In recent years the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station has been doing its utmost to live up to its reputation as the Everest of Real Estate. For 30 years, the building sat empty and decaying, the sheer scale of its brick edifice defying all attempts at regeneration or redevelopment. But while this changed with the sale to SP Setia and Sime Darby in 2012, these deep-pocketed Malaysian investors who have since supplied the necessary cash and determination to summit this beast may well have had moments of regretting they ever strapped on their crampons.

By 2017, build costs on the redevelopment of the power station itself had already increased from £750m to more than £1.15bn, which, combined with a lengthy fall in the prime London sales market, had more than halved the developers’ expected profit margin. Then, the extent of construction delays forced the developer, Battersea Power Station Development Company (BPSDC), to give buyers in the next phase, Phase 3a, the option to get their deposits back, which BPSDC has admitted lost them 20% of the sales they had already made. In documents circulated to local council officials in July 2017, the project’s developers warned the project as a whole was “not too big to fail” and that delays to Phases 3 and 4 were possible.

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