It rooftop ‘villas’ are £8m, its shops include Rolex and Cartier – and its affordable housing figure is just 9%. We go inside the £9bn, no-expense-spared rebirth of London’s famous landmark
In 1983, the year Battersea Power Station was decommissioned, the radical architect Cedric Price drew up a provocative proposal for what to do with the gargantuan brick hulk. The London building’s silhouette of four slender white chimneys rising from the stepped art deco brick rooftop was the real icon on the skyline, he reasoned, so why not just save that and do away with the rest? He christened his surrealist proposition the Bat Hat and sketched out how it could all be held aloft on great steel supports, freeing the land below for housing. “We have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site,” Price wrote, “leaving only that which is considered important – its height and familiar profile.”
His proposal was intended as a playful dig at the conservation movement. But, visit the site today, and it seems like an eerily accurate prediction. Approach the area from most directions and all you see is the chimneys – if you’re lucky. The developers of the 42-acre site have achieved the miraculous feat of hiding one of the biggest buildings in London, almost completely surrounding the great brick cathedral of electricity with bloated blocks of luxury flats. Many more are on the way.
Follow the signs saying “Electric buzzing vibes this way” and you are channelled through a deep canyon of high-end, high-pitched real estate concepts, before you reach the power station itself. Apartments by Frank Gehry writhe their way along one side of Electric Boulevard, his trademark twisting volumes more clunking than swishing, while a serpentine block by Norman Foster slithers its way along the other side, its curving, glacial flanks rising to a rooftop pool. Under a mirror-clad bridge – which reflects the surrounding carnage back in a queasy, fragmented collage – you finally arrive at the foot of the power station, where the ground plunges downwards in a cascade of curved steps to form an egg-shaped piazza, a hell-mouth vortex ready to suck you inside the belly of the beast. It’s quite some feat to drown out one of the most imposing buildings in the capital, but this motley approach sure does its best.
