Battersea Power Station redevelopment | Wandsworth | Pre-planning - Page 53

Rational Plan · May 7th, 2012, 05:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wingnut

I bow to your superier knowledge.
If that is a factor then chelsea may drop out.
Chelsea need a bigger capacity stadium asap to generate more money and compete with the likes of city,utd etc otherwise they will get left behind
so they might just look elsewhere.

But you can't fling a 60,000 spectator stadium up overnight anyway. It would be no different anywhere else. Chelsea is an inner London club and there are few alternatives. The other options are Olympia or Earls Court. Battersea is a walk in the park in planning terms compared to them.

I doubt EH will be too hard line as the station has been rotting away for 30 years now, and so many other schemes have failed.

kerouac1848 · May 7th, 2012, 05:44 PM

White City was apparently seriously considered (it's in the same borough for one), but fans would grumble going that far north, whilst it's QPR territory and they remain more likely candidates. If Battersea fails along with Earls Court they'd probably have to go a bit further West tbh, maybe to the industrial area sandwiched between Acton and Chiswick and off the M4 and North Circular.

alonzo-ny · May 7th, 2012, 09:08 PM

In my view I would be a bit sad if they moved out of proper Chelsea. There is something great about having a football team squigged into a dense up market neighbourhood.

flare · May 8th, 2012, 10:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alonzo-ny

In my view I would be a bit sad if they moved out of proper Chelsea. There is something great about having a football team squigged into a dense up market neighbourhood.

If they move to Battersea then surely the same could be said by the neighbourhood in 20-30 years time!

wingnut · May 8th, 2012, 05:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alonzo-ny

In my view I would be a bit sad if they moved out of proper Chelsea. There is something great about having a football team squigged into a dense up market neighbourhood.

I believe stamford bridge is actually in fulham

Jaeger · May 12th, 2012, 01:35 PM

TedStriker · May 12th, 2012, 04:27 PM

Good work!

But seriously though, how exactly would a stadium be built to include the chimneys?

woodgnome · May 12th, 2012, 08:00 PM

Why Battersea power station must be preserved

-- Link to Guardian article --

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.

PowerOfLondon · May 13th, 2012, 10:24 PM

Anyone remember when alton towers were gonna build an indoor theme park there? That would have been awesome! Seeing as that wont happen i think they should make it a museum or something similar

*Nurse* · May 14th, 2012, 09:46 AM

Every three months Abramovich would change the project manager and go for an entirely different approach.

danm · May 24th, 2012, 01:55 AM

Good lord...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...-car-park.html

One of the leading bidders for Battersea Power Station is planning to build a multi-storey car park inside the historic site.

According to plans seen by The Daily Telegraph, a consortium led by veteran property developer Godfrey Bradman wants to turn the inside of the power station into a 2,000-space car park that will support 5m sq ft of residential development on the surrounding land.

The plans are likely to be hugely controversial with Wandsworth Council, English Heritage and the Mayor of London.

The authorities want the power station to be a vibrant new commercial district, but Mr Bradman is proposing to increase the number of residential units on the site to almost 6,000, compared with 3,500 on previously agreed plans. He intends to forward-sell the upmarket units at £800 a sq ft to part-finance the development.

The power station is in administration with Ernst & Young, which received final bids for the site last Wednesday.

The shortlist is thought to include Mr Bradman's consortium DCVV, Chelsea Football Club, and SP Setia. However, Mr Bradman, who is being backed a wealthy South African family, has been able to secure an advantage.

He has agreed a deal with junior creditor Victor Hwang to buy £180m of debt against the site in return for Mr Hwang taking a minority stake in the vehicle seeking to acquire the site. Mr Bradman declined to comment.

ooh · May 24th, 2012, 03:50 AM

Ugh. Cannot believe it is even being considered.

Great work on that render Jaegar, would be amazing!

TedStriker · May 24th, 2012, 10:45 AM

Shocking.

Does anyone know what SP Setia are proposing with the site?

london lad · May 24th, 2012, 11:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TedStriker

Shocking.

Does anyone know what SP Setia are proposing with the site?

SP Septia were in talks with the old Irish developers to form a JV to build out the approved scheme but the Irish developers didn’t like the price they were offering. End result the Irish developers declined and went bust and now its back out to auction.

Rational Plan · May 24th, 2012, 11:43 AM

Even if they did stick 2,000 car park spaces in there, that would still barely fill the space they'd need to fill the other 2/3rds.

***SE9*** · May 25th, 2012, 11:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by alonzo-ny

In my view I would be a bit sad if they moved out of proper Chelsea. There is something great about having a football team squigged into a dense up market neighbourhood.

Chelsea isn't located in the neighbourhood of Chelsea SW3, or in the borough of Kensington & Chelsea.... it's located in the neighbourhood of Fulham SW6, in the borough of Hammersmith & Fulham.

The major difference with the Battersea plan would be that it's south of the river, but it would still be in the SW postcode area and it wouldn't be further from actual "Chelsea" than it currently is.

Core Rising · May 25th, 2012, 12:42 PM

Well Arsenal in Islington is nowhere near Woolwich anymore..

Officer Dibble · May 25th, 2012, 02:18 PM

And the Den isn't in Millwall (on the Isle of Dogs, i.e. north of the river), it's in Bermondsey (south of the river).

kerouac1848 · May 25th, 2012, 04:01 PM

And West Ham are closer to East Ham, Palace sit in South Norwood, and QPR in White City rather than Kilburn, etc.

At least Wembley is in Wembley....

Quote:

Originally Posted by Core Rising

Well Arsenal in Islington is nowhere near Woolwich anymore..

Arsenal were mostly in Plumstead I believe before running north, they were just founded by workers from a factory in Woolwich.

Core Rising · May 25th, 2012, 04:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kerouac1848

Arsenal we're mostly in Plumstead I believe before running north, they were just founded by workers from a factory in Woolwich.

I didn’t know that. Though their name of course comes from the Woolwich Arsenal.

May 12th, 2012, 08:00 PM	#1048
woodgnome CEO, Dingly Dell Corp. Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: London Posts: 689 Likes (Received): 103	Why Battersea power station must be preserved -- Link to Guardian article -- 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. __________________ London is not a city. It is more like a country, and living in it is like living in Holland or Belgium. Its completeness makes it deceptive - there are sidewalks from one frontier to the other - and its hugeness makes it possible for everyone to invent his own city. My London is not your London, though everyone's Washington, DC is pretty much the same. The London Embassy - Paul Theroux

May 25th, 2012, 02:18 PM	#1058
Officer Dibble cartoon policeman Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Londres Posts: 2,963 Likes (Received): 40	And the Den isn't in Millwall (on the Isle of Dogs, i.e. north of the river), it's in Bermondsey (south of the river). __________________ dibble music

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May 7th, 2012, 05:44 PM	#1042
kerouac1848 Registered User Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: NW London Posts: 2,246 Likes (Received): 66	White City was apparently seriously considered (it's in the same borough for one), but fans would grumble going that far north, whilst it's QPR territory and they remain more likely candidates. If Battersea fails along with Earls Court they'd probably have to go a bit further West tbh, maybe to the industrial area sandwiched between Acton and Chiswick and off the M4 and North Circular.

May 7th, 2012, 09:08 PM	#1043
alonzo-ny Thermobaric Thagomizer Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 19,803 Likes (Received): 1018	In my view I would be a bit sad if they moved out of proper Chelsea. There is something great about having a football team squigged into a dense up market neighbourhood.

May 12th, 2012, 01:35 PM	#1046
Jaeger Registered User Join Date: May 2006 Location: United Kingdom Posts: 2,327 Likes (Received): 30

May 12th, 2012, 04:27 PM	#1047
TedStriker Over Macho Grande Join Date: May 2009 Posts: 1,308 Likes (Received): 9	Good work! But seriously though, how exactly would a stadium be built to include the chimneys?

May 13th, 2012, 10:24 PM	#1049
PowerOfLondon Registered User Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: London Posts: 337 Likes (Received): 34	Anyone remember when alton towers were gonna build an indoor theme park there? That would have been awesome! Seeing as that wont happen i think they should make it a museum or something similar

May 14th, 2012, 09:46 AM	#1050
Nurse Take Your Meds! Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: St Bananas Posts: 312 Likes (Received): 1	Every three months Abramovich would change the project manager and go for an entirely different approach.

May 24th, 2012, 01:55 AM	#1051
danm Registered User Join Date: Aug 2010 Location: London Posts: 635 Likes (Received): 29	Good lord... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...-car-park.html One of the leading bidders for Battersea Power Station is planning to build a multi-storey car park inside the historic site. According to plans seen by The Daily Telegraph, a consortium led by veteran property developer Godfrey Bradman wants to turn the inside of the power station into a 2,000-space car park that will support 5m sq ft of residential development on the surrounding land. The plans are likely to be hugely controversial with Wandsworth Council, English Heritage and the Mayor of London. The authorities want the power station to be a vibrant new commercial district, but Mr Bradman is proposing to increase the number of residential units on the site to almost 6,000, compared with 3,500 on previously agreed plans. He intends to forward-sell the upmarket units at £800 a sq ft to part-finance the development. The power station is in administration with Ernst & Young, which received final bids for the site last Wednesday. The shortlist is thought to include Mr Bradman's consortium DCVV, Chelsea Football Club, and SP Setia. However, Mr Bradman, who is being backed a wealthy South African family, has been able to secure an advantage. He has agreed a deal with junior creditor Victor Hwang to buy £180m of debt against the site in return for Mr Hwang taking a minority stake in the vehicle seeking to acquire the site. Mr Bradman declined to comment.

May 24th, 2012, 10:45 AM	#1053
TedStriker Over Macho Grande Join Date: May 2009 Posts: 1,308 Likes (Received): 9	Shocking. Does anyone know what SP Setia are proposing with the site?

May 24th, 2012, 11:43 AM	#1055
Rational Plan Registered User Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Slough Posts: 2,785 Likes (Received): 52	Even if they did stick 2,000 car park spaces in there, that would still barely fill the space they'd need to fill the other 2/3rds.

May 25th, 2012, 12:42 PM	#1057
Core Rising Ampersands & What Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: London/ Nottingham Posts: 4,832	Well Arsenal in Islington is nowhere near Woolwich anymore..