Battersea powers back to life: Industrial relic rises from the ashes

For four decades, it has sat in splendid isolation, a monument to a gilded industrial past.

Failed by botched restorations, raided by scavengers and worn away by the rain, Battersea Power Station, for many years, looked like a lost cause.

Now, however, it is just days away from a resurrection as a temple to consumerism and London’s thirst for property. Shops, from Adidas to Starbucks, will thrum with trade in the halls that once housed the turbines that powered much of the capital.

On the site of one of the four chimneys that once belched coal smoke into the air, visitors paying £15.90 a time will be carried up in a circular glass lift, resembling something from Roald Dahl’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.

There, from nearly 360 feet, they can enjoy panoramic views of the city.

The chimneys themselves, damaged after years of neglect, were painstakingly dismantled and reassembled as part of the restoration project.

If it seems like a tricky time to launch the centrepiece of a £9billion retail, residential and leisure venture, the company behind the project is not showing it.

Simon Murphy, chief executive of Battersea Power Station Development Company, says 96 per cent of the power station’s commercial space is sold. 

It has also already rented a big office to iPhone maker Apple with other tenants including shared workspace company IWG.

The pandemic has taken its toll on the development, however, delaying it by around six months. But Murphy declares that he is confident.

‘We’re not blind to the fact that the world’s in a difficult place and has been for a long time, and certainly there are real challenges,’ he says.

‘But what we can do is manage the things that are under our control and that is creating an amazing space with a great line-up of retailers and opportunities for people to come down here and enjoy themselves.’

Battersea’s Malaysian owners are expected to enjoy commercial revenues from the shops, restaurants and offices on the site of around £100million a year.

The power station has already sold 90 per cent of its 254 apartments – ranging in value from £865,000 studio flats to penthouse Sky Villas costing £7million a piece.

Its first residents moved to the site in May last year.

Thepower station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, once provided a fifth of London’s electricity needs.

The oldest part of the site, completed in 1935, incorporates Art Deco period detail.

In the control room, where dials and knobs once orchestrated the flow of electricity to different parts of London, a panel marked Carnaby Street 2 was actually the switch for Buckingham Palace.

The fittings, still showing some signs of wear and tear, were in some cases removed by souvenir hunters when the site was a wreck before they were returned in an amnesty. The control room will become an events space in the development.

On the other side of the power station, completed in 1955 in a starker, brutalist style, the control room will become a bar.

The spaces in the power station are vast. On each side is a large turbine hall which will, in both cases, house retail space – with facades for the likes of Starbucks and fashion retailer Superdry already in place.

In the middle of the complex is the giant boiler house, now filled with floors of office space, which was so big when empty that it could incorporate the whole of St Paul’s Cathedral.

The power station kept the lights on in London for 50 years – including during the Second World War when it survived being hit by a Luftwaffe bomb that failed to explode.

It became an emblematic part of the city’s landscape, and in 1977 appeared on the front cover of Pink Floyd’s album Animals, with a giant inflatable pink pig floating between the chimneys.

The pig became untethered and floated into the flight path of Heathrow Airport. It had to be tracked by police helicopters before coming to land off the coast of Kent.

The power station closed in 1983 and a series of projects to revive it came to nothing.

A plan to rebuild it as a theme park – launched at an event attended by former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1988 – never got off the ground, but developers had already removed the roof and by the time its new owners took over, grass was growing inside.

There was even an abortive bid for Chelsea Football Club to move into the site.

The challenge of redeveloping Battersea was described as ‘the Everest of real estate’.

The site was bought from receivers by a Malaysian consortium for £400million in 2012.

The redevelopment of the power station is the mid-point of a series of stages of building which will eventually see 4,000 homes built over a 42-acre site.

Blocks of flats designed by Los Angeles-based architectural group Gehry Partners, LLP and London peer Foster + Partners flank the main building and more will follow over coming years.

Developers say more than 2,500 jobs will be created when the doors to the power station open in a ceremony on October 14. 

They have also ploughed £300million into the building of a Tube station serving the site, as an extension of the Northern Line.

‘A lot of people said we weren’t going to get here,’ Murphy says. ‘I’m very proud of what we have achieved.’