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.

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. I know there is Mulberry and Omega; Ralph Lauren and Rolex; Sweaty Betty (though none is sweaty) and Watches of Switzerland. This last feels apt, since this is not a London I have known. It feels like Battersea has lifted off, transformed itself and returned as an airport lounge. We are all strangers in our own lives, but this is absurd. I won’t bore you with the developers’ successful pleas to diminish the amount of social and affordable housing over time, and I don’t need to. The truth is mirrored in Le Creuset.

There are many restaurants and bars: a cocktail bar in Control Room B so you can pretend you are in Doctor Who; a Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza (though it isn’t street pizza); a Searcys Rolls-Royce Champagne Bar; a Starbucks; a Wright Brothers seafood shack; a place called, as if in therapy and seeking to name itself, Where the Pancakes Are.

I choose Roti King, a Malaysian restaurant – the power station was developed by a Malaysian consortium– which sits under the Grosvenor Bridge railway arches to the west. Once it would have been a happy set for Prime Suspect: now it finds itself named Circus West Village.

Roti King’s twin is over at unhappy, doughty Euston, and it is succour here too: you must work hard to defeat the glass, and they do. They bring hot round bread with dahl, and spicy red curry, and murtabak – a sort of squashed roti sandwich – and a nasi goreng: sweet, garlic rice. It’s vivid for London’s newest parish, which is all pride and tat. Who could live here happily, except the pancakes, who will surely ship out eventually to some pancake Elysium? I walk to the river and mount the Uber Boat by Thames Clippers, which is soothing because it looks like the ferry to the Isle of Wight. I look back at the homogenised ruins of Britain’s industrial culture and name it another wasteland lost.