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Comment by hbcdbff | Hacker News Reader

I suppose you’d prefer the power station to have remained a derelict wreck.

Honestly, people like you are what holds this country back.

It's not hard to imagine that not every derelict wreck has to turn into the new battersea power station. In fact, it's hard to think of a less inclusive redevelopment project in the UK than battersea power station.

Dozens of proposals were made for dozens of years. Nothing was done, it sat there rotting away.

Ok but that doesn't contradict the original point that the area ended up soulless and expensive, so your "people like you are what holds this country back" is still unjustified (and rude)

It turned into a luxury place because that's where the highest margins in construction are. Every developer wants to build high margin houses, nobody wants to build low margin houses.

City development must cater to all its inhabitants, and if you have a prime estate like the Battersea Power Station, it's a failure, from the city's POV, if you burn that only on high margin development. From a negotiation standpoint, the city negotiated badly here. The city has to accommodate the needs of less wealthy inhabitants in other means now, but without the negotiation leverage that a high margin property can provide.

If you view it like this, the complaints "only luxury flats" are pretty rational. The city negotiated badly.

I personally see no issue with using prime real estate for… prime housing.

Affordable housing can be built somewhere that is actually… affordable.

Imagine you're the mayor. You want to hire companies to build prime housing and affordable housing. Every company only wants to build prime housing, because that's where the money is. If you only give out contracts like that, basically nobody will apply to build affordable housing.

You're not dumb, of course, so your next step is to say, "if I give you the contract to build prime housing, you also must build affordable housing". That's not ideal for the developer, because the time spent on building affordable housing is time they don't spend on stuff where they make proper money, but at least they can make some money. They agree to take the deal. You think, problem solved, but turns out the developer outsmarts you: they structure the company in a way that they can chicken out of building the affordable housing. In real estate, it's very common to have every building project be its own limited liability company so that one failed project doesn't influence the others. In this case, you put the affordable and the luxury housing together in one Ltd, build the luxury housing, extract the profits by moving them to the parent company and then declare your Ltd bankrupt, meaning they unfortunately can no longer build the affordable housing.

As a mayor, you observe how you're being cheated, you get real angry but the walk through the courts is too slow, and your voters demand action now. Realistically, you do the court route in the background, but you learned your lesson and now you tell the developer "before I give you a high margin luxury contract, you must have completed affordable housing first".

Alternatively, you mix the buildout into the same building so that you cannot open the luxury flats/office space without having completed the affordable part. Either way, affordable first, luxury second.

That is basically the story of the London property market.

Another issue is how do you even build affordable housing on land worth millions? The only way to make that work is if the government owns the land forever and commits to never selling it. Which is kind of what the government was going for after WWII with council houses, but Right to Buy ruined that.

There actually is some "affordable" housing in the wider project but only because there was a very long battle to keep the developers to their legally-bound promise to build some affordable property that they — of course — tried to wriggle out of.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/20/develo...

It's in zone 1. Every flat in that area, no matter how much of a cupboard it is, has a huge luxury: location.

It was only dragged into zone 1 in order to charge higher fares to recoup some of the cost of building the Northern Line extension. If it weren't for that, it'd be zone 2 - and one of the less well-connected bits of zone 2, at that.

I don't have that much of a problem with it, tbh - before the development it was a weird light industrial bubble, disconnected from the rest of the city. Now it's a weird bland commercial bubble, disconnected from the rest of the city.

And we've lost Marco Polo House, the home of QVC, and gained Apple. Seems about a wash in terms of cultural value as well.

Ahh yes because the only destiny of large buildings in London is high-end retail and luxury flats for the wealthy. That's what holds us back as a country, isn't it? Not enough places for the very very very rich.

I didn't at all say or suggest I would have preferred it to stay derelict. It's an absurd straw man.

There are many things that project could have been, for London, that it is not.

But if that's the only way you see progress — the creation of places for foreign wealth to be spent — then yeah, I am holding the UK back from that miserable dystopia.

I don’t want to dive into Reddit like territory but this is not a fair representation of the place. It is a shopping centre, yes, in the same vein as Westfield or any other created in the past twenty years. There is a Lego store, Uniqlo and many other normal high street stores [1] alongside higher end places but Sloane Street this is not. Throughout the year there are events in the riverside space with stalls from local traders and various other free events, especially for children.

I would argue that it is one of the more successful new developments in terms of “placemaking”, certainly in that part of London. It is very clearly targeted at the residents of the local area who are normal London middle class wealth. The little shop no doubt has bottles of expensive wine but it also has £10 ones.

For clarity; I’m not a resident of the area but have visited a bunch of times, especially with kids.

Making new places is hard and I think they’ve made a decent go of the place.

[1] https://batterseapowerstation.co.uk/retailers/?retailertype=...

What holds the country back is anti-growth, financially insecure people who complain about anything and everything.

> But if that's the only way you see progress — the creation of places for foreign wealth to be spent — then yeah, I am holding the UK back from that miserable dystopia.

Try actually going there. You might find there aren’t as many “foreign” people as you fear.

> What holds the country back is anti-growth, financially insecure people who complain about anything and everything.

That isn't me. I am not complaining about anything and everything. I am complaining about one specific place.

> Try actually going there. You might find there aren’t as many “foreign” people as you fear.

I wrote that comment because I have been there. And my fear isn't foreign people — not remotely. My fear is foreign unexplained wealth — one of London's biggest and most intractible problems. It's not xenophobia, it's the corrupting influence of dubious, hard-to-trace oligarch-connected money being sloshed around in the London Laundromat.

The Battersea Power Station project is legit — all done legally — but the project was literally built by people not exactly tenuously associated with 1MDB. And as with many of these developments, many of the people who live in those expensive flats will be doing so thanks to money that was ill-gotten through proximity to power elsewhere in the world.

It's central London. Of course it's a place for foreign wealth; as long as we get to keep enough on the way. We need to stop being snobby about the very real need of the country for foreigners to spend money on stuff we sell.

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