Another brick in the big wall at Battersea Power Station
One of the world’s largest brick buildings, Battersea Power Station is currently undergoing restoration. It’s not just the scale of the project, but its complexity that is mind-bending, says Turner & Townsend’s Steve McGuckin.
Long before it graced the cover of a Pink Floyd album, served as a backdrop in the Beatles 1963 movie Help! or featured in a generation of music video clips, Battersea Power Station was a London icon.
Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect responsible for Britain’s iconic red telephone boxes, Battersea Power Station was built in two stages in the 1930s and 19s.
Heralded as a “temple of power” by contemporary critics, the station long ranked alongside St Paul’s Cathedral as a London landmark.
After it was decommissioned in 1983, the building loomed over London as a symbol of unmet potential. Owner after owner reimagined it as an indoor theme park, a shopping mall, an eco-dome with new age offices and even a stadium for Chelsea Football Club.
Then, in 2012, a Malaysian consortium of SP Setia, Sime Darby and the Employees’ Pension Fund of Malaysia purchased the power station for £400 million, or around AUD $685 million.
Now, as Europe’s largest urban renewal project takes shape, the smoke stacks are being restored as part of a $14 billion three-phase project along the South Bank of the Thames which stretches from Vauxhall to Chelsea bridge.
Turner & Townsend was appointed by Battersea Power Station Development Company (BPSDC), the investors’ UK entity, to provide project management and contract administration services for phases one and two, as well as for site-wide program management for a development that will eventually be up to nine phases constructed into the 2020s.
“When people hear Battersea, they think of the power station,” McGuckin (pictured right), Turner & Townsend’s managing director explains.
“That’s at the heart of the development,” but is just one part of the Nine Elms regeneration area that spans 227 hectares in central London.
When it’s complete, Nine Elms will encompass 17,0 new homes between Battersea and Vauxhall, an extension to London Underground’s Northern Line, a new green corridor, cycle routes and pedestrian paths. It also takes in part of the Thames Tideway Tunnel, a 25-kilometre sewerage system being constructed to cope with the demands of the city well into the 22nd century.
“There is major infrastructure going on underneath Nine Elms, which is in itself a challenge. It’s not just building but civil engineering on a major scale,” McGuckin explains.
Turner & Townsend project manages a site-wide consultancy team responsible for site logistics and masterplanning the works. It includes temporary works engineers, cost consultants, specialists in utilities, health and safety, roads and bridges, as well as the client’s own in-house expert engineers.
Together, their job is to ensure the project is “joined up”, working closely with the client’s experienced seniors, including the construction director. It is a true partnership between the client’s team and Turner & Townsend, McGuckin says.
Four years in, the first residents have moved into the luxury Circus West Village, while Apple has announced it will bring 1,400 staff to the precinct from 2020, occupying the office space within the power station structure.
The power station’s two turbine halls are being transformed into shops, restaurants, cafés and cinemas. And a new concert venue for 2,000 people is also in the works.
McGuckin says it will be a “new destination” for London, and that the space between the buildings is just as important as the buildings themselves.
But then there’s the building – and what a building.
At its peak, the station supplied 20 per cent of London’s electricity, churning through 10,000 tons of coal a week, delivered by a steady stream of barges working their way up the River Thames.
The building’s dimensions are 160 metres by 170 metres. The roof of the boiler house stands over metres, and each of the concrete chimneys stretches to 103 metres tall – just 8.6 metres shorter than St Paul’s Cathedral.
“The danger with projects like this is that you underestimate the scale and the complexity. You look at a drawing and think 103 metres isn’t that long. But once you start laying out materials and sequencing the work, it’s huge.”
Restoring decades of damage to the monolith is no easy feat.
“It’s taken more than two years to get to the point of starting the new building, because a lot of remediation work has been required.”
Previous owners had “lifted the lid” off the power station in the 1980s, “but recession meant work stopped and the structure was exposed to the elements for 30 years”. The team spent a lot of time dealing with corrosion, brickwork repairs and asbestos.
The concrete chimneys also needed to be recast.
“Smoke over the years had corroded the reinforcements in the concrete chimneys reducing their life expectancy. They were stable short term, but it was better to rebuild them than have to do it down the track,” McGuckin says.
Working with a Grade II listed building meant forging a strong relationship with Historic England, the body that regulates works to listed buildings. McGuckin says his team “sees it as a partnership, because we do want to preserve the building”. With the right approach, the historic context becomes “an asset rather than a constraint” he says.
To address the issue of scale, the team has looked at standardisation, particularly modular construction and prefabrication. In some cases, this requires negotiation with Historic England.
“Some of the traditional materials were in limited supply at the scale we need. For example, we’ve looked to replace some parts of the walls with panelised bricks, so we can do it at scale and control the quality. Historic England has been willing to listen to the team’s ideas.”
McGuckin, who will be heading to Australia this week to share his insights at The Property Congress, trained and worked as an architect for Grimshaw, before moving in his 30s into development and project management with UK’s LandSec.
Since then, he’s worked on around $12 billion of work, and some of London’s most significant projects, including The Shard, the London Eye, Terminals 5 and 2 at Heathrow Airport, the ‘Walkie Talkie’ building by Raphael Vinoly and Jean Nouvel’s One New Change beside St Paul’s Cathedral.
How does Battersea Power Station rank?
“It’s hugely rewarding to be part of a team giving this London landmark a new life. Our work will mean it’s around for our children and their children to also enjoy”. And perhaps capture the imaginations of a new generation of musicians.