Category Archives: Housing

Battersea Power Shopping Station

Posted on October 19, 2022 | 3 comments

The reopening of Battersea Power Station last week drew a lot of publicity, much of which summarised the contents of Up In Smoke, my book on the power station, while sanitising most of the politics.

The reason I wrote the book was because I felt that much of what has happened to modern London – indeed, modern England – could be located within the bricks of the power station.

Battersea was always a symbol of prevailing trends and it still is today – from industrial powerhouse to decrepit ruin, reimagined as a retail experience for the ultra wealthy. Here is a landmark piece of British architecture on a patch of prime central London once owned by the British state but sold for a pittance to chaotic private enterprise only to end up in the hands of another country’s state pension fund.

If that doesn’t highlight the relationship between the short-sightedness and failure of imagination of privatisation and our current economic situation, where just about every British asset seems to be owned by other countries, I’m not sure what does.

When writing the book, I found one of the most honest interviews to be with Sir David Roche, the power station’s overlooked first developer. Sir David came on the scene in 1983 after a distant relative saw a competition in the Times inviting applicants with ideas to redevelop the power station. Roche’s relative, an architect, wanted to build a science-theme park but Roche went along with it but privately thought that was a daft idea.

“To me,” he said. “It was a shopping centre.”

Roche’s secret plan was to come up with a design that had a few rides in prominent places in and around the power station, while filling most of the space with shops. “We’d win the competition on the basis it was a theme park as that is jolly nice and makes people comfortable and exciting. But to make money it had to be a retail destination.”

As cynical as he was, Roche has proved to be completely correct, it’s just taken 40 years for everybody to admit it. The problem at the time was that Tory-controlled Wandsworth didn’t want to build shops because they didn’t want to threaten Clapham Junction town centre, just as they didn’t want to build houses because they didn’t think people would buy them. The fact there was no other viable use of the power station – an art gallery is a lovely idea but it’s too damn big – meant developers were forced to conceive completely unpractical uses for decades. That only changed when Wandsworth admitted that okay, maybe shops and houses were a good idea after all – but only for really rich people. By then, most of the developers either went bankrupt or sold to people who would eventually go bankrupt.

Roche was one of the latter. To make the theme park idea work he needed somebody with experience and brought on board John Broome, the owner of Alton Towers. Broome was even more cynical than Roche and outmaneuvered his rival to take control of the consortium, paying Roche a tidy sum to walk away – before going bankrupt trying to achieve the impossible.

That made Roche the first of several developers to pocket a tidy profit without have done all that much to earn it.

“It was mega bullshit by lots of people including me,” he admitted quite cheerfully. “But the problem with bullshit is it can sometimes work but when it doesn’t the whole thing falls apart.”

Welcome to Britain 2022. We hope you enjoy your stay.

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Posted in Architecture, Battersea Power Station, History, Housing, London, Politics

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Municipal Dreams by John Boughton

Posted on December 3, 2018 | 1 comment

This review will appear in the January edition of the London Society journal.

News that a book has been commissioned on the back of a popular twitter account is often a cause for eyebrow-raising annoyance peppered with professional jealousy, but that wasn’t the case when Verso announced they were publishing a book based on @municipaldreams, the twitter account run by John Boughton. That’s because Boughton’s tweets (and superb blog) were on the history of social housing, about which Boughton has become the sort of house historian. Boughton’s posts would study in close detail a different housing estate, outline its social history and architectural appearance and then explain the various ways it had been neglected by local councils committed to Thatcherism, either through force or ideology.

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In the book of Municipal Dreams, Boughton takes a broad overview of the history of council housing from the Victorian era to the present day. Although there are occasional forays overseas to see how things are done elsewhere, his history is largely confined to England and increasingly to London, where “the spate of high-profile housing struggles in recent years testify to the dysfunction of the London housing market”. Boughton is a reassuring guide through this story. He’s a sincere and convinced advocate for state-built housing and praises the ambition and idealism exhibited by post-war planners, but he isn’t blind to the failures nor is he so politically motivated he cannot accord success where it’s been earned. This balance is particularly relevant in the later sections, covering the post-80s era when the consensus about the moral need and positive benefits of state housing was ended by Margaret’s Thatcher Conservative government, an attitude that continued under New Labour. Boughton fumes throughout this sorry era, but also gives credit on the few occasions it’s deserved.

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London is a major part of this story, starting with the pioneering Boundary Estate in Bethnal Green, which opened in 1900 for the working poor and now offers two-bed flats for a monthly rent of more than £2,000 to City bankers. Boughton looks at numerous London estates, from the vast and rather dull Becontree Estate to the wonderful post-war estates built in Camden by Neave Brown, the only living architect to have all of his UK work officially listed. Historical nuggets are liberally applied – a particular favourite was the news that at Staleg Luft III, the Second World War POW camp from which the Great Escape took place, a group of prisoner took a break from depositing earth down their trousers to conduct a debate on Abercrombie’s County Of London Plan (see the poster below).

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It’s the post-1979 section that feels most important though. Boughton carefully and painstakingly takes us through the various government interventions that led to the “residualisation” of council estates – that’s the process by which social housing became repositories for the poorest and most desperate of society. As Boughton points out, this was not the original intention of state-built housing but as soon as councils began treating estates this way it was always going to start a race to bottom – and the self-fulfilling prophesy that council estates, in and of themselves, would be seen as breeding grounds for crime and deprivation. While he’s unimpressed by New Labour’s record on housing, Boughton reserves most scorn for David Cameron’s 2016 promise to “blitz” poverty by demolishing 100 of the “UK’s worst sink estates” noting that the conditions Cameron decried were caused by the policies Cameron advocated.

That brings us to the place of social housing in London’s recent deranged housing market. Boughton looks at various important recent London stories, including the ugly destruction of the Heygate Estate, the artwashing of Balfron Tower, Lambeth’s attempts to demolish Lambeth’s Cressingham and Central Hill, and the campaign to protect the residents of the New Era in Hackney. He ends with the horror story of Grenfell, pondering the role the tragedy may yet play in shifting our housing policies. I think Boughton actually underestimates the role the issue of housing has already played in contemporary politics – notably the surprise result of the 2017 general election – but Boughton ends with cautious optimism, suggesting that a new era of public housing may be coming thanks to “the failure of the free market to provide good and affordable homes to all those who needs them”. That still feels some way off as it would require an embarrassing climbdown from the media and Conservative party to admit that the flagship policy of Thatcherism, “right to buy”, has been a national disaster. But it also feels inevitable, as the case for a return to state-built housing will soon become too pressing to ignore.

Municipal Dreams by John Boughton (Verso)

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Posted in Architecture, Books, Camden, History, Housing, London, Politics, Property, Uncategorized

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Americana in Perivale

Posted on October 15, 2018 | 1 comment

Maybe it’s just me, but Perivale is one of those London places names that always make me want to snigger. It’s also the unlikely location of one of London’s most beautiful buildings, the Hoover Factory.  The building has recently been turned into flats, which meant I got to look around it when writing a piece for the Telegraph.

I’d only ever driven past it before, so seeing it up close was a real treat. I even took some photographs. None of the interior I’m afraid but take my word for it that it’s been converted in the best possible taste.

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The premise of this piece was that the Hoover, along with several other buildings in the area, represent a brief flowering of Americana in London – that is, buildings that are billboards and look like they belong alongside a Californian freeway rather than next to A-road in suburban west London. I’m not sure whether “Americana” as a distinct architectural term even exists, but I know what I mean when I use it.

When I was at Time Out, we named the Hoover one of the Seven Wonders of London. You can tell why when you get a close-up gander of the entrance. What a beauty!

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The Hoover was built by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, who called their style “fancy factories” and admitted the influence of not just American factory architecture but also Madison Avenue advertising techniques. Their most accomplished vision was the Firestone Factory, which was infamously knocked down on August Bank Holiday weekend in 1980. As a result, Michael Heseltine hastily listed a number of other buildings from the same era, including the Hoover and Battersea Power Station.

The Firestone was a stunner. As anybody who has driven along the Great West Road knows, there are still several other amazing buildings of this type in the area – there’s surely a book to be written about this unique collection of London buildings.

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Despite all that, my favourite building in this style might be one that is outside London. The India of Inchannin building is located on the road between Glasgow and Greenock and is too cute for its own good. Read more here.

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Leaving the canal

Posted on January 23, 2018 | 1 comment

I wrote this piece for a recent issue of Waterfront, the Canal & River Trust’s superb magazine for canal lovers.  

In theory, it doesn’t take long to move off a canal boat. When I finally left my floating home of seven years, all I really needed was a couple of hours with some sturdy cardboard boxes and a roll of bin bags, such is the lack of storage space for anything other than the most basic of life’s essentials. But how long does it take to get over moving off a canal boat? I’ll tell you when I manage it.

I left for love, having bought a flat with my girlfriend, but also for central heating, storage space, flushing toilets and a water supply that never ran out. The decision was helped by the fact my boat was in poor condition. I’d been spending less time there, and the neglect was starting to show. I’d never been the most diligent of handyman and a boat deteriorates quickly, so by the time I moved away the boiler, fridge and cooker were condemned or unreliable. Then there was the toilet. The terrifying condition of this medieval contraption was the main reason my girlfriend wouldn’t spend much time on the canal, and helped make dry land – with its ready access to an actual sewer – seriously appealing.

There was more. Now at least I wouldn’t have to mentally filter every item I acquired – every book, CD, mug, apple or pair of socks – to decide whether I could really afford the room. I’d never wake frozen to the core having come home too late to light the fire. I’d never run out of water in the middle of a shower because I’d forgotten to refill the tank. That time when I ended up taking a shower in diesel after a can of oil leaked into my water tank would, surely, never be repeated. I’d be able to have a bath, and my mum could stop worrying about me accidentally falling in the canal when I arrived home, unsteadily, after midnight.

All this was true, and yet from the start there was much I missed. Quite simply, living on a boat never gets boring and it was never something to take for granted. I had never grown tired of returning each evening and unlocking the mysterious gate in an unremarkable wall that allowed me to descend from noisy street to the secluded world of the towpath. I felt privileged to be part of this secret universe, populated by fascinating people. It wasn’t just about seeming cool – although that had something do with it. Boat life really is interesting, both as a concept and as a way of life. These were the rewards you got for the discomfort.

It could also be exhausting and at first, I revelled in the luxurious space of my tiny flat but even this proved illusionary. A good boat has excellent storage but also genuine, unbreachable limitations on what you can accumulate; flats and houses have no real limits, you can continue stacking stuff almost indefinitely in corners and under beds and sofas until you are so suffocated by physical objects you find yourself desperate to move. On a boat, you cannot hoard. It was an excellent discipline that in some ways I retain – I don’t keep newspapers or magazines, for instance, and am always getting in trouble for instinctively throwing away any letter or piece of paper that seems to have been abandoned in the same place for too long.

I didn’t return to the canal for several years after leaving my boat – canals being easy to avoid unless you go out of your way to find one. When I did go back, I was struck by a disorientating sense of saudade, a nostalgic melancholy for what has passed. As I wandered down the once familiar towpath, noting old boats in new moorings, new boats in old moorings and the excellent paint job on my former home, I realised how much I missed the chaotic camaraderie of boat life. We lived on top of each other in a way that was as close to communal living as you can get outside of student digs. In my flat, by contrast, I took the stairs rather than get stuck with a stranger in the lift.

Even now, years later, there are times I miss the canal most painfully. The pang can be triggered by the slightest thing – the smell of coal smoke on crisp winter evenings, the sight of a perfect blue sky in August, the sound of hard rain late at night. It comes back most powerfully every time I step aboard a boat. There is that initial give and roll, the subtle shift of weight that comes every time you leave dry land, and then the short descent into the comforting darkened corridor of a cabin with its warm smell of water, smoke and diesel. One day, I think, one day I will come home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Boats, Canal, Housing, Journalism, Uncategorized

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Building on London allotments

Posted on August 10, 2017 | 1 comment

I wrote a piece for the Guardian about a conflict between social housing and green spaces, two of the most important issues facing London today. It concerns Northfields Allotments, a stunning sliver of green space in Ealing that is London’s oldest surviving allotment. I visited the allotments on a gorgeous June morning and was captivated by this secret garden hidden behind ancient hedgerows.

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Credit: Paul Bate

Rather than the rather staid lines of vegetables that I expected, the allotment was like 100 completely individual back gardens in one giant field – so some people had turned their spaces into meadows of wildflowers, others had grown small orchards, there were all manner of handmade sheds, somebody had flung a hammock across a makeshift porch, and there were several Wendy houses for the kids. It was an example of the best a city can offer – people of many nationalities and with very personal tastes thrown together and creating something truly magical.

Then I went across the road to meet Robin, who was living in an almshouse owned by Pathways, a local housing charity that also happen to own the allotment following various historical mergers. Robin’s flat was very small and a little rundown, but provided him with a home when he found himself homeless, jobless and unable to support himself. Thousands of Londoners face similar situations, and there isn’t enough housing being built to provide for all of them. It’s London’s greatest failing.

Pathways now want to correct this by knocking down Robin’s block and rebuild it to modern specifications. While that takes place, they will build a new block of social housing on a small strip of the allotment site. This is so they can keep all the residents of Robin’s block together during the rebuilding work. They will fund this – contentiously – by building a small element of private housing, either to rent or sell depending on what they are allowed to do (technically, they cannot sell the allotment land).

View over Northfields Allotments NW to SE_Credit - Nabil Jacob

Credit: Nabil Jacob

Robin argued very persuasively that the needs of vulnerable Londoners are paramount and the loss of a tiny amount of green space was no big deal. Christina and Ian at the allotments argued equally persuasively that green space was essential for London’s mental and physical wellbeing and that once it is gone, we never get it back (60% of the original allotment site was already under concrete following development in the 1970s). They also felt that Pathways would keep coming back for more land, so eventually there would be nothing left. A spokesperson for Pathways assured me they had no intention of doing so, but who is to say how his successors will feel in 20 years time? This is a deceptively large section of land and housing will continue to be a concern for decades. The temptation to repeat this process, taking another 5 per cent here and there, will surely be too great.

As I wrote this story, I found it very difficult to decide where I stood. Ultimately, I come down on the side of the allotment holders because I think there is going to be increasing pressure on inner London green spaces in the next few decades so it’s important to protect what we have – and it won’t just be charities hoping to build on it.

If I had ever been homeless myself, I’d probably feel very differently, though.

We need social housing, but we surely can do better than this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Reversing the ferret: affordable housing at Battersea Power Station

Posted on June 21, 2017 | 4 comments

The Evening Standard, usually a reliable cheerleader of the Battersea Power Station redevelopment, reports that the already limited affordable housing commitment is being slashed in half.

The argument appears to be that as the bottom is falling out of the luxury homes market because of entirely predictable problems of over supply, the developers can no longer afford to build the sort of homes that people actually need. The commitment had originally stood at more than 600. By the time I wrote Up In Smoke, my book about the history of Battersea Power Station, this had been reduced to 565 units – around 15 per cent of the total number of new flats. Some of these have since been moved to another location – ie, nowhere near the posh flats going up round the power station itself.

The Standard says the developers now want to build only 386 affordable homes – around 9 per cent of the final residential offering. That’s because following escalating costs caused by Brexit, they need to focus their finance on renovating the power station itself and building the new Northern Line extension. It’s the sort of trick used by developers all around the country as they attempt to weasel their way out of already meagre commitments, and at Battersea they can do this without making a new planning application or holding a public consultation by using a “deed of variation”. Conservative Wandsworth Council, whose commitment to a developer-led solution to the power station has been steadfast despite three decades of excruciating and occasional hilarious disappointment, are unlikely to object.

Ah, the irony. When I interviewed the amiable Rob Tincknell, the development’s chief executive, in 2014, he boasted it was only the developer’s commitment to the Northern Line extension  (NLE) that was allowing the already limited amount of affordable housing to be built in the first place. Without the NLE, he insisted, they would never be able to build this number of affordable units.

Now the argument is reversed. Because they have to build the NLE, they can’t afford to build as much affordable housing. It’s a classic piece of power station sophistry to match that of the recent decision to transform some planned residential units into commercial, despite earlier assurances that they having developed the perfect ingredients for a mixed use scheme they’d be fools to change their minds.

Tincknell told me in 2014 via email: “BPS makes its section 106 planning contributions in two ways. The first is a ￡200m plus contribution to the Northern Line extension (NLE), the second is 15% affordable housing or 565 units – the largest amount ever built in Central London.

The important point to note is that the NLE project allows the development density in the district of Nine Elms to nearly double. Therefore, without the NLE the density at BPS would be about half (like the previous planning consent) and therefore even if there was a higher level of affordable, say 30%, it would be a percentage of a lower figure and therefore the city wouldn’t get any more affordable than they do now.”

Suddenly, all that has changed.

The developers claim they hope to restore the missing 250 units at the end of the build.

I wouldn’t hold your breath.

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Posted in Battersea Power Station, Housing, Journalism, London, Property, Rant, Recession, Uncategorized

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Big Capital – Anna Minton

Posted on June 13, 2017 | 2 comments

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There is no bigger issue in London politics than housing. It’s probably the most significant reason London voters of all ages and from almost every social background turned to Labour in such numbers in last week’s election, and I wonder if the demographic changes caused by the capital’s out-of-control housing market had wider repercussions, as yet unexplored.

Was it partly responsible for the hollowing out of the Tory vote in Kensington, where the wealthy British are being replace by non-voting non doms? Are suburban constituencies being affected by the presence of recent graduates, unable to afford property of their own, and living with parents in the previously Tory-voting shires? What about those who have been forced to leave London because of prices – are they going to turn the country red wherever they end up? For many people under 50 – as well as older, concerned for their children and grandchildren – it is housing, not Brexit, that is the prism through which everything is viewed.

So how did we get here? Anna Minton’s Big Capital provides many of the answers. A few decades ago, this would have been published with a blue cover by Pelican, one of those great, short, cheap books that simply and effectively explained a moment in society for a wider audience.

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With the minimum of fuss, Minton explores the historic reasons for the housing crisis – right to buy, planning laws, changes in the way benefits are distributed, overseas investment – and then shows how these have affected London. She shows how the luxury housing bubble has impacted Londoners further down the scale and highlights what happens to people and property after councils, frequently Labour ones, elect to blow-up estates and sell the land on the cheap to developers. She even spends some time in the marketing suite at Battersea Power Station, where she discovers the way developers are encouraging people to invest in a lifestyle rather than simply buy a home for their family.

Minton is interested in what this has meant for people, and she talks to renters, campaigners, developers and politicians, as well as those who have been forced out of London by hostile redevelopment.  She wraps things up by looking at a handful of possible alternatives to the mess we are in – the most simple yet impossible of which is that the state starts taking responsibility and builds places where its citizens can live.

There has been a consensus against council housing for decades but as the election showed, there is a renewed appetite for state spending where it’s clearly seen that the market has failed. A national policy of housebuilding should be simple vote-winner but as long as the Conservatives view right-to-buy as the flagship achievement of the Thatcher years, they won’t be able to face up to the continuing disaster they helped unleash in the 1980s, assuming they even want to. Labour under Corbyn do not have such a shibboleth, which goes some way towards explaining their success in London despite any discomfort with the party’s policy towards Brexit.

Big Capital is a short and angry book, filled with data, case studies, interviews and personal opinion. This was a style Minton first used for 2009’s Ground Control, a prescient and important study of New Labour regeneration on UK cities. Minton was the first person to seriously highlight nagging doubts about New Labour’s regeneration policy, looking at the way communities had suffered because of failures of planning, design and basic humanity. Most memorably, she looked at the issue of private control of public space, an increasingly important topic in an age when developers are given larger and larger areas of land with which to do as they please, making their own rules along the way. It was groundbreaking, as so much of this seemed to have happened while people were looking the other way, seduced by the buoyant economy before the crash of 2008.

Big Capital isn’t quite in that category. There’s little here that isn’t already well known or hasn’t been covered many times before. Its value, though, is to join the dots and to gather everything together in one place. As a textbook primer on where we are today, it’s essential.

 

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Posted in Battersea Power Station, Books, History, Housing, Literature, London, Politics, Property, Uncategorized

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Metroburbia – by Paul Knox

Posted on May 18, 2017 | Leave a comment

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METROBURBIA: The Anatomy Of Greater London by Paul Knox (Merrell)

London’s suburbia occupies so much space – 695 square miles according to Paul Knox – that it seems ridiculous people even try to summarise it with a single adjective, whether that’s “aspirational” or “banal”. The suburbs contain multitudes and are more like a network of a thousand individual towns then a uniform commuter-ville of identical streets. Knox describes them as “metroburbia”, which he defines as “a multimodal mixture of residential and employment settings, with a fusion of suburban and central-city characteristics”, which is a way of saying that there’s much more to London’s suburbs then large gardens and a fast train to Waterloo: they have shopping centres, office blocks, housing estates, schools, local governments and, critically, millions of residents who never dream of travelling to central London even if they benefit from being within its orbit.

Knox explored central London in his previous book for Merrell, London: Architecture, Building And Social Change, a glossy overview of the relationship between social change and architecture. That book focussed on 27 central districts, looking at how they were originally developed and then exploring in more detail a dozen key buildings. Here he again divides London into sectors, seven of them – Lea Valley, Northeast London, Thames Estuary, South London (all of it), Thames Valley, Northwest London and North London – as defined by the arteries of road, river and rail. Little, though, is made of these sectors once they have been established, with Knox instead taking a chronological overview of metroburbia’s growth and development.

The book is richly illustrated, with the historical narrative interrupted by numerous boxes that focus on individual buildings, trends, regions and housing estates. The story that unfolds is a useful way of understanding how the city has developed. At first, the suburbs were essentially used as a place to put the city’s problems. This is where you could place those big, ugly but necessary things such as cemeteries, asylums, prisons, sewage pumping stations and reservoirs. Housing at this time was just another problem to solve, and in the suburbs there was sufficient space to experiment with both social and private housing, whether in the form of domestic architecture or vast pioneering estates. The increase in population that came with the railways then created a need for further, more localised, infrastructure – libraries, police stations, hospitals, town halls. As a result, one of the joys of this book is the variety of styles it features. There are photos of 60s high-rise towers, modernist mansion blocks, art deco Golden Mile factories, neo-gothic Victorian asylums, Edwardian shopping parades and glitzy suburban villas, with tiny details picked over such as the subtle incorporation of postmodern motifs in domestic housing.

And it’s housing that ultimately dominates the story. The Green Belt is one factor behind this. A crucial reason for the attractiveness of suburbia, it is also a choke on growth with 14 outer boroughs giving more land to the Green Belt than they do to housing. A further complication is the continued fingers-in-ears approach to social housing, something the Government’s recent White Paper on housing suggests isn’t going to change any time soon. Knox picks over all this in a final chapters that analyses the current problem and possible outcomes. What is clear is that the impasse cannot be resolved without direct intervention, and that the fringe land of Metroburbia will be central to any solution.

Buy the book here – http://www.merrellpublishers.com/?9781858946511

 

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Posted in Architecture, Books, History, Housing, Journalism, London, Suburbs, Uncategorized

Brief brutalism

Posted on April 6, 2017 | 1 comment

There’s a passion for the architecture of Brutalism right now, as seen by the dozens of books that have recently been published showing erotically charged exposed concrete and right angles.

The Royal Academy has a short but interesting exhibition on the subject called Futures Found, open until the end of May.  This takes half-a-dozen different related aspects of post-war British architecture and investigates them with a mix of photos, books, film and objects – all set against the backdrop of fake concrete panelling.

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My favourite sections explored the architecture of car park and the role of architecture at the University of Essex, which was one of the country’s most radical campuses in the late 60s – and where the Angry Brigade had their roots.

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I liked also the section on an estate at Kennington, which included this example of how renderings and reality never quite overlap.

 

The final section looked at car parks, and also touched on the fetishisation of Brutalist architecture just as much as it has been demolished. Exhibits included a tote bag from Peckham and a certified lump of concrete from the old Trinity Square car park.

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Fiddling with the ingredients at Battersea Power Station

Posted on February 24, 2017 | 2 comments

When I interviewed Rob Tincknell, chief executive of the Battersea Power Station development, for my book Up In Smoke, he went to great lengths to explain why the plan would be a success, not just as a business but as a new piece of city.

Well, he actually used the words “urban village”, but let’s try not to blame him for that.

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Tincknell enthused about how carefully they had worked out the exact mix of residential-commercial-leisure space in a way that would create the perfect “place” – a real destination that people wanted to visit. This was the social science of “placemaking” and the developer had published numerous reports and beautiful but boring books to explain their position.

He proudly told me the precise numbers: “57% residential. Of the remaining 43% that’s about 3.4m sq ft, 1.2m retail and restaurants, 1.7m sq ft of offices and the balance  in hotels, leisure and community space.”

These numbers, he insisted, were sacrosanct – they were the recipe that made the cake rise.

“It’s an appropriate density for the centre of the city,” he said when I questioned the scale of the residential aspect. “This level of density has been proved all round the world as a density that works. It creates a critical mass so the shops function, the public transport works, there’s a buzz and that’s what people come for. You create this mix of uses, this cocktail that you really believe in, you have to stick with it, you can’t fiddle with the ingredients.”

Guess what?

That’s right, the ingredients are now being fiddled with. According to an interview with Ticknell in the Financial Times,  the bottom has fallen out of the luxury flat market, causing problems for the power station model. But riding to the rescue are Apple, whose decision to move into the power station’s vast office space in 2021 has undoubtedly been a gigantic coup for the developers. Now, with Apple proving such an attractive hook, Tincknell is talking about turning over more of the residential aspect to offices. He told the FT that at least one planned building in the third phase of the scheme, designed by Frank Gehry and Foster + Partners, was under consideration for a change of use.

“I could easily see us adding another million square feet [of offices],” Tincknell says. “The great thing about a long-term scheme like this is we can adjust with the markets. If there’s no residential market and a very strong office market then we will build offices.”

It looks as if that perfect cocktail is being shaken not stirred.

For Up In Smoke, Tincknell promised me “that we are genuinely committed to creating a brilliant community. We feel very passionate. It will only make the place better. We have a responsibility to London. We are doing things way beyond the remit of the site so it fits in with London and genuinely improve the quality of life. If we succeed in that goal the value of the commercial and residential assets will rise and it will be a great place to live and visit. You can’t just develop it and run away, it has to work.”

On that latter promise, we’ll just have to wait and see.

 

 

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Posted in Architecture, Battersea Power Station, Housing, London, Place, Uncategorized

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