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The money shot for the redevelopment of London’s Olympia exhibition centre is a bank of staircases and escalators soaring upwards, Aztec temple-style, to an elevated concourse sandwiched between the colossal barrel vaults of the original exhibition halls. In a modern homage to its historic predecessors, the concourse is also crowned by a glass vault, crimped like a fan, its origami pleats connoting sparkling, flashy newness, a tiara of cubic zirconia among the heritage diamonds.

Looming behind the tiara is what appears to be a cluster of cylindrical towers, but are actually the rounded ends of a steroidal stepped office block, with master-of-the-universe views over London, from Wembley to Crystal Palace. Already ensconced and enjoying those views are the staff of the Premier League’s media production arm, which has a brand-appropriate mini football pitch on its expansive terrace.

Effortlessly accommodating spectacles as disparate as Miss World and the Chemical Brothers, Olympia has long oiled the wheels of commerce and culture. The Grand Hall, a humongous iron and glass confection embodying the puissance of Victorian engineering, has seen it all, from cat fancies and dog shows, to concerts, sporting events, military tournaments and a plethora of trade fairs promoting everything from cars to chocolate.

The jewel in Olympia’s trade fair crown was (and still is) the Ideal Home Show, founded in 1908 by the Daily Mail, with mocked-up houses filled with the latest domestic appliances. But nothing could compete with the “illuminated aquatic festivities” of Imre Kiralfy, the legendary 19th-century Hungarian impresario, who flooded the Grand Hall to choreograph a tribute to Venice “bride of the sea”, featuring a flotilla of barges and gondolas.

Following in the tradition of monumental exhibition halls popularised by the 1851 Great Exhibition, Olympia evolwved into a kind of architectural nougat containing an assortment of chunks from different eras. The Grand Hall, England’s largest enclosed space at the time of its construction in 1885, and the neighbouring Pillar Hall, where Vivienne Westwood held her first catwalk show, were both designed by Henry Coe, a pupil of George Gilbert Scott, the prolific gothic revivalist. The National Hall, a more modest version of the barrel-vaulted Grand, was completed in 1923, while in 1929, Joseph Emberton, one Britain’s leading interwar architects, was commissioned to design the Empire Hall (now Olympia Central), its jazz moderne facade cranking along Hammersmith Road like something out of an episode of Poirot.

Anchored by history and the drama of its architecture, Olympia reigned supreme for most of the 20th century. But ultimately, it began losing out to newer upstarts, notably the logistically hyper-efficient but drearily soulless Excel centre over in Docklands. Acquired by real estate firm Yoo Capital in 2017, Olympia has been expensively rebooted and expanded, a strategy that involves stripping away grungy accretions, buffing up the core historic structures and then going gangbusters on shiny new implants. Costing £1.3 billion, the nearly decade-long remodelling is the work of Heatherwick Studio and fellow architects SPPARC.

Crammed into a triangular tract of land between Hammersmith and Holland Park, Olympia covers around the same area as neighbouring Westfield. But if you weren’t a visitor or exhibitor, it used to be entirely insular, a kind of city state, like a west London Vatican or Monaco. “When we first visited in 2017, it was a kilometre of perimeter and if you didn’t have a ticket, that was it,” says Heatherwick Studio’s Eliot Postma. “And so all of our early discussions were around how do we create public realm where there is none?”

Conceptually, there’s a whiff of Battersea power station in the concerted attempt to transform an unfashionable west London milieu into a “destination”. No one ever said “Let’s go for a drink at Olympia”, but scenesters can now take their pick from an array of F&B outlets (developer speak for food and beverage). These line the elevated concourse underneath the crinkly glass tiara. “Will it be enough to entice the Chelsea set?” mused society magazine Tatler.

As it turns out, the tiara is just the glittering cherry on a very chunky developmental cake, which crams in over half a million sq feet of office space, 30 restaurants and bars, two hotels, a conference centre, gym, a 3,800-capacity music and events venue, and London’s largest purpose-built theatre in 50 years after the National on South Bank. There’s even a new secondary school, Wetherby Pembridge, which opened last September, occupying the refurbished shell of a multi-storey car park originally designed by Joseph Emberton in 1937. It all amps up Olympia’s reframed appeal as a city within a city, no longer just for lanyard wearers.

Emberton has achieved a kind of immortality in the form of Emberton Walk, a high-level thoroughfare encompassing the elevated concourse and an indoor street that extends under the office block and links through to another set of Aztec-scale escalators and stairs on Hammersmith Road. “It’s a new public street,” says Postma, “sitting on the shoulders of these Victorian buildings, literally building on what the Victorians did, with the same level of ambition.”

Conceived as an open public route (time will tell just how open), Emberton Walk threads up and through the site, providing access to the offices, performance space, shops, restaurants and theatre. Yoo’s website shows an achingly stylish throng of office-workers, theatregoers, shoppers, revellers and flaneurs enjoying the assorted amenities, bathed in the rosy glow of perpetual early June. But in the meantime, while things get going – the theatre is due to open next year – the indoor street is a slightly lifeless tunnel, animated by a migraine-inducing digital ceiling, its screen pulsating like a supersize lava lamp.

The new additions bear the imprimatur of Thomas Heatherwick, designer of London’s infamously aborted Garden Bridge and Google’s nearly completed UK mega-HQ at King’s Cross. Heatherwick has a well-documented aversion to “boring” architecture, as outlined in his Humanise manifesto published in 2023. The result is a tendency to Tolkien-ise everything he touches. Most of his buildings would be at home in Middle-earth.

At Olympia, pleated motifs predominate: roofs zig and walls zag, balustrades are like concertinas, even door handles are crinkle-cut. This is ostensibly inspired by the glass gable end walls of the Grand Hall, which are vertically faceted to optimise structural stability. In the quest not to be boring, it’s all a bit hectic and jazz hands, but the muscular historicism of Coe and Emberton acts as a tranquillising foil.

Given the scale and challenges of the programme – Olympia had to remain open during construction – some changes can be transformational. A new logistics centre simplifies and streamlines operations, taking the churn of lorries and kit off the street. Olympia Way, effectively the site’s main frontage, has been reconfigured as a landscaped boulevard, revealing Coe’s Italianate facades in all their Victorian glory, complete with a restored sculptural tableau featuring Greek agricultural deities (the Grand Hall was intended to trump Islington’s Royal Agricultural Hall).

Statues of Demeter and Persephone gaze out on a very different London from 1885, but as the beau monde clink glasses under Heatherwick’s tiara, the newly engorged Olympia is still synonymous with spectacle. So in some ways, nothing has changed.