city in the world and is financing most of Nine Elms.
Losing it from the landscape would be as calamitous as the virtual eradication of Britain's magnificent elms by another fungal blight, Dutch elm disease, in the 1970s.Finger-pointing has turned to dismay.
An acre of stony ground, Where the symbolic rose can break in flower, Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable, The sound of the rain or sound Of every wind that blows; The stilted water-hen Crossing stream again Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows.
