Battersea Power Station Future Uncertain

At first it was going to become the London equivalent of Disneyland, then a shopping center with a roof-top ice-skating rink and finally 3,400 luxury apartments. But each grandiose plan failed as one developer after another ran out of cash.Now the decrepit Battersea Power Station stands as a sad reminder of the big ideas that flourished when credit was cheap and the economy was buoyant. On Monday, it goes on sale again.

A London landmark that was featured on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album “Animals,” the power station has been without a roof for two decades. Its Italian marble hall and Art Deco turbine control room with parquet flooring are slowly rotting away.

Yet it sits in the middle of a vast 40-acre, or 16-hectare, plot right on the Thames, just opposite the fashionable district of Chelsea. Many developers agree it is an attractive proposition — if it were not for the giant brick shell that must be preserved.

“Battersea Power Station is an iconic world-class site that will attract great interest when put on the market,” Gerald Allison, senior director at DTZ, a property adviser, said. But, he added, it will have to make financial sense.

The power station was built in 1933 by Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed London’s red telephone boxes and the power station that now houses the Tate Modern museum, to show off Britain’s industrial power.

Battersea is Europe’s largest brick building and with its four white chimneys looks like an upside-down pool table. At the peak of its production in the 1950s, the station supplied a fifth of London’s electricity.

Since its closure in 1983, dozens of development plans have been drawn up, but none have succeeded. The composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Cirque du Soleil circus group, Warner Bros. and even Michael Jackson were among those who considered investing in the project over the years, then decided against it.

New York Times