The Way We Were Battersea, July 1997

It’s looking like a typical summer during this rather wet rush hour in the capital – but there are some familiar faces traversing the flood waters

It could almost be an episode of The Bill – albeit a rather drab one, in which PC Reg Hollis is dispatched in a Sun Hill-spec Astra MkIII to ensure that a flash flood doesn’t catch out the capital’s motorists. You can almost sense the viewers flicking over to Driving School, where at least they’d be treated to a few clips of Ladas narrowly missing Cavalierdriving sales reps…

But this is very much a real rush hour – specifically, the one on Latchmere Road in Battersea on 8 July 1997; a Tuesday afternoon of downpours turned South London’s bustling thoroughfares into routes better suited to the Thames Clippers.

Let’s start with the couple charging towards the photographer in their R8-generation Rover 200, dressed

as though they’ve been for a polite afternoon seeing relatives over tea and scones rather than lugging things to the nearest tip. This one’s a 1991 216 GSi automatic and, while its occupants probably won’t have cared much for its discreet red bumper stripe, they’ll have loved its leather-trimmed interior and its dependable Honda D-series engine – this played second fiddle only to the GTi in Rover’s early 200/400 range. However, we reckon that it had a hard life ploughing through London’s traffic jams – including this rather soaked outing – because there’s no record of H998 YYE surviving today.

It’s a similar story with the Polo MkIII about to enter the drink behind it, which was last on Swansea’s books back in 2008. We’re going to make an educated guess at this being the newest car here, having been registered a year before this shot was taken. This one’s a mid-range CL model with Volkswagen’s trusty 1.4-litre engine beneath its bonnet – but anyone looking for a go-faster Polo would have to wait until the turn of the millennium, when a GTI model was introduced as part of a range-wide revamp. VW’s efforts at that point were focused on making SEAT’s Ibiza its go-to choice for This Life- watching twenty-somethings – somewhat successfully, as the average age for UK buyers of SEAT’s Ibiza at the time was just 24.

At the time the Polo won a slew of ‘Best Supermini’ awards from the UK’s motoring mags but couldn’t quite topple Ford’s fourthgeneration Fiesta – essentially a heavily reworked version of the MkIII, a model that dated all the way back to 1989.

Speaking of Fiestas, it’s hard to not to notice the splash being made by the 1.1 Popular Plus heading northwards towards the Thames. This five-door is a particularly early example of the MkIII and looks like it’s still holding up well after seven years of avoiding South London’s parking scrapes; look closely and you can see that it’s still proudly sporting its drilled-in dealer badge. Doves is still going strong today, with dealerships across southern England, but this Ford disappeared from the DVLA’s books just five years after this photo was taken.

Further back there’s another Volkswagen that’s now creeping ever closer to classic territory – a Golf MkIII – particularly as this one’s a GTI, albeit a 1992 eightvalve version with 115bhp. UK hot hatch fans would have to wait until the following year for the 150bhp 16-valve version, but the chunky rear spoiler, tinted light clusters and 15inch alloys mean this one still looks the part. But the hot hatch game had moved on by 1997 – Peugeot was offering press-on motorists a six-speed gearbox and 167bhp in its 306 GTI-6, and Volkswagen was hard at work on its vastly improved ( but sadly, no more fun to drive) Golf MkIV, launched towards the end of the year.

The aforementioned GTI’s owner would probably have lost any impromptu races from Battersea’s traffic lights against the coupé coming the other way – we reckon

that this particular Vauxhall Calibra has Rüsselsheim’s 2.5-litre V6 nestling beneath its bonnet rather than the 16-valve two-litre ‘four’, on account of its sole occupant enjoying the luxury of cream leather seats. 1997 was the last year of production for both the Calibra and its chief rival, the Ford Probe, although the Blue Oval would be back with the Mondeo-based Cougar less than a year later.

The other Vauxhall in this shot is the marked police Astra 1.4LS parked up on nearby Sheepcote Lane, which the Met used as an Incident Response Vehicle. Luton boasted that its police-spec MkIIIs were equipped with heavier-duty brakes and suspension than their civvyspec counterparts, and had higher ground clearance and steel wheels to deal with the rigours of catching the capital’s wrong ’uns.

However, we suspect that PC Hollis would have fared rather better in the car right at the back of our shot, which we believe is a 1990-92 Volvo 740 estate, judging by the fact that it has smaller headlamps than those used found on earlier cars. With the exception of a hastily-taped up driver’s door mirror, it looks like it’s got decades of battling through London’s congestion to come…