Why Electric Boulevard matters.
Electric Boulevard is a sculptural corridor where Battersea's industrial character meets contemporary architecture, pedestrian urbanism and the reinvention of a former power-generation district around one of London's most recognizable structures.
Running through Battersea between Nine Elms, and Battersea Park, the pedestrian corridor occupies the southern approach to Battersea Power Station, extending from the Underground station toward the restored generating complex between two radically different architectural compositions. Gehry Partners' Prospect Place shapes one side through rippling façades, projecting winter gardens and irregularly stacked forms whose geometry changes continuously as the boulevard advances north. Foster + Partners' Battersea Roof Gardens answers across the street with a longer curving elevation that rises and falls along the route, creating a deliberate spatial counterpoint to Gehry's fragmented residential blocks. Prospect Park interrupts the built enclosure near the southern section, giving the boulevard a landscaped opening before the four chimneys of the former generating station increasingly define the forward view. The result is a corridor where Battersea's industrial monument becomes the visual destination of a purpose-built contemporary street, with Gehry and Foster framing the approach through contrasting architecture conceived as part of the same urban composition.
What defines Electric Boulevard.
Electric Boulevard is best known for forming the architectural centerpiece of Phase 3 at Battersea Power Station, where Gehry Partners and Foster + Partners were commissioned to design opposing sides of a new pedestrian high street connecting the restored generating complex with a new Underground station. The wider redevelopment entered its present phase after SP Setia, Sime Darby Property and Malaysia's Employees Provident Fund acquired the 42-acre site in 2012, ending decades in which multiple redevelopment proposals had failed to return the former industrial complex to sustained use. Construction began with Circus West Village in 2013, establishing the first occupied portion of the masterplan before Phase 3 concentrated major international architects around the future southern approach. Planning permission granted in 2014 established Electric Boulevard as a new high street for Wandsworth, with shops and restaurants beneath homes and the two architectural practices defining its principal frontages. Northern Line tunnelling finished in 2017, and Battersea Power Station Underground station opened in September 2021, giving the emerging boulevard a Zone 1 terminus at its southern end. Electric Boulevard opened publicly on 14 October 2022 alongside the restored Power Station, with the completed northern portion running between Prospect Place and Battersea Roof Gardens toward the new station. The masterplan assigns more than 126,000 square feet of retail and leisure space, 744 homes, 200,000 square feet of offices and a 164-room hotel to the boulevard's Phase 3 architecture, giving a newly created street the density and variety of uses required to connect the transport interchange with the former industrial site.
Prospect Place and Battersea Roof Gardens turn that masterplan into a rare face-to-face encounter between Frank Gehry and Foster + Partners on a single London street. Gehry Partners designed Prospect Place as Holmby House and Pico House, containing 308 residences above double-height commercial units and using undulating elevations to break the large development into smaller visual components. Foster + Partners developed the opposite side through Battersea Roof Gardens, where the building's long profile responds to the movement of the Thames and carries a substantial elevated garden designed by James Corner Field Operations with LDA Design. The Foster composition also incorporates art'otel London Battersea Power Station and 50 Electric Boulevard, a 200,000-square-foot workplace completed in 2024 behind a curved glass façade at the southern entrance. Koa occupies the southern portion of Battersea Roof Gardens with 204 residences, extending the Foster frontage toward the Underground station and continuing commercial space across its lower floors. Gehry Partners returned for the next development stage, with further buildings intended to complete the southern portion of the boulevard and continue the architectural language established by Prospect Place. Gehry, Foster, Corner and LDA Design collectively make Electric Boulevard an unusually concentrated architectural commission, joining residential form, workplace design and landscape architecture around a street created simultaneously with the district it serves.
How Electric Boulevard fits.
Electric Boulevard works as the anchor for a daytime exploration of Battersea through Victorian landscape engineering, industrial infrastructure converted into an arts venue and civic architecture that later became a major center for experimental performance.
Begin at Battersea Park, where Thomas Cubitt and the Reverend Robert Eden advanced the idea of a public park in 1843 before James Pennethorne produced a preliminary plan in 1845 and Parliament authorized the project the following year. John Gibson directed the principal development after 1854, and Queen Victoria formally opened the park with neighboring Chelsea Bridge in 1858; its riverside later accommodated fifteen hectares of Festival Gardens for the 1951 Festival of Britain, adding a major twentieth-century design chapter to Pennethorne and Gibson's Victorian landscape. Continue to Pump House Gallery, occupying the structure James and William Simpson built in 1861 to operate the steam-powered system supplying Battersea Park's fifteen-acre boating lake. The brown-brick pump house used its machinery to circulate water, irrigate planting and power artificial cascades before the system fell out of use during the twentieth century; restoration between 1988 and 1992 converted the industrial building into an art gallery without erasing its original relationship with the lake. Conclude at Battersea Arts Centre, where E. W. Mountford won an 1891 competition to design Battersea Town Hall and produced a Free Classical civic complex completed in 1893 with relief sculpture by Paul R. Montford, plasterwork by Gilbert Seale and mosaics from Battersea's Vitreous Mosaic Company. P. E. Pilditch extended the complex from 1899 to 1901, and the building escaped demolition after municipal functions moved to Wandsworth before Battersea Arts Centre acquired its lease in 1981. The progression moves from Pennethorne and Gibson's creation of a metropolitan public landscape through the Simpsons' engineering of its water system into Mountford's architecture for Battersea's expanding civic ambitions, tracing how recreation, technology and public culture shaped the district long before Electric Boulevard introduced its newest architectural chapter.
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