Battersea Power Station is a major Lodon landmark and is a decommissioned coal-fired power station, located on the south bank of the River Thames.
It was built by the London Power Company to Art Deco designed by J. Theo Halliday and Giles Gilbert Scott. The station is one of the world’s largest brick buildings.
Battersea Power Station comprised two power stations, built in two stages, in a single building. Battersea A Power Station was built between 1929 and 1935 and Battersea B Power Station, to its east, between 1937 and 1941. Due to the intervening Second World War, the building was finally completed in 1955.
In 1980 the whole structure was given Grade II listed status and the power station shut three years later.
The building remained empty until 2014, during which time it fell into near ruin. Various plans were made to make use of the building, but none were successful.
In 1983 the Central Electricity Generating Board held a competition for ideas on the redevelopment of the site. It was won by a consortium led by developer David Roche who proposed an indoor theme park, with shops and restaurants. The scheme received planning approval in May 1986 and work on converting the site began the same year. The project was halted in March 1989, for lack of funding. By this point huge sections of the building’s roof had been removed, so that machinery could be taken out. Without a roof, the building’s steel framework had been left exposed and its foundations were prone to flooding.
In March 1990, the proposal was changed to a mixture of offices, shops and a hotel. This proposal was granted planning permission in August 1990, despite opposition from English Heritage. Despite permission being granted, no further work took place on the site between 1990 and 1993.
In 1993, the site and its outstanding debt of £70 million were bought from the Bank of America by Hong Kong-based development company, Parkview International, for £10 million. In November 1996 plans for the redevelopment of the site were submitted and outline consent was received in May 1997. Having purchased the site, Parkview started work on a £1.1 billion project to restore the building and to redevelop the site into a retail, housing and leisure complex.
In 2006, it was announced that Real Estate Opportunities, led by Irish businessmen Richard Barrett and Johnny Ronan of Treasury Holdings, had purchased Battersea Power Station and the surrounding land for €532 million.
REO announced that the previous plan by Parkview had been dropped and devised a new plan. The centrepiece of this masterplan was an eco tower that dwarfed the power station and was described by London’s then mayor Boris Johnson as an “inverted toilet-roll holder”. The tower was quickly dropped from the scheme.
In November 2011, the REO scheme collapsed into administration.[
In 2012, administrators Ernst & Young entered into an agreement with Malaysia’s SP Setia and Sime Darby to develop the site to include 253 residential units, bars, restaurants, office space, shops and entertainment spaces. The plans were approved and redevelopment commenced a few years later.
Battersea Power Station – the London Underground station – forms the terminus of the Northern line extension to Battersea.
Partially funded by the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, the station is located on Battersea Park Road, close to Battersea Park railway station and a short walking distance from Queenstown Road (Battersea) railway station. The line and station opened on 20 September 2021.
