Could the next property boom be in Battersea?

I’m not quite sure what the average age of Spectator readers is, but for many a pink floating pig is their abiding memory of Battersea Power Station. Since 1983, when it stopped producing energy, there have been many unfulfilled promises and dreams for the building. I went inside it back then and it was immense. So vast and bleak was the space that the majority of Londoners simply couldn’t envisage anything happening there. 30 years of will it, won’t it, were brought to an end ten years ago when current shareholders SP Setia, Sime Darby Property and the Employers Provident Fund acquired it and started to make good on their vision.

Recent headlines about the opening of two new underground stations, extensions of the Northern Line, modestly ignore the fact that this was one of the biggest local infrastructure investments in history. It’s also easy to underplay the importance of the stations to an area that has, certainly for my 40 years in the business, always suffered from the label of being too badly connected to be worth buying in. Now