London’s Battersea Power Station finally reopens after £9bn renovation

After 40 years of aborted plans, Battersea Power Station is finally opening its doors in a test of whether a glitzy £9bn renovation project can take-off while the wider UK economy slows.

The 2008 financial crash caused the last attempt to revive the 1930s building to go bust. But this time, the Malaysia-backed developer believes this economic downturn will not hamper plans to create a new district of homes, retail and leisure on the river Thames in London.

Speaking ahead of the public launch on Friday, Simon Murphy, boss of the Battersea Power Station Development Company, said “in terms of opening [now], we continue to be confident”. 

“We are not blind to the world being a difficult place,” he added. “Certainly there are other challenges. But what we have to do is manage the things that are under our control.

“We think when you build something very special and it takes account of the new world in which we are undoubtedly living, people will still come. So we’ll find out whether that is right.”

Murphy described the 42-acre site, which includes a number of residential and office blocks as well as 250 shops, cafés and restaurants, a theatre, hotel and public space, as a “new town centre for London”.

The building’s old turbine halls have been converted into an upmarket retail space — with luxury brands such as Cartier and Rolex, alongside Adidas, Superdry and Marks and Spencer — that takes up the majority of space on the ground floor.

With Westfield shopping centres in the west and east of London, the former coal-fired power station will become the southern point on a triangle of malls, with the West End nearby.

Colm Lauder, a property analyst at investment bank Goodbody, said that “better” retail schemes were still letting well, albeit often on discounted deals, despite the UK’s worsening economic outlook.

“There’s more activity on shopping centres and high streets recently than for a long time, but only for the good space,” said Lauder.

Apple has taken six floors of offices in the renovated power station in what is one of the biggest leasing deals in London in recent years. Last month, Apple boss Tim Cook tweeted that the move was a “reflection of our commitment to Apple’s future in the UK”.

He added: “We can’t wait to open our new offices in the iconic Battersea Power Station.”

Above Apple’s offices, the building houses 254 residential apartments and a roof garden. One of its four white chimneys, a legacy of its days as a working power station, has a glass lift to the top that will be open to — and paid for — by the public.

The original power station started producing electricity in 1935. The art deco architecture of the time is well preserved in one half of the building and most clearly seen in a control room that is being turned into an events space.

Its panels once controlled the power for a fifth of London, and include a board labelled Carnaby Street 2 that once linked to Buckingham Palace.

The other half of the building was added after the second world war, by which time architectural trends had moved to the 1950s-era steel and “space age”. This corresponding control centre will be converted into a 1950s-themed bar.

The plans for the power station site, which is owned by a consortium of Malaysian investors and developers, will finally see the building brought back to use for the first time since the power was cut off in 1983.

In the past, the building has attracted owners from Hong Kong, Ireland and the UK, with various aspirations to turn it into a theme park, hotel and even the base of a 300m glass chimney.

But the site has largely remained untouched over the decades as its owners have either gone bust or sold out — in the 1990s it was even left without a roof for a period after the project ran out of funding.

The Malaysian-pension fund backed consortium bought the site in 2012 from its receivers for £400mn.

The new project has already attracted criticism over its lack of affordable housing, fuelling concerns over the number of empty flats built along a stretch of the Thames that is already blighted by soulless blocks.

Murphy said that 96 per cent of the station’s commercial units — offices and retail — have been filled, while about 90 per cent of flats in the power station have been sold.

He said that planning consent for the remainder of the site, which had previously featured “some really very large buildings”, had been updated to give greater flexibility in terms of future use, building shape and size, “which is useful at a time when the developers’ crystal ball is a bit foggy”.

But he added that the developer was already seeing interest in a new office building “despite the world being a funny old place”.