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Plan for London power station site sealed back

TREASURY Holdings has made significant changes to its plans for its €4.5bn redevelopment of the Battersea Power Station, a key south London landmark site. The developer has scaled back the amount of office space from an initial plan for 2.5 million square feet to 1.5 milion
and previous proposals for a 250-metre eco chimney have also been dropped. However, a spokesman for Treasury's publicly quoted vehicle, Real Estate Opportunities
(REO), says the overall scheme will remain the same in terms of its development space with more residential, retail and leisure space being provided.

Controlled by Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett, the firm submitted a masterplan for the project yesterday and if approved, work on the scheme would start late next year and be completed by 2020. 

The latest proposals now include around 3,700 homes as well as a six-acre riverside park, a hospital, a hotel and a market square. The redesign would also enable construction work and sales to be undertaken in five phases which would also facilitate cash flow should market recovery prove slow. The first two-year phase will focus on a 600 apartment terrace. The initial phases will also include restoration of the, currently derelict, art decolandmark power station which will be transformed into a carbon neutral building run on bio-fuel and converted into offices, shops, restaurants and homes as well as a 2,000-seat auditorium for conferences and concerts, the scheme now envisages a green roof and residential apartments topping off Giles Gilbert Scott's iconic Grade II power station, with a series of medium-rise stepped terraces on either side. Around 600,000sq ft of offices will be developed in the top six storeys of the station, offering 80,000sq ft floorplates.

Adjoining buildings have a maximum height of 67m, level with the shoulder of the base of the famous chimneys which remain intact. Mr Tincknell also indicated that the company would not need to raise development finance until 2011 and that REO had already received expres-
sions of interest from sovereign wealth funds enquiring about investing.  Although the company wrote down the value of the site at the end of December by .doom to C440m, this is still comfortably above the debt on the site as the site purchase was financed with only around £150mofdebt. The development also includes extending the Northern Line to the site by 2015 the first privately funded extension of the Tube.

The scheme will be developed in five phases, with the first two-year phase focusing on a 600 apartment terrace and restoration of the station. Work will then begin on redeveloping  the station, which, it is proposed, would be ready for occupation by the time the Tube opens in 2015. The plans are due to be submitted to Wandsworth council in July.