Nine Elms Walking Tour with Open City Friends - Saturday 4 November 2023, 11am

Join Open City Friends for a tour exploring the past present and future of London’s Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station regeneration zone. 

This insightful walking tour — led by expert guide Nick Edwards — tells the story of this waterfront district formerly famous for the Vauxhall gyratory system, Terry Farrell’s MI6, New Covent Garden Market, and a hinterland of associated of sheds, cold warehouses, post office depots, railway viaducts and Battersea Dogs Home – alongside the iconic Giles Gilbert Scott-designed Battersea Power station which has recently been refurbished by Wilkinson Eyre.  

The tour will start at the landmark Vauxhall bus station designed by Arup Associates in 2004 and finish at the newly opened Battersea Power Station. The journey will discuss how this former industrial zone less than a mile from parliament was identified as an ‘opportunity area’ in Ken Livingstone’s 2004 London plan and has been going through a lengthy regeneration programme ever since with the aim of creating a vast new £15 billion mixed-use district. 

It will examine competing visions for the future of the area and look at how two new Northern Line stations designed by Grimshaw, the first few phases of the Raphael Viñoly’s £9bn Battersea Power Station masterplan, and a sea of towering speculative housing developments have created a critical mass of activity while also reshaping London’s skyline.

Landmark buildings featuring on the tour include include Prospect Place by Frank Gehry, Circus West Village by Simpson Haugh and Nine Elms Square by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). The tour will also cover Brunswick House, Terry Farrell’s ‘SIS Building’, the new US Embassy by Kieran Timberlake, the contentious Embassy Gardens sky pool by HAL Architects & ARUP Associates, and the Riverlight development by RSHP.

With the potential to deliver 20,000 new homes, 25,000 new jobs, 600,000m² of commercial space and a 4.8ha linear park, this case study tour will question the successes of the Nine Elms regeneration project to date while also looking ahead to what the future might hold.

Key information