Another wasteland lost: Battersea Power Station reviewed

The rude fingers of Battersea are repointed, and barely rude at all. The power station by Giles Gilbert Scott and J. Theo Halliday is no longer a wasteland to contemplate as you sit on the Waterloo to Shepperton night train. It has become a small town with shopping centre, restaurants and a pier on the river, so a middle-aged woman can get on an Uber Boat by Thames Clippers and pretend to be Cardinal Wolsey without others knowing it.

‘Talk about trendy – the food here is served on bits of wood.’

I have only ever known it as a ruin and so approaching it from its Underground stop feels subversive, but then all subversion ends. It is glossy, tinny: a dinosaur skeleton painted in glitter with glass apartments stacked on the head and satellite glass apartments all around for fellowship. I suppose it was inevitable: the greatest redevelopment opportunity in central-ish London in a generation and they have, typically, replicated Chelsea Harbour and added another Westfield, since two weren’t bad enough.

I suppose I should tell you it is big. It is bigger even than Tate Modern with its solitary rude finger. That had the grace to become an art gallery – not one I cherish yet an art gallery nonetheless – but Battersea? It is a Grade II* concession stand for the tat rich people buy themselves to feel something. If the coal it burnt (240 tonnes an hour, apparently, making electricity for one fifth of London in its glam-rock prime) leads to the flooding of its neat river-side garden – almost a modernist knot garden – it may turn back into a metaphor. Until then it is less interesting.

I don’t tour the outlets as I do not have to. I go into the grocers, which is apparently their Co-op, and am instantly face to face with a display of Le Creuset.