In January I visited the Battersea Power Station development. Basically, it’s a high-end shopping mall inserted into the old Battersea power station, plus surrounding development – more retail (less high-end), apartments, and a tube station. I hadn’t realised that something had finally been done with the site – I remember the Pink Floyd pig from the early 80s, and I also remember Margaret Thatcher enthusing about a planned redevelopment when she was PM – and she resigned in 1991, I think – but I also remember that all the initiatives stumbled and failed because of the scale of the challenge. But it has been done, and is open.
As I said, the shopping mall is pretty high-end – indeed, there are shops there for brands that I’d never heard of. (But I may not be in their target demographic, so fair enough…) What there weren’t was a lot of shoppers – indeed, I got the feeling that the majority of people wandering around were just there to have a look at it. Like me, in fact. By far the busiest shop I saw was a M&S Food store in the deveopment outside; that was packed.
There’s no doubt that the development has been well done – the new shops, etc, have been inserted into the old structure, and in a lot of places the old brickwork shows though. There’s even the occasional piece of (huge) generation equipment lying around, possibly to give a clue that it used to be a power station. The architecture around is pretty good – certainly the public spaces are on a scale that matches the original building. The apartment blocks are a bit of a disappointment, however. I took a bunch of pictures with my iPhone, inside and outside, and the best are attached below.
Nice images Tom. Personally I thought the apartments surrounding the power station were too ugly and too close, blocking some nice view of the Art Deco PowerStation.
I certainly could not afford to by much inside, but it’s definitely worth a look if you enjoy historic buildings.
Personally, I would have preferred to see ALL of the original machinery inside, rather than a shopping Mall – but that would not attract the masses and make money, would it?
Malcolm Oliver
Thanks for the comment, Malcolm.
As regards ‘attracting the masses and make money’, one thing it wasn’t doing the day I was there was attracting the masses – most of those inside seemed to be just looking (as was I). There were a lot of bored retail sales people around, and the two guys at the Searcy’s bar looked very fed up.
So unless things change I’m not sure it will make money…. And what happens then?