1 · Position
Investors bought the 42-acre site in 2012 and divided the work into eight phases. The Art Deco structure was restored and the chimneys reconstructed. Circus West Village completed in 2017 with as many as 1,800 residents; Apple announced in 2016 that it would put a London headquarters for 1,400 staff on the site; the power station itself opened to the public in October 2022 with a shopping mall in the former turbine halls, a cinema and an ice rink.
2 · Why it is in the Library
It is the group's clearest case of the building preceding the district. Canary Wharf and King's Cross were land looking for a use; Battersea was a single object too famous to demolish and too large to ignore, and everything around it was arranged to justify keeping it. The chimneys were taken down and rebuilt to look the same — an unusually literal statement of what heritage means to a developer.
3 · Candour
⚑ The Library records the reconstruction of the chimneys without judging it: replicas of demolished originals are conservation to some and pastiche to others, and both readings are held. The residential pricing and the proportion of affordable housing on the site have been widely criticised and are not established here.