The fuzzy picture around funding for the mooted Northern line extension to Battersea has sharpened a little as the Mayor, TfL and Wandsworth and Lambeth councils revealed their intentions. They're proposing to whip up £850 million by selling council bonds: the scheme, known as tax increment financing, is popular in the USA, and the investment is paid back via increased business rates post-completion. They'd require Downing Street's rubber stamp to proceed.
Yet the (white) elephant in the crowded tube carriage here is REO, one of the owners of Battersea Power Station, who have bleated repeatedly about the necessity of a Tube link to lend their ever-troubled redevelopment another tint of legitimacy. Their website features a map of the Northern line with two stations added, one at Nine Elms (convenient for workers at the new US embassy) and a new terminus at Battersea
What's not particularly abundant on either the website nor the recent public presentation is the issue of money. In the past REO have spoken of stumping up the reddies themselves, but such talk seems to have dried up as the likelihood of the Power Station project actually happening diminished. Hence these inchoate moves towards TIF.
Any new extension wouldn't be up and running before 2015, and there are a whole herd of loopholes to jump and potholes to leap before then. But it could be a viable way of extending the network's entrails into deepest Battersea, and if completed with the proposed Northern line split, may help park that old "Misery line" monicker on the sidings for good.