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.
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- Battersea Power Station tube station
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- Inside
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- Outside
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- Vintage Roller near Searcy’s champagne bar
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- Interesting architecture outside
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- View of the Control Room bar
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- Inside
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- Looking back at one of the entrances