Battersea Power Station, the iconic London landmark famous in the 1970s for Pink Floyd's floating pink pig album cover and in the 1980s and 1990s for being the capital's most doomed white elephant, opens to the public today in a blizzard of publicity celebrating one of the country's most ambitious new commercial and residential districts.

Even to the most jaundiced, anti-development observer – and it is by no means without its critics – the opening is something of a miracle. Dogged across decades by pie-in-the-sky plans, daunting infrastructure and a rapidly deteriorating building passionately protected by highly vocal conservationists, the 40-year saga of how the site was developed takes in more colourful characters and seemingly insurmountable hurdles than even its peers at King's Cross Central, Stratford City and The Shard.

So what will be on show as the 1920s power station's doors open to the public for the first time in its history, and was it all worth it?

The commercial calculations of space leased and sold speak for themselves.

For starters, there is the retail. Somehow, while facing increasingly dire headwinds from the sector and a global pandemic, Battersea Power Station's owners and its advisers kept the momentum going to persuade many of the world's biggest names to take a chance on an entirely new pitch.

Ninety-six percent of the Power Station’s commercial space is prelet, with a sizeable chunk of that taken by famous brands. That includes 90% of the retail and leisure space let or under offer, with more than 60 places to shop and dine opening. Retailers will include Hugo Boss, Theory, Lacoste, Ralph Lauren and Aesop. A new bookstore, Battersea Bookshop, and Curated Makers, a retail concept that links local independent artists and makers with the high street, opens its first unit in London inside the Grade II* listed landmark.

Food and drink offerings joining the line-up inside the Power Station include Le Bab and Where The Pancakes Are. The famous Boiler House will be home to a 24,000-square-foot Arcade Food Hall by JKS Restaurants which will open in 2023.

The Power Station’s two Control Rooms, which at one point managed a fifth of London's electricity, have also been fully restored. Control Room A will be an events space while Control Room B has been turned into an all-day bar by Inception Group, where punters can see and touch the Control Room’s original dials and controls.

The offices element is if anything more of a success story.

In September 2016, US tech behemoth Apple agreed a deal to lease 500,000 square feet at the development, the largest office letting in London’s West End market for 20 years.

Other office tenants include a new IWG coworking offer, The Engine Room, which has taken 40,000 square feet, and SharkNinja, the vacuum and home appliances manufacturer, which has taken 25,000 square feet.

After the Apple letting, the Battersea Power Station Development Company indicated it planned to deliver another 750,000 square feet of offices in 2023 and 2024.

Also opening inside the Power Station will be a cinema and Lift 109, a glass elevator ride transporting visitors 109 metres up to the top of the building’s north west chimney.

The last may sound incredible but the power station's various owners over the years have always had elaborate plans for the famous chimneys, most notably Victor Hwang's proposed single-table restaurant at the top. The only thing that sticks out about the latest plans is that they have happened.

The remainder of the site is being developed with buildings designed by a roster of star name architects. If they have blocked views of the famous landmark as they have sprung up, they have been visually arresting and have been selling as quickly as the station.

Electric Boulevard, a new pedestrianised high street, which runs from the south of the Power Station, between Frank Gehry’s Prospect Place and Foster + Partners’ Battersea Roof Gardens to Battersea Power Station Underground station, opens on 14 October with brands including international Zara and Zara Home, optician David Clulow and Korean supermarket Oseyo. M&S has signed for a food hall to open at Malaysia Square, CoStar understands.

These complement a mix of bars and restaurants already open in Circus West Village, the first, principally residential-led, phase of the site's regeneration which completed last year and includes Sugen Gopal’s Roti King, Tapas Brindisa, Battersea Brewery, and Vivek Singh’s Cinnamon Kitchen. The 850 apartments have all been sold.

At its peak, Battersea Power Station had supplied a fifth of London’s electricity but after it was decommissioned in 1983 plans for the site came and went with alarming regularity.

The Power Station has been owned by Sime Darby Property, S P Setia and the Employees’ Provident Fund since 2012, and the Grade II* listed building has been painstakingly restored to its former glory. But how did they manage it?

To understand this, it is particularly useful to dial back to 2012 before the Malaysian consortium took control - an event first revealed by CoStar News.

At that stage the power station's future looked bleaker than it had ever done.

Lloyds Banking Group and Ireland's National Asset Management Agency bad bank had gone to the High Court to appoint Ernst & Young as administrators to the vehicles that owned the building. The creditors were trying to recover the entire £502 million owed by the project’s owners by selling the site or the debt.

As always, there were no shortage of parties circling an opportunity that Treasury Holdings subsidiary Real Estate Opportunities, the Irish group which controlled the site, had been marketing over the previous few months via Cushman & Wakefield.

British Land and Capital & Counties had both held talks. A raft of other developers and consortia including Development Securities and Berkeley had been waiting for the lenders to call in the loan and sell at a more palatable price than the circa £500 million REO wanted for a 50% stake.

Two bidders stood out.

Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich’s long-standing interest remained unabated, with the club appointing Mike Hussey’s Almacantar to look at options for a development that would include a major new football stadium. The lenders had also considered and rejected two bids from Malaysian property developer SP Setia to buy the debt at a discount.

So why were so many people still chasing such a difficult project?

On the face of it, it remained a hugely attractive opportunity given the site’s closeness to West London and the significant prices nearby residential schemes such as Chelsea Barracks were gearing up to achieve. It had the potential to become one of the capital’s next key strategic development sites, sitting at the heart of a redeveloped Nine Elms opportunity area, where the US Embassy, New Covent Garden Market, Ballymore, Royal Mail, National Grid and others were all already proposing major schemes.

But a series of critical issues faced developers.

The most significant was the difficulty of arriving at the site, which seems so tantalising close on the journey into Victoria Station, but in fact was a fair distance from the nearest transport hubs at Vauxhall, Sloane Square and Battersea Park.

A number of ideas had been floated over the years, including a bridge over the Thames linking the site to Sloane Square. But the most viable was the one that REO, Wandsworth council and Mayor of London Boris Johnson had begun evangelically promoting, an extension of the Northern Line from Kennington into the site.

The £800 million upfront cost of that was a major stumbling block.

One major developer eyeing the opportunity told CoStar News at the time: "The site has a great deal going for it but the upfront cost of the infrastructure and transport needed is just too much. Rival opportunity areas, such as Earls Court and Victoria, already have these issues resolved for the developers."

The other issue was the Power Station itself. The site has always proved hugely emotive with successive suggestions that the famous chimneys or the building itself should be demolished to ease development meeting with passionate objection. Demolition therefore would be extremely costly.

On the other hand, the station was in a state of increasing disrepair that would be difficult and costly to resolve and it had proved a difficult space to find financially viable solutions for in the long-term.

The final problem was the saga that had grown up around Battersea Power Station creating a general feeling of doomed white elephant.

Three milestones changed everything: the first was the government's public commitment to the plans already embraced by Wandsworth council, Johnson and REO for a Northern Line spur into the site and the wider Nine Elms development area.

Chancellor George Osborne announced in the 2012 Budget that government would “consider allowing local borrowing against future receipts of Community Infrastructure Levy” – a levy local authorities can set on new development to raise funds for infrastructure – to support the extension of the Underground, subject to a commitment by April 2013 from a developer that it would contribute and develop the power station.

That, in turn, gave confidence to the Malaysian consortium that eventually bought the site and that had the kind of patient capital capacious enough to complete such a large upfront investment.

The final piece of the jigsaw was US technology giant Apple's decision to consolidate its London headquarters into the station, a game-changing decision that enabled the developers to reshape the plans in favour of creating a large business district.

Simon Murphy, chief executive at Battersea Power Station Development Company, puts the eventual realisation of the development down to a "lot of hard work, determination, and the continued commitment of the Malaysian Shareholders over the past ten years to bring Battersea Power Station back to its former glory".

He describes opening the power station to the public as a "monumental moment for the project".

Nick Symons, a leading retail and leisure agent who co-founded MMX Retail, has never advised the owners but has been a local resident for the past 30 years. He points out that one of the other critical factors was the US Embassy’s decision to move to Nine Elms from Grosvenor Square.

He feels a close connection to the Power Station. "As a local resident for three decades I have seen it and gone past it most days. I just love the fact it did not get demolished to become a modern office or residential block fronting the river. To me it is the best modern example in the UK of a brownfield regeneration project because it retained the original building. The physical blend between the old and the new, what they have created and the mix is incredible. The gestation period of the power station is dramatically longer than even Westfield London for instance. But that was a fairly straightforward brownfield site to a degree.

"Here they have had to remain honest to the existing fabric and retain it which is why it is such a great development. The visibility is still good from the riverfront and north bank too and the land has been used and kept active pretty well throughout. This Friday is going to be quite a statement for south west London and I am excited to see the next chapters in this regeneration project "

Natalie Lintott, a partner at Cushman & Wakefield, who has advised on leasing the retail and leisure since 2013, says the site and the retail has been prepared spectacularly for the opening.

"What we hoped to achieve and what we really wanted to create was a mix of price points. Some are mainstream high street retailers and some are a bit more premium, so there is really something for everyone. It is such an iconic building and we all felt it was appropriate to create something for everyone.

"Our game changers were Apple taking the offices just after Brexit – that was huge – and obviously the tube. Those two pieces of the jigsaw were vital. We saw the power station as the anchor rather than a department store and we wanted to create an exciting mix.

"Circus West opened in 2017 and that was our artisan village and was created for the local community. The second phase was the well-known brands and the third phase at Electric Boulevard, we wanted to create the ability to have the big 40,000 square foot Zaras, the high street retailers. We think a lot of people will want to come just to see the building. Phase one has been really successful, partly because of that, even during the pandemic. The work to restore the building was so important."

If the response has been typically positive, there are criticisms of the Power Station's lack of affordable housing at around 9%, with Wandsworth council's new Labour administration boycotting the opening for this reason, citing a report that there are more than 3,500 families in the borough that are statutorily homeless.

The council said in a statement: "There are currently numerous live planning applications from Battersea Power Station that are still to be determined so it wouldn’t be right to accept this hospitality. In Wandsworth, the council is focused on building 1,000 new council homes for local people and their families.”

Others think there are future problems baked in. One senior real estate adviser said. "I am very positive about what they have done but there is some nervousness. If you look at the retail element it is very high end and targeted at the affluent shopper. The first few phases are dominated by a comparison spend rather than a blend of comparison and convenience. There are future phases and I know there is a look at the community in the wider piece but the power station is going to be slightly exclusive. That part of London is very diverse culturally and socially so they must be careful it embodies the area. They describe it as a 15-minute city, but from Battersea Power Station there are some pretty deprived parts of South West London within 15 minutes."

As always with a major development there is concern also about where the spend is going to come from and the locations it will leave behind.

The power station is likely to provide a more convenient choice for some locals who would otherwise have headed to Westfield London, Wandsworth, Putney and Clapham High Street.

"There is a ripple effect and that will take a couple of years to really understand," one senior real estate professional pointed out. "My other concern is can the local schools accommodate the new families, can the NHS deal with it? Can the roads that are massively over capacity already cope with it? Another big thing is with the retailers and the occupiers that go in – where are the staff going to come from? There is a massive issue on staffing around London."

Such gripes are for future observers to follow. From today, a five-day "free" party begins to celebrate the public opening of a development that can with some justification claim to be one of the UK's most inspiring. Headlining the festival is Arcadia’s Lords of Lightning, a duelling spectacle involving multimillion volt bolts being fired between the two ‘Lords’, hosted in the six-acre Power Station Park from 7pm. Other highlights will include the official countdown to the Power Station opening its doors, which will take place in Malaysia Square to the south of the Grade II* listed building.

Handily, London's newest neighbourhood takes centre stage just as the capital could do with a reminder of its ability to innovate and prosper.

Sebastien Ricard, director at architect WilkinsonEyre, said: "I’m excited that these incredible volumes – the Turbine Halls and Boiler House – will, for the first time, be open to all. We’ve taken great inspiration from [original architect] Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in everything from the drama and scale right through to individual material choices and I hope this is reflected in the experience of residents and visitors.”

Emily Gee, Historic England regional director, said: “We are delighted that the Grade II* listed Battersea Power Station, one of London’s most recognised and cherished landmarks, is opening its doors to the public. The sheer scale and condition of the Power Station presented major challenges to its repair and reuse. But through years of dedication and partnership working, together we have ensured that the building’s major conservation needs have been met."

Ben Walker, design director at LDA Design, which has worked on the landscaping of the site, said: “London’s most meticulous post - industrial building restoration is complete - what a moment to celebrate. And the restoration is only part of it. For the first time ever, Battersea Power Station is more than a building - it has become a welcoming, well-connected place. Nothing but the building really existed on this 42-acre site before and now it’s a successful new piece of city, with nearly half the site given over to public realm. This extraordinary icon sits in a landscape that enhances views and creates new ones, softens the monumental architecture, makes people feel comfortable and connects the entire estate seamlessly. It’s a remarkable achievement by all involved."