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Battersea Power Station view from south

Two chances to hear about Nine Elms redevelopment, including Battersea Power Station and the US Embassy. Nine Elms is central London’s biggest regeneration opportunity. The area covers more than 450 acres of land along the south bank of The Thames – the vast majority of which is gearing up for major redevelopment.

Tues 27/7/2010 @ 7.30pm
ROSE Clubroom, Ascalon St SW8
Ascalon St is between
Thessaly Rd and Stewarts Road on Savona Estate access by car is from Wandsworth Road

link to a MAP and you can register your attendance for this meeting

Weds 28th July 2010 @ 7.30
All Saints Church, Prince of Wales Drive SW11.

Link to register attendance for this meeting and Map

Map All Saints Church is near Queenstown Roundabout

Wandsworth Economic Development Office have arranged these meetings chaired by Cllr Govindia and Cllr Lister.

You’d think that with debts up to their eyeballs, and Wandsworth Borough Council’s decision on planning permission still in the balance, the owners of Battersea Power Station would have enough to worry about.

But now new allegations have arisen in the Irish media about certain figures involved in REO, the property firm that owns the site.

The Irish Independent has reported that Willie McAteer, formerly finance director of Anglo Irish Bank, which loaned money to REO, also owns a stake in the company.

McAteer was also arrested and questioned by the Irish fraud squad in March 2010 following his resignation from the board of bailed out bank Anglo Irish in 2009.

Meanwhile accusations of irresponsible behaviour are in the air directed at Johnny Ronan, one of the owners of Treasury Holdings, REO’s largest stakeholder, with an opinion piece in the same newspaper accusing him of reckless spending. Mr Ronan’s children’s ‘lavish birthday parties…costing hundreds of thousands of euro’ come under fire.

This only adds to speculation on the propriety of his behaviour – in March the Irish Times reported that he was ’standing down’ from his position for a few months, following embarrassing revelations about his love life.

It seems Mr Ronan had been embroiled with arguments with a former girlfriend after being found taking extended lunches and private jet trips to Morocco with a former Miss World.

Not responsible behaviour, some might say, for a man whose company has debts funded by the Irish taxpayer to the tune of more than a billion euro.

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Detail of a slide from REO's presentation to the Battersea Power Station Community Group

Even if you take the question in its strict financial sense, it’s not as simple as you might think.

Property consultants King Sturge valued the site at £388m in February of this year. But read the small print and you see that this value depends on some factors which are still in flux: the obtaining of planning permission, the extension of the Northern line to Battersea, and the availability of funding for REO’s huge debts.

To take the first issue of planning permission, that’s a decision that’s going to be made by Wandsworth Borough Council later this summer.

And it might not be as cut and dried at the developers hope: several groups are opposing the plans, including the Kew Bridge Engines Trust, 20th Century Society, Battersea Society, SAVE, and the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society. The Victorian Society have also made a formal written objection and recorded an interview with Spectacle on their attitude towards the developers’ plans.

Even supposing the planning proposal is given the go-ahead, it’s unclear how valuable the site will be, given REO’s reluctance to say what proportion of the site will be made up of affordable housing.

Even now, when the site has none of the “essential” planning permission in place, the valuation of £388m suggests a value-per-acre of £10m. A little high, perhaps, given that Capital & Counties exhibition centre in Earls Court, which already generates income and has ready transport links, is valued at £6m per acre.

This second point of transport links, and the extension of the Northern line to Battersea, is also up for discussion.

No public money is being put towards it from either the mayor’s office or the Department of Transport, so it looks like it would have to be privately funded. The REO’s estimated cost at the moment is £200m – seen by some as a hopelessly optimistic figure.

And even if the price of building the tube link remained on target, it’s uncertain where REO would find £200m, given the company’s unfortunate financial position and hefty debts.

It’s hard to see how a valuation of the Battersea Power Station site, and of its worth to the developers, can be at all conclusive. £388m is an attractive figure for a company mired in debt, but to anyone else it looks optimistic at best, and at worst completely unrealistic. It is also £12m less than REO paid for the site.

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REO co-owner Rob Tincknell

Property firm REO, whose portfolio includes Battersea Power Station, owes millions of euro to its banks, and to the Irish taxpayer.

The company owes a total of €2bn to its banks. This includes nearly €1bn owed to Nama, Ireland’s National Asset Management Agency – set up by the Irish government to take on the debts of banks bailed out in the financial crisis.

With a property portfolio valued at €1.3bn (including the Battersea site, whose valuation is problematic in itself), the company’s debts now far outstrip its assets.

That’s not the end of REO’s problems: it recorded a pre-tax loss of £900m for the 14 months to February 2010. The announcement of those accounts, in June this year, caused a 50% fall in the company’s share price, taking it down to just 8 pence per share, and a market value below £40m. The company is not in good financial health.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that REO are looking to separate the potentially lucrative Battersea Power Station site from the company as a whole. They hope to draw off the property into a separate company, and list it on the stock market before the end of the year.

Investment partners are being sought to help fund the project, with international property groups and Middle Eastern wealth funds thought to be expressing interest.

But these grand plans could be brought to a halt if Wandsworth Borough Council decide not to grant planning permission. Elsewhere on the Spectacle Blog you can find out more about the historical preservation groups who are opposing the developer’s plans for the site.

You can also watch our interview with Alex Baldwin of the Victorian Society and other clips about the power station in the Spectacle video archive.

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Listed but not protected

Battersea Water Pumping Station is Grade II listed but not protected.

The usual safeguards against demolition of a heritage building are under scrutiny as REO, “developers” of Battersea Power Station, seek to bypass the criteria for demolishing a listed building and bulldoze the Victorian Battersea Water Pumping Station. Under new policy guidelines, REO will no longer need to administer the test criteria before destruction of a heritage site. REO state they “are not seeking to justify demolition on the basis of Policy HE9.2(ii)” Conveniently, REO is not in violation of policy and in effect giving them the right to proceed without obstacle.

A summary of the criteria for demolition under Policy HE9.2(ii) of PPS5 are to prove they are unable to:

1. find a “new use” for the building
2. maintain existing building  use
3. find a charity group interested in the building
4. get a local group willing to take on the building
5. market the building – someone could use it for alternative means

The community group Battersea Power Station Company has in fact offered to purchase the building for a nominal sum for a community centre, the building is described as “fairly robust and would be restorable if somebody wanted to.” However, under Policy HE9.2(i), REO claim they will not need to go through the test criteria listed. REO claim they can reject applications for the building arguing “the requirement to market the property is not engaged, since that only relates to Policy HE9.2(ii) and not to Policy HE9.2(i).”

Furthermore, under the new policy, REO “justifies the demolition of the water pumping station by reference to Policy HE9.2(i) of PPS5. Our position is that the demolition of the pumping station is justified by the delivery of the substantial public benefits inherent to the regeneration scheme [REO] are promoting, that outweigh the building’s loss, and that retention of the building would compromise the delivery of the comprehensive scheme.”

REO’s superfluous argument that the water pump station must be demolish or it will jeopardize the entire regeneration project for this area remains unfounded.

In fact, there are approximately 20 hectares of land for redevelopment.  It is perplexing that the developers are not willing to revise their plans for redevelopment to include the heritage site. Alex Baldwin of the Victorian society confirms that the demolition of the site would be a “considerable loss and unnecessary waste of a valuable historic building.” She goes on to say that the Battersea Water Pumping station is “integral to the redevelopment and regeneration of the area.  Demolition would degrade the area of the site and call into question the listing process as a whole.  The developers have not fulfilled the testing criteria for demolition, nor have they gone through re-qualifying their scheme for regeneration.”

Examples of successful redevelopment of historical sites can be found in Nottingham, Crossness in East London, Abbey Mills, and Dean Clough Mills in Halifax. The rejuvenated historical sites have revitalized the community and the same could be done for Battersea. Governments should include historic sites in the redevelopment schemes and not deem them mutually exclusive to the social and economical regeneration linked to a community.

By proceeding with the redevelopment proposed by REO, a precedent is set forth in how to undergo regeneration schemes in London. It is not good practice to use this as a blank slate for developers to demolish historical sites for the profit of a selected few. It is imperative to uphold government policy regarding the demolition of these irreplaceable iconic symbols. Once they are gone, we will never be able to get them back.

Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet – Bill Hicks

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As we have mentioned here on the Spectacle blog previously; owners of Battersea Power Station, REO (Real Estate Opportunities), have some illustrious plans to bring the Northern line to the Power Station. The project has received support from the mayor’s office but no public money is being put towards it from either the mayor’s office or the Department of Transport. This extension would serve to sever the two branches of the Northern Line so that only Bank services would travel to Morden and Charing Cross services would end in Battersea. As it is very few Charing Cross branch trains travel past Kennington. Far from benefiting the local community, this extension is effectively an attempt to build a private station for a private development with little to no concern for the local people.

In typical architectural consultation manner, they’ve produced 4 proposals and asked people to choose which one they believe will be the most beneficial. One of these maps is reproduced below and they can also be found over at London Reconnections along with some other useful information about the extension plans.

As can be observed on the below map taken from OpenStreetMap, REO’s consultation map conveniently crops Victoria station and forgets to label Queenstown Road and Battersea Park stations. The South London Line which runs from Victoria and London Bridge passes through Battersea Park station thus the Power Station site is already connected to these two major stations. Additionally Queenstown Road station, five minutes walk from the Power Station site, is one stop away from Vauxhall Station. With these two connections to major stations very nearby, surely extending the tube to the area is a bit over the top? Tunneling is not a cheap process after all.

Another proposal suggests extending the Northern Line to Vauxhall en route to the new Battersea station, but as we mentioned, Vauxhall is already easily reachable from Queenstown Road station and is in fact actually quite a crowded station already. The other two proposals suggest an intermediary station in Nine Elms, either around New Covent Garden Market or at the site of the current Sainsburys. The intention here is to serve the Nine Elms opportunity area and the new planned US Embassy (allegedly their 12 storey embassy building requires some underground facilities). However a few more buses in the area could easily serve this purpose or even a small tram service which would be far cheaper than costly tunneling. Besides, Vauxhall is really only a short walk away.

The consultation has included a Freepost Questionnaire for anyone who would like to inform Treasury/REO how they feel about the proposals. It is also worth considering that Treasury Holdings are conducting the consultation themselves and likely have no obligation to share the results. Either way, how would the public know that any published results of the consultation would match up with the actual results?

Visit Spectacle’s on-going Battersea Power Station Project

Watch a video trailer here: Battersea Power Station – The Story So Far

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If you live in the neighbourhood and would like to get involved, contact us here putting Battersea Power Station in your message.

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Olympic Blues

BATTERSEA POWER STATION AND OLYMPICS 2012: LEGACY, LAND GRABS AND LIBERTIES

Mark Saunders talk and videos

Wednesday, 02 June 2010 17:30

Room 517 (5th floor), Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB.

Directions

More info on London Planning Seminars

For more info:
On the Olympics:
Project: http://www.spectacle.co.uk/London-Olympics-2012
Blog: http://www.spectacle.co.uk/spectacleblog/category/olympics-2012/

On Battersea Power Station:
Project: http://www.spectacle.co.uk/Battersea-Power-Station
Blog: http://www.spectacle.co.uk/spectacleblog/category/battersea-power-station/

Developers REO want to demolish Battersea Pumping Station

Last week’s blog entry on Battersea Pumping Station focused on the frailty of the argument behind demolishing the building by current developers REO / Treasury Holdings. The pump house is a listed building at Grade II and pre-dates the power station by several decades as it was built in 1850. It has suffered from the same neglect that has befallen the power station, and like the sleeping giant that dwarfs it, it has been proclaimed as unrestorable by the developers and therefore fair game to be knocked down to make way for gated communities and a retail hub.

Yet much is being ignored here. The new Planning Policy Statement 5 declares that the council must take into account not only the possibility of sustaining and restoring a building of historical significance, but also weigh up the loss of heritage that would disappear along with the building against the desirability of any new development and the effects of both actions on the local community.

Kew Bridge Engines Trust, 20th Century Society, Battersea Society, SAVE, Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society, and also The Victorian Society (whose have posted a formal written objection and recorded an interview with Spectacle on their attitude towards the developers’ plans), are amongst many significant organisations to have questioned the planning application. And with good reason.

The developers are playing the practical usage card, and are shrewdly associating the building’s dereliction with inaction and obsolescence. However, Spectacle followed a team of architects who declared the pumping station structurally sound, and therefore transformation must subjugate destruction according to PPS5, but in what capacity?

Papplewick Pumping Station, above, is an illustration of a successful restoration on multiple levels. Built a few decades later, the water pumps are back in full working order and as a museum the station is an important focus of historical and engineering study. English Heritage, who have for the past few years failed to back any substantial arguments for preservation, have conversely put money into the ongoing restoration of Cross Ness Pumping Station, which includes plans for use in an educational context, and will be finished in 2011.

For Battersea, the local industrial heritage could play a huge role in the redevelopment of the power station site. Other suggestions include an exhibition space for artists and musicians, as well as a provision for housing archive materials indispensable for environmental, archaelogical and architectural study.

Beyond the functional potential for the site, it would reverse years of association with apathy and inertia, and could instead by synonymous with ingenuity, innovation and regeneration, perhaps even ultimately rousing support for a more public discussion on plans for the site’s regeneration.

A decision on the current application will be made by Wandsworth Council in July. It is not too late to register your comment or objection to its demolition.

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The future of Battersea Pumping Station, located next to the Battersea Power Station, is in serious doubt. If the current planning application to redevelop Battersea Power Station and the surrounding land by REO / Treasury Holdings is accepted without alteration by Wandsworth Council in July, the Grade II listed building would be demolished under assertions by the developers that the scheme would not be economically viable with its continued existence.

However, evidence to support this claim is less than accurate. Neither in the private nor public domain have the developers or Wandsworth Council revealed the percentage split of affordable and luxury housing. Without knowing what percentage of the planned housing developments will be “luxury” or affordable apartments it is not possible for REO, let alone English Heritage, to know how much profit the developers will make, therefore arguments over the economic viability of the scheme are spurious. Assuming the developer calculated the minimum amount of “affordable” flats would be needed the issue is not the economic viability of the scheme but the size of REO/Treasury Holdings profit margin.

REO argue that the Pumping Station should be demolished for the “Community benefit” but what they mean is their profit. It is becoming depressingly common for developers to present their economic interests as a community benefit. In this case what is actually meant is that if the developer does not get its way and make a substantial profit then the scheme will not go ahead and the community will suffer decades more planning blight.

Despite formally submitting their application in November 2009 in which they declared that flattening the pumping station would be critical, in February the only definitive number of houses of the 3856 dwellings of the master plan given any ‘status’ whatsoever are the 245 build-to-let houses – classified as non-affordable. As recent as March this year, in a Q & A session with the Planning Director Jeremy Castle, the percentage of affordable housing against non-affordable had still yet to be decided.

English Heritage, an organisation whose official remit is to promote and protect Britain’s historical environment, have effectively given their blessing to REO by deferring any decision-making responsibility to the Local Planning Authority.

In a letter to the Local Planning Authority, Nick Collins stated that although the proposed plans “risk causing harm to the setting”, the decision ultimately rests on assessing whether or not the ‘substantial community benefit’ (community benefit in this case being  private gain) outweighs the loss of the building and whether or not the building could be bought up by another party and reused (you can see the new legislation PPS5 here).

Under this new legislation the council must establish no other organisations are interested in buying the building or that no alternative community use can be found. Battersea Power Station Community Group has registered its interest and is supported by  a number of  local and special interest groups.

The Victorian Society is one of a number of expert groups who are against demolishing  the Pumping Station, yet they have been ignored (see the interview with Alex Baldwin from The Victorian Society here).

Jeremy Castle plans to reveal the official percentage of affordable housing on June 15^th – less than a month before Wandsworth Council make their final decision on the application. Aside from the absurdity of demanding a 150 year-old building be torn down because ‘it might be handy’, the relinquishing of accountability by organisations like English Heritage  demonstrates an alarming and depressing deference to private business when they are funded to enforce and support preservation.

The exhausting planning process and massive application documentation helps developers like REO / Treasury Holdings to wear down any resistance and bury the fact that they intend to destroy historically and culturally significant sites without open discussion. As English Heritage have in recent years funded the restoration of Cross Ness Pumping Station, their dereliction of duty and unfounded support for the vandalism of Battersea Pumping Station is curious.

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The comments below are from Chelsea Bridge Wharf resident Mike O’Driscoll, who is one of a  significant number of residents to have lodged formal objections against the Battersea Power Station plans.

The issues mentioned in your post concerning formal objections by residents of Chelsea Bridge Wharf to the current development plans for Battersea Power Station are worrying for residents but what is more worrying for the area, and for London as a whole, is that Wandsworth Council and the developers are clearly trying to fudge the issue of how much affordable housing would be included in the development. When so many people cannot afford a home it would be obscene for this development to go ahead without insisting on 50% of homes being affordable.

The Council is however refusing to say how many affordable homes would be included and claims that it is unable to say how many there would be because it is not clear what the demand is! I suggest you write to Mr Bob Leuty at Wandsworth Council (planningapplications@wandsworth.gov.uk) and make it clear that you do not support any development unless it includes 50% affordable housing. You can also contact your Wandsworth Councillor, or your local MP, and ask them what their view is on this before deciding how to vote.

If we allow this development to continue without clarification on the issue of affordable housing then we are simply allowing the developers to make themselves even richer and making this area even less diverse socially.

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