For a generation, Battersea power station has been
standing empty, noble but slowly rotting, while all around it the unending boom
in
London domestic property has made
its surroundings shinier and pricier. This is the land of "Soanlies" (as in " 's
only 10 minutes from Sloane Square"), an almost-
Chelsea with
almost-Chelsea values. In the early 1980s, a lot of London looked as scabrous as
the power station; now it is the capital's last great ruin. It is like a
malodorous grandparent who refuses to do the decent thing and die, so that his
heirs can put a Bulthaup kitchen in the family home.
Over the past few months calls for its euthanasia
have gathered pace, prompted by the fact that bids are currently being
considered for the site – of which the most eye-catching is Chelsea FC's
proposal
to retain fragments of the building and engulf them in a new stadium. The built
asset consultancy EC Harris announced that the site would be worth an extra
£470m if it were knocked down, and declared that "the economic situation
requires practical thinking, and one should consider whether heritage is more
important than profit".
The property journalist Giles Barrie said that "the only people who want
Battersea power station retained are a few ancient hippies … in the worst
financial crisis since the era of Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, it's time to drop
Battersea power station – and provide thousands of new homes".
You might see Barrie's point. Battersea has now
spent longer as an urban problem than it did producing electricity at full
capacity. Except that the same argument was applied to St Pancras station, with
its palatial neo-gothic
Midland
Grand hotel, which was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, grandfather of
the power station's architect,
Sir Giles. Indeed
this argument was used repeatedly. In the Wilson/Heath era to which Barrie
refers, the hotel was declared an impossible luxury, a drain on hard-pressed
national resources, an unsolvable problem. It did indeed stand empty for
decades. But last year it was triumphantly
reopened,
and no sane person would want it removed.
Or else there are the Wren churches in the City of London. Look at how much
land they take up! See how appalling is their return of floor space to site
area! And their maintenance costs! Think how much world-class office space could
be built in their place, giving the message to foreign investors that London is
open for business! And who goes to church anyway?
The fact is that, in places such as London, heritage is sometimes put before
profit, and the city ends up benefiting: culturally, socially, visually and
financially. If you took away all the awkward, hard-to-justify, out-of-fashion,
eccentric and expensive landmarks, it would become a drabber, duller place. It
would be more like, say, Frankfurt or Zurich, cities which are forever trying to
grab more of London's financial business, and with only limited success,
precisely because they are more boring.
As for the argument that preservation can't be afforded in a recession, this
is beyond absurd. A recession, in Battersea? It's hard to spot. But the main
reason for resisting the property industry's calls for demolishing the power
station, in whole or part, is that the site's dormancy is, above all, a failure
of the property industry.
Successive owners have proposed fantastical projects
– a
theme
park, a retail-entertainment complex in which
Cirque
du Soleil would swoop down on unsuspecting shoppers, a thousand-foot
"ecodome" – which required unfeasibly large amounts of upfront investment, and
failed adequately to address such things as the location's poor public
transport. What's more, these plans, while retaining the old building, would
have so thoroughly changed its character that it was hardly worth the
effort.
Chelsea FC's plans have not yet been revealed, but it is hard to imagine that
they will not have similar problems – gigantism, the destruction of the
essential qualities of the old building, and rather obvious issues with
transport and local residents. It is hard to see how dropping a stadium on the
power station would be anything other than an awkward coupling: a camel with a
hippo, say.
Meanwhile it has been plain for years what the site
is best for: a great deal of housing, taking advantage of the area's high values
and waterside location, to be developed incrementally as the market allows. As a
look at Google Earth will tell you, there is plenty of room, as the power
station only occupies one-seventh of the site. The architects
Allies
and Morrison and
Terry
Farrell have come up with different ideas for what it could be used for – a
relatively simple performance venue in one case, a romantic ruin containing a
garden in the other. Neither would be profitable in itself, but could be paid
for by the returns on the rest of the site.
The last owners were Treasury Holdings, a
Dublin-based company, which once bid unsuccessfully for the
Millennium
Dome and whose finances eventually went the way of the Irish economy. It
bought the site for £400m in 2006, a fatally high price that is rumoured to have
been £150m above that of the next highest bidder.
The aim of the current sale is to recover some of the money that financial
institutions were dumb enough to lend to the Treasury. If the power station were
to go, the value would increase, so the creditors would get more of their money
back. The argument for demolition, or for crushing it under a stadium, is to
destroy a listed building so that lenders get a less severe haircut.
But this is their problem: buyers of the site, in the past and the future,
know that it contains a large historic building, and they should calculate the
price accordingly. If they get it wrong, the city's heritage should not pay for
their mistake.
