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Lord Foster reveals £50bn Thames Hub project

The Sheet — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:33:41 +0000

Ambitious Thames estuary plan to include international airport, railway and housing with new freight and energy infrastructure

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realised." These famous words are attributed to Daniel Burnham, the ebullient American architect and planner who reshaped Chicago, extended Washington DC and championed the City Beautiful movement of the late 19th century.

On Wednesday Lord Foster announced a plan so big that even Burnham would have been impressed. The Thames Hub, a £50bn project devised by architects Foster and Partners, planners and builders Halcrow and Volterra, a consultancy group of British economists, aims to revolutionise Britain's often creaking and largely inadequate national transport and energy infrastructure.

From a proposed new Thames Hub, comprising an international airport, railway terminus, freight depot and port along with a new Thames Barrier sited all together in the Thames estuary, a new four-track high-speed orbital passenger and freight railway would run around the north of London before joining main lines to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Felixstowe, Cardiff and Southampton.

Aiming to take thousand of container lorries off the roads, this radically enhanced national transport "spine" would also carry power lines and communications cables, cutting down on the need for new pylons. Built to a continental loading gauge, the railways would connect directly with high-speed passenger and freight lines in the rest of Europe.

New homes, hi-tech factories and other workplaces would be built around existing and new railway lines with tens of thousands of new homes connected directly to an ultra-modern transport network. Most new homes in Britain are currently scattered on the fringe of old towns and across the green belt with little consideration for transport and other infrastructure.

"We need to recapture the foresight and political courage of our 19th-century forebears, " said Foster on Wednesday, "if we are to establish a modern transport and energy infrastructure in Britain for this century and beyond."

The Thames Hub and the "spine" are bold plans indeed. "They're born out of necessity, enthusiasm and frustration," says Foster. "In Hong Kong, a decade ago, we were able to build a major new international airport and all the associated infrastructure including a new island reclaimed from the sea within four years. If Britain wants to compete with rapidly developing global economies, it must sort out its infrastructure and, if this is holistically planned with real political commitment it can also be a thing of beauty and environmentally friendly."

"I know it's against the national grain to come up with big plans and we'll be accused of playing Napoleon, but we have to get the debate going and show what a difference a radical new infrastructure plan could make to Britain."

"Infrastructure is the key", says David Kerr, group board director of Halcrow. "Britain ignores development and investment in infrastructure at its peril. Look around the world and you see the way in which China and Latin America are investing heavily in infrastructure. They see it as a passport to strong economic development."

Bridget Rosewell of Volterra says that, if implemented, the Thames Hub plan would generate £150bn in financial benefits alone. It has also been planned to save the green belt from rapacious commercial development, to generate hydroelectric power from the tidal Thames and to beautify transport corridors around London and along the country's main traffic arteries.

"If it went ahead, even in part," says Foster, "the very realisation of the plan would create thousands of skilled jobs in engineering, manufacturing and construction alone."

Although Britain has rarely been a country of grand plans, these have existed. The building of the railways, sewers, National Grid, motorways and water supplies are all examples of how Britain has made it in the past. Huge infrastructure projects like the city of Birmingham's water supply from the Elan Valley, completed in the early 20th century, prove how such works can be breathtakingly beautiful as well as discreet and highly effective. They can also be highly controversial, politically sensitive and hugely expensive.

"The cost of not doing anything will ultimately be much higher," says Foster, an architect used to moving mountains in the far east. "We've stuck our heads up like coconuts in a funfair expecting them to be knocked down. But we need to do something soon, and this plan is national, aiming to redress the imbalance of the economies of north and south."

Could it happen? Could we soon be flying in and out of one of the greatest ports in the world where fleets of modern aircraft, ships and trains power Britain's economy into a newly competitive age? Will we live in fine new homes connected to brand new transport, energy and communications spines and hubs? Or will we decide it's business as usual in little Britain and carry on building junk housing on what were once meadows and unsustainable supermarkets and shopping malls on the land that's left and between overcrowded roads and railways? Foster and his team have offered a big-spirited vision of Britain, but do we have eyes to see it?

Jonathan Glancey

Constructive criticism: the week in architecture

The Sheet — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:57:32 +0000

All aboard! Our transport special schedules an Olympic facelift for Euston station and a psychedelic stop on the Naples metro

News earlier this month that Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers are competing to design the world's largest airport at Daxing, southwest of Beijing, makes this week's transport-related architectural stories seem little more than the stuff of "news in briefs" tucked into the corners of news pages.

Even so, the 90,000 passengers who use Euston station every day may well be pleased to learn that the London terminus is about to be given a makeover by Aedas Architects. The polished black granite 1960s station, opened by the Queen in 1968, replaced the original terminus, which dated from 1837. With its handsome train shed by Charles Fox, a magnificent entrance – the Euston Arch – designed by Philip Hardwick to mimic an ancient Greek propylaeum, and a sumptuous Great Hall (England's noblest waiting room) drawn up by Hardwick's son, Philip Charles Hardwick, the original Euston station was admired worldwide. Sadly, all this was churlishly demolished in 1961-2.

The current 1960s building has never been popular, and not just because of the loss of the Victorian station: nearly half a century on, there is still nowhere to sit in this airport-style "terminal" while waiting for trains that are strangely hidden out of sight.

The Aedas team will clear the station's clutter, add a mezzanine with new cafes and somewhere to sit overlooking the concourse, and generally make the building feel crisp, clear and clean. The project is meant to be temporary, although this turns on whether or not HS2, the new high-speed line from Birmingham to London, goes ahead. If it does, Euston may yet be rebuilt completely. But don't hold your breath: big talk in 2008 of an ambitious new station masterplanned by Allies and Morrison, designed by Foreign Office Architects, developed by British Land and with the Euston Arch brought back to life, came to nothing. Aedas's revamp may end up lasting a very long time.

If the renovation of Euston is, in part, being encouraged by the London 2012 Olympics, the redevelopment of Glasgow Queen Street station is being prodded on by the 2014 Commonwealth Games, although work on this Victorian station is not expected to be complete until 2015. A 1970s office block fronting the station will be demolished and the terminus will refaced with a glazed atrium and a direct link to the Buchanan Galleries shopping centre. If it was fashionable 50 years ago to turn railway stations into faux airport terminals, they are now on their way to becoming shopping malls, with eye-wateringly expensive trains attached.

Alejandro Zaera-Paolo of AZPA, a former partner of Foreign Office Architects (disbanded since the 2008 Euston plan), is in the running to design one or perhaps two stations for the new Galicia extension of Spain's high-speed AVE, at Ourense and Santiago de Compostela. Zaera-Polo's rivals at Ourense are Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Eduardo Souto de Moura, while the shortlist for Santiago de Compostela includes David Chipperfield.

Biarritz station is quite some walk from the city's seafront on the Bay of Biscay. Here, the world of commuters gives way to sailing boats and surfboards and to the curious Cité de l'Océan et du Surf, opened this summer. Designed by Steven Holl with Solange Fabião, this museum of the sea is a poetic place where the architecture blurs into the waves and where you'll find a surfers' kiosk and a semi-enclosed space for performances and festivals. The building has just won a 2011 Emirates Glass LEAF award, an international prize for the world's best new buildings.

The Leaf awards' special commendation went to the gloriously colourful and playful University of Naples metro station (below), designed by Karim Rashid. These interiors will certainly take anyone's mind off the woes of commuting. Every staircase is an artwork, with each step offering a fraction that builds up to a whole, flight-long picture. Pop imagery abounds; it's like the psychedelic art shows of the 60s, at the time the new Euston opened. And very radical for a Metro station, even five decades on.

We've had trains and surfing, and now here's something for cyclists. The 2012 Olympic velodrome by Hopkins Architects is the favourite to win the RIBA Stirling prize. The winner of what the judges believe to be the best new building designed or built in Britain by a British-based practice is announced at a slap-up dinner at the Magna Science Adventure Centre, Rotherham, on Saturday night. The local train station has just been rebuilt by Aedas. From Euston, change at King's Cross and Doncaster.

Jonathan Glancey

Letter: Preston bus station is no St Pancras

The Sheet — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:05:44 +0000

If eyesores like Preston bus station are all that pass to make a town unique, it is a sad day indeed (Unthinkable? JK Rowling at Preston bus station, 6 August). When it opened in 1971 it may well have been bold and uncompromising. Also bold and uncompromising are the stenches of urine and skunk cannabis that fill its many nooks and crannies in 2011. The stark exterior is covered in the same dirt-white tiles found in the toilets. The only permanent access is via intimidating, low-lit subways. The rubber floor covering is alarmingly dangerous in wet weather. There is no comfortable seating for travellers waiting for buses. The surrounding surface is in a constant state of disrepair. For elderly and vulnerable users it can be a frightening place, especially at night. It is a monument to social and economic decay, an asbo magnet, not a place to linger and be awed. St Pancras it ain't.

Preston is not a museum. It is a living city – the newest British city in fact – with a justifiably proud transport history: an important west coast mainline railway station, the first motorway in Britain (M6 Preston bypass) and the erstwhile Leyland Trucks just down the road – and, yes, when this building was built it was the largest bus station in Europe. It is now an architectural dinosaur. For this city to have a large bus station is crucial, but it should be a functioning building fit for purpose – not a museum of grot of which its inhabitants are expected to feel proud! Its problems are so inextricably linked with its design that to earmark it for preservation would be folly. The only solution is to tear it down and replace it with a vital heart of infrastructure which is clean, comfortable and safe to use.

How patronising the sentimentality that monstrosities such as Preston bus station elicit from people who live nowhere near them. I live and work in the Preston area and can testify that its regular users would not lament its passing. If JK Rowling has ever laid eyes on Preston bus station, she would agree.

John Rodgers

Preston

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London 2012: Olympic flame will be lit in one year’s time, but still much to do

The Sheet — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:07:55 +0000

IOC hail progress as Tom Daley dives into Aquatics Centre pool, completed on time and budget

With 366 days to go, 2012 being a leap year, until the Olympic flame is lit in east London, organisers, the government and the International Olympic Committee are queuing up to hail progress to date.

Wednesday's events to mark the milestone, which will see the £269m Zaha Hadid designed Aquatics Centre formally handed over to organisers by the Olympic Delivery Authority and Tom Daley diving into the pool, will have an air of celebration.

"Marking one year to go, by diving in the Aquatics Centre is an incredible honour. Only a few years ago, this was a distant dream," said Daley, who finished fifth at the world championships in Shanghai on Sunday. "I can't wait for next year and the honour of representing Team GB." But although world class athletes are beginning to test the venues, there remains much to do.

Venues

The Aquatics Centre is the sixth and final permanent venue to be handed over to organisers by the ODA, which has spent £7.25bn of public money building them. Chairman John Armitt said the successful completion of the venues had helped boost the image of British contractors around the world.

"It's very satisfying to be handing it over on time and keeping within the budget. It's a great tribute to everybody that has played a part in this," he told the Guardian. "It is something that as a country and an industry we should be proud of and we should try to maximise opportunities in other parts of the world while memories are still fresh about what the industry can do."

Some venues, especially the velodrome that has already been nominated for the Stirling Prize, have garnered more plaudits than others. The clean lines and simplicity of the stadium have also been praised but there has been criticism of the ugly temporary "water wings" that have been attached to the aquatics centre to boost the capacity to 17,500 for the Games. When it was designed, the high cost was justified by the signature design, which will be obscured by the temporary stands. "When you're inside it, it's fabulous," says Armitt, diplomatically.

Despite outward appearances, the London organising committee still has a huge task. Each venue must be "fitted out", a task that includes the laying of the track in the main stadium, and several major temporary venues must be built from scratch. They include a 15,000 capacity hockey stadium, a 23,000 capacity arena for the equestrian events at Greenwich Park and a 15,000 seat bowl on Horseguard's Parade for the beach volleyball.

Tickets

London organising committee chief executive Paul Deighton has confirmed the last batch of 1.2m tickets that will go on sale from December will first be made available exclusively to those who took part in the initial ballot in April and have yet to get a ticket. Around 6m tickets have already been sold, considered unprecedented with a year to go, with only around 1.5m for football matches around the country and those final 1.2m across all sports – to be made available when the final seating configurations are decided – remaining. Next year, Locog also plans to sell "non-event tickets" which will allow entry to the park but not the venues.

Later this year, millions of free tickets for the live sites, with big screens and concerts in Hyde Park, Victoria Park and Potter's Fields will also be made available on a first come, first served basis. The mantra from Locog chairman Lord Coe and other organisers has been that while they understand the "disappointment" created by the huge demand, which saw 22m applications in the initial rush for tickets, they stand by the controversial process.

Transport

Ever since London was awarded the Games in 2005, transport has been considered a potential achilles heel. The ODA passed responsibility for operational matters to Transport for London last year, but retains an overall co-ordination role. The first stirrings of a backlash have already been felt about the so-called "Olympic lanes" that will whisk 18,000 athletes and officials around the capital during the Games.

They make up roughly a third of the 109-mile Olympic Route Network and have already sparked loud protests from London's black cab drivers. Meanwhile, much will rest on the ability of organisers to persuade businesses and individuals to modify their behaviour during the Games.

"The message must be business as unusual," said Armitt. They take some comfort from the variety of routes into Stratford, including the Jubilee Line and the new Javelin train from St Pancras, but will be desperate to avoid a millennium eve style meltdown.

On the nine busiest days of the Games there will be more than 1m Olympics-related journeys, with a report earlier this year warning of "extreme" conditions on a system already "creaking at the seams".

Security

Olympics minister Hugh Robertson said that security plans needed rethinking when the coalition came to power. Before she quit, Lady Neville-Jones led a government review that resulted in the government predicting security at Games time could be delivered for £475m, though the overall £600m envelope will be retained.

Ministers and organisers have sought to play down the significance of the resignation of Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, but he said in his own statement that a key reason for it was to allow time to get someone new in place for the Olympics. Locog will spend £282m on security within the venues, chiefly through contractor G4S, but there will also need to call on several thousand non-uniformed military personnel.

'Look and feel'

For all the operational challenges Coe's organising committee will face, in many ways the bigger challenge is building public enthusiasm for the Games to reach a crescendo around 27 July next year when the flame is lit. Coe has talked of Britain being a "slow burn" nation. He hopes the torch relay, which will begin at Land's End on 19 May and visit 74 locations in 70 days via 8,000 runners, will be the point at which cynicism is cast aside and enthusiasm ignites.

Part of the task will be to keep those without tickets engaged, through the big screens planned for cities throughout the country and cultural events that will culminate in Festival 2012. London mayor Boris Johnson has a budget to "dress" key areas of the city, including placing Olympic rings on the capital's landmarks. The BBC, which has promised to broadcast every event from every venue live, will also have a big role to play.

Legacy

Given the relatively smooth progress of organisers to date, much of the controversy has centred on the legacy claims that helped secure the Games in the first place. The Olympic Park Legacy Company has taken on responsibility for the park after the Games and must prove it can make a commercial success of it while meeting the needs of local residents.

The fate of the stadium, the object of a furious row between Spurs and West Ham, is mired in high court litigation and it will face searching scrutiny over the affordability of thousands of homes that will be left behind, partly the athletes village.

One of the biggest challenges for the OPLC will be finding a tenant for the cavernous media centre, although there are renewed hopes that a major broadcaster may take an interest.

But even more of a challenge is the "soft legacy", with figures showing that the number of people playing sport is resolutely refusing to budge and ongoing debate about whether the predicted opportunity to get more young people engaged in sport, build links between clubs and schools and raise the profile and quality of coaching, is really being seized. They were famously planting the trees in Athens the day before the opening ceremony, but the landscaping on the Olympic Park is starting to take shape.

More than 4,000 new trees are planned, with 1,500 already planted. Over 300,000 wetland plants have been planted and there are bold claims for the Park that will be left behind. Eventually, there will be up to 11,000 new homes on the site, in the heart of an area that the Olympic Park Legacy Company hopes will be resurgent. Westfield, the giant shopping mall at the entrance to the Park and on which politicians are relying for many of their legacy claims about jobs and regeneration, opens for business in September.

Owen Gibson

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Air travel is no privilege for the poor | Owen Hatherley

The Sheet — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:53:08 +0000

Travelling from Luton airport is a teeth-grindingly laborious process compared with the grandeur of St Pancras International

If you're in any doubt that the class war is raging in the field of transport design, try travelling in the same week from London St Pancras International on the Eurostar, and then from Luton airport on a low-cost airline. Bear this contrast in mind when it is claimed – and it often is, implicitly or otherwise, most obviously in the forthcoming budget's trailed inducements to air and road travel – that holidays via air are the innocent privilege of the poor and the "squeezed middle", which green or lefty killjoys want to take away from them.

St Pancras International is marketed as "high design", combining the aesthetics of the industrial revolution – in the form of William Barlow's majestic iron and glass canopy and George Gilbert Scott's grandiloquent hotel frontage – along with the modern: sleek, grey-steel new terminuses, chic typography and, where beer barrels imported from the East Midlands once sat, a luxury shopping mall. Here, as you wait, you can fill yourself with all the organic coffee you can drink, stock up on improving literature in Foyles and enjoy the "world's longest champagne bar". Drink enough there and you might even find value in the station's statues of John Betjeman and snogging backpackers. To take a train into Europe is reserved for the elite, then, an elegant experience, "reassuringly expensive".

London Luton – aside from the hubris in its very name, with a city of more than 200,000 demoted to a terminus for the capital – also has a shopping mall, and also caters largely to travel in Europe, but that's where the similarity ends. The notion that the plane might be quicker and easier than the train is now absurd, if you're travelling from Luton or the many airports like it. To travel out of London from St Pancras is simple, even for non-Londoners, as the station is a major terminus. To travel to "London Luton" is teeth-grindingly laborious, on the disintegrating Thameslink train followed by a bus winding vaguely around the General Motors works. When you finally arrive at the airport, you're at a nasty little shed into which retail is stuffed as if at random. The design makes Lidl look like Le Corbusier, an overlit, cramped horror.

That's before you've even made your way into the floating cattle car that will be shepherding you to your destination, via your chosen low-cost airline – in my case it's usually the Hungarian couriers to "new Europe" Wizzair, the subject of the Wizzair Sucks website. Then you'll arrive somewhere more humane, for a week or so. It's a miserable way to travel, for both of its main groups of clients – Gastarbeiter from east-central Europe and working-class holidaymakers on their way to Spain. And never mind arriving at Luton, when accusatory signs about "ASYLUM" and the "UK BORDER" provide a warm welcome.

This experience, making the very act of getting in and out of the country a grim struggle, is what the government will trumpet as empowering the ordinary holidaymaker, while they themselves – perhaps even the currently ascendant Clarkson tendency in the coalition, best represented by Philip Hammond – would surely opt every time for the Eurostar. They are, in the fine tradition of British Conservatism, serving up something they know, as Gerald Ratner once so pithily put it, is "crap" – then telling us we should be thankful.

So even before we bring in other factors – the price and quantity of oil, or its hardly benign environmental effect – it is clear that we are being sold a pup. The "freedom" of the skies or of the motorway is a risible myth.

Owen Hatherley

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Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2011 award nominations – in pictures

The Sheet — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:54:49 +0000

From energy-harvesting paving slabs to quick-assembly emergency shelters, see the projects at the cutting edge of design in 2010

Boris Johnson’s London Cycle Hire scheme flogs our birthright to Barclays

The Sheet — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:46:52 +0000

The mayor's deal has smothered London's public spaces with what may be the largest piece of corporate branding in existence

London's long-awaited cycle-hire scheme is launched this week. While there's no doubt it's a valuable addition to the capital's public transport options, it strikes yet another blow to the idea of London as a dignified city. First of all, there's the name. Paris has the Velib, Montreal has the Bixi; what does London get? Barclays Cycle Hire. Clearly the good people at Barclays marketing thought long and hard about that one.

Maybe it's not worth getting too wound up about the name – selling the rights to popular institutions is unlikely to make anyone who watches, say, the Barclays Premier League or the Npower Championship even blink. What is new, however, is the prospect of more than a hundred kilometres of the capital's road surface being branded with corporate livery. The city's new dedicated cycle lanes – two of which recently opened, with another ten to come before the Olympics – are called "Barclays Cycle Superhighways" and painted Barclays blue.

London can now claim the dubious honour of hosting what is surely the largest piece of corporate branding in existence. It's not just the scale, the mind-blowing square footage, that is shocking about this – it's the principle. We're not talking about some supersized billboard here: we're talking about the mayor selling off the very road beneath our wheels – one of the few parts of a city that counts indisputably as public space. Whether they realise it or not, whether or not they even care, from now on thousands of cyclists are doomed to commute on a giant Barclays ad.

The sponsorship deal, worth £25m, has been presented as a coup for Boris Johnson. It has enabled him to recover some of the £140m Transport for London spent on the cycle-hire scheme and has even been presented as "payback" for the mayor's support of the banks during the credit crunch. Surely, however, £25m is a small price to pay for such an invasive piece of branding? If a city of the global stature of London can't afford to provide rental bikes without turning its urban fabric into a massive endorsement, we're in trouble.

There is something, too, in the gibes suggesting this is not just Barclays blue but Tory blue. Neither New Labour nor former mayor Ken Livingstone did anything to prevent the growing privatisation of the city, but it is hard to imagine Livingstone selling off a chunk of the public realm in such brazen fashion. Johnson seemingly lacks any sensitivity to the ethical or aesthetic side-effects of his deal-making – this is, after all, the man who condemned the Stratford Olympics site to a hideous 115m-high sculpture – precisely the kind of vainglorious ego trip the Olympics can do without – based on a 45-second chat with Britain's richest man in the cloakroom at Davos. We must be careful not to assume a loss of innocence; private ownership and interests have held sway in this city for centuries, and often cooperation between private and public bodies is the best way to meet the city's needs. However, the public realm that the Victorians handed over to municipal authorities to manage in the public good – including streets and pavements, squares, and infrastructure such as transport and sewage networks – has been under steady assault since the privatisation of the Thatcher years.

A decade ago, Naomi Klein argued in her book No Logo that we had reached a point where it seemed nothing could happen anymore without a corporate sponsor. The inevitable upshot of their growing social power was that brands wanted an expanded visual presence. T-shirt logos and media advertisements were no longer enough: branding had to be a fully immersive experience. As the superhighways prove, there is no amount of space a brand will not happily fill, with public bodies all too willing to hand it over. TfL is becoming ever more imaginative about the bits of Tube stations it will sell off to advertisers – including, now, the space between escalators and the gates of the exit barriers. Every year the Regent Street Christmas lights, once a public gesture organised by the Regent Street Association, turn a major thoroughfare into a 3D advert for some fashion label or blockbuster movie.

Increasingly entire pieces of London have become brands in their own right, a process that began in the 1980s with the privately owned Canary Wharf development. Since then, so-called "business improvement districts" have been popping up all over the capital under the banner of regeneration: Broadgate in the City, Paddington Basin, Kings Cross Central, the new Spitalfields Market, the More London development near Tower Bridge. It's a national phenomenon, too, exemplified by "malls without walls" such as Liverpool ONE or Brindleyplace in Birmingham. They might look like other parts of the city, but they are very different. Stroll through Broadgate and you'll notice the logo of developer British Land studding the pavements. These are privately owned developments, policed by private security guards who can throw you out for the slightest misdemeanour or – if you happen to be sleeping rough, say – simply for disrupting the projection of affluence. In the case of More London – a series of sterile glass blocks set amid some rather uptight landscaping on the South Bank – the very name is a deliberate deception. The developers are trying to claim this is just an ordinary piece of the city. Don't believe it.

Anyone who wants to find out more about the insidious privatisation of British cities should read Anna Minton's latest book, Ground Control. The point is that we are in danger or running out of unbranded space. Though it may seem innocuous, the branding of cycle lanes sets an all-too-exploitable precedent. As citizens we have a communal birthright, which includes the public realm. Our representatives are supposed to protect that – not sell it off to corporations who are neither responsible nor accountable for the spaces of which they claim symbolic ownership. Politicians seem only too ready to turn our cities into horizontal billboards. If we're not vigilant, the urban landscape is going to become a brandscape.

Justin McGuirk

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Battersea power station fires up for London stock market listing

The Sheet — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:09:35 +0000

• Irish owners refinance and want to list the project on Aim
• See our gallery of previous redevelopment plans

The troubled owners of Battersea power station have unveiled plans to float the building on the stock exchange in the latest in a string of attempts to redevelop the derelict London landmark.

Despite numerous plans for the 40-acre site, it has stood empty for more than a quarter of a century while the rest of the Thames waterfront around it has undergone huge change.

Now Irish property group Real Estate Opportunities (REO), which bought the Battersea site in 2006 for £400m, wants to spin it off and possibly float it on London's Alternative Investment Market (Aim). It is also looking for a partner to take a 50% stake in the project and provide the financial firepower.

REO has been hit hard by the Irish property slump. It reported an underlying loss before tax of nearly £1bn for the 14 months to 28 February, reflecting an £811m drop in the valuation of its property portfolio.

The firm has drawn up a shortlist of possible investors after being approached by a number of international real estate groups, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds from around the world, including the Middle East.

REO hopes to get permission to redevelop the site in September after submitting the largest ever planning application made in central London, in terms of financial value, last autumn. If it gets the go-ahead, the site's value is expected to soar from the current valuation of £388m.

"It's an opportunity to turn the power station into a cultural icon for London," said Robert Tincknell, who runs REO's parent firm, Treasury Holdings. "A year ago, people were saying 'it's not going to happen'. That's changed enormously over the last 12 months, with the planning permission having gone in and the support we have [from the London mayor, Boris Johnson, English Heritage and Wandsworth Council]." The Conservatives launched their election manifesto at the power station in April.

Treasury Holdings was forced to tear up its plans for the imposing building, one of London's most recognisable landmarks, and start again after Johnson decided that a proposed tower would ruin the view from Waterloo Bridge to the Palace of Westminster. The original plan, drawn up by the New York-based architect Rafael Viñoly, included a futuristic 300m glass funnel and atrium, rising from an enormous transparent dome.

Viñoly and Treasury Holdings came up with a new blueprint a year ago that is capped at a height of 60m, as stipulated by the mayor. It includes 3,700 homes, office space, shops, restaurants and leisure facilities, at a cost of £4.5bn. Treasury Holdings also hopes to co-fund an extension of London Underground's Northern Line to the site.

The high cost means the company needs a partner – "someone who can bring big financial strength to it to make sure it happens," said Tincknell. Building work could start at the end of 2011.

When the power station was decommissioned in 1983, its then owners, the Central Electricity Generating Board, wanted to tear down the building and replace it with housing, but it had been given a Grade II listing in 1980. For developers, the real prize is the land around it; most have little interest in its heritage status.

REO said today it had negotiated new lending terms for Battersea with Lloyds Banking Group and Nama – Ireland's "bad bank" – which means its existing bank facility will be extended and all outstanding breaches waived.

Julia Kollewe

Dan Milmo

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Fingers crossed for England’s tallest bridge

The Sheet — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:22:55 +0000

• 187-metre-high crossing for Wear wins approval
• Construction depends on securing funds after 6 May

The tallest bridge in England is set to join the country's long list of famous northern landmarks, slung from two slender columns across the river Wear.

Curved in a fingers-crossed design, unwittingly reflecting years of searching for the cash to build it, the crossing in Sunderland will tower above other lofty icons, including the Angel of the North.

Prosaically listed as the New Wear Crossing in the Sunderland Strategic Transport Corridor, it will stand 187 metres (613ft) – taller than Blackpool Tower, at 158 metres, and approaching four times the height of Nelson's 51-metre column.

Once building starts, a competition will help find the bridge a handy nickname.

The sensational design, given planning approval today by Sunderland council, dates back five years but was kept under wraps until 2008, to avoid disappointment if funding failed. A government promise of £98m for an off-the-peg bridge freed the council to ask residents if it could add £32m for something special. They looked at the mock-ups and gave a big yes vote.

"It will be a people's bridge," said Sunderland's Labour council leader, Paul Watson, who is hoping to preempt less dignified slang for the striking silhouette. Horny Bridge is one contender, reflecting the curving shape of the two towers, but a claim that the suspension wires would play the Geordie anthem Blaydon Races in high winds proved to be the Sunderland Echo's April fool.

Although designed to ease traffic and help regeneration of former shipyard and engineering sites, the bridge is a deliberate attempt to give Sunderland a lift. Watson said: "It will be a distinctive new symbol for the city, help raise our profile and the potential for greater prosperity."

Sunderland already has a beautiful riverscape where the Ghyll [aka Galley's Gill] meets the Wear, embellished by the Winter Gardens, National Glass Centre and university buildings. But it looks jealously across at the Tyne's bridges, as well as the Angel, Sage concert hall and Baltic gallery.

Stephen Spence, architect of the new bridge, who also designed the graceful double curve of the Infinity bridge in Stockton-on-Tees, said: "This is positive and bold. It's particularly pleasing to see the support from the community."

The last, nervy wait for the Wear bridge will be the post-election period, but all parties have suggested that they would not pull the financial plug. Labour is involved in a battle to defend Sunderland Central from a Tory challenge led by the party's group leader on the council.

The council has planned to start work on the bridge in 2012, with completion due in 2015, but the local funding is potentially vulnerable because of Tory hostility to regional development agencies.

The local development agency, One North East, has pledged £3.1m for the bridge; the loss of that could affect Sunderland's own contribution of £19.1m as well as a further £12.8m from the government's local transport plan for the north-east.

• This article was amended on 5 May 2010. The original said named Sunderland South Labour as the constituency where Labour is facing a Conservative challenge. This has been corrected. An alternative rendering of the Ghyll has also been added, in clarification.

Martin Wainwright

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Take the next exit for the green motorway service station

The Sheet — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:05:57 +0000

A new motorway service station being designed in the Cotswolds will lead the way environmentally

Motorway services and green design are awkward bedfellows. It's not simply the petrol, the shopping and the fast food, but service stations take up a lot of space. And of course, they're dispiriting to look at.

But the challenge of building new services in the Cotswolds between junctions 11 and 12 of the M5 persuaded the developers to hold a competition. It was won by Glenn Howells, whose Savill Building in Windsor Park was shortlisted for the Stirling prize three years ago.

Designed to "knit" into the landscape so that even the petrol station cannot be seen from the road, it will emit a fifth of the carbon dioxide of normal motorway services thanks to a kitchen garden, the creation of habitats for wildlife, and the use of locally sourced Douglas fir as the building material.

The consortium, whose planning application is to be considered by Stroud district council, includes Westmorland, the family-run firm behind the much-admired Tebay services in Cumbria, which won Egon Ronay's British Academy of Gastronomes' Grand Prix award last year.

The trouble is, having arrived you might never want to leave. The architect describes it as "a rural oasis", but it's not just the peace and quiet that is so appealing. It's the homemade food, the fresh veg and organic meat that will be sold in the farm shop, and the locally produced art and crafts replacing Marks & Spencer, WH Smith and other brands that will be banned, while profits will be ploughed back into the local community.

Green and foodie credentials aside, it's the design that will put it on the architectural map. The undulating shapes echo the landscape, while the timber-clad interior looks like the business- class lounge of a Scandinavian airport, with curvy chairs, low coffee tables and subtle lighting. Bring on the organic apple juice, the carrot cake and the hand-thrown pottery.

Amanda Baillieu is the editor of Building Design.

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