An iconic building that featured on a Pink Floyd album once supplied much of London's power, but now offers only nostalgia as it awaits its new future, writes Brian Dillon
Battersea Power Station stands on the south bank of the River Thames, at the western extremity of inner London: a building as unmistakeable as it is also ill-starred. Its vast heft of brick and four tapered chimneys are so iconic that I cannot quite believe, on a grey morning, en route to view the interior for the first time, that I have managed to lose sight of them. Then, hopelessly lost in a maze of low-rise council housing, I turn a corner to discover the stranded behemoth starkly framed but maddeningly out of reach. As the station looms at odd angles to my line of approach, I have time to wonder how it became so contested, fragile and melancholy. Since its closure nearly a quarter of a century ago, this industrial relic of futures past has supplied the city with an alternating current of nostalgia and regret. Battersea Power Station is England's Parthenon.
The station, first proposed by the London Power Company in the 1920s, was always controversial. A heated correspondence started in the Times, as a certain stratum of Londoners feared the effects of a coal-fired facility so close to the Tate Gallery, Chelsea Gardens and Westminster Abbey. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury intervened, complaining to the Royal Institute of British Architects that he "could hardly find any adequate adjective to describe it".
It must have seemed a fantastic intruder on the waterfront, but it was not alone: Battersea was to be the largest in a chain of power stations along the river. Finished in 1933, the "A station" sported only two chimneys; the second pair belongs to the "B station", completed during the second World War.
Their lifetimes slightly extended by the 1970s oil crisis, the former was shut down in 1975, the latter in 1983; they have stood vacant ever since.
The building was designed by J Theo Halliday, but his name has been almost erased by that of Giles Gilbert Scott, the consulting architect responsible for the structure's signature elevations: the facades of fluted brickwork that support the cream-coloured concrete chimneys.
SCOTT (ARCHITECT OF Liverpool's Anglican cathedral and designer of the first red telephone boxes) suspended his elegant temple of power around a framework of steel, much of which is now visible. Long ago stripped of their equipment and flooring, the massive boiler and turbine halls are monstrous skeletons, but there are still signs of an astonishing attention to the aesthetics of this most functional of sites. In the turbine hall, my guide points to what seem like acres of exquisite white tiles, squared classical columns and a pair of dainty balconies a hundred feet above us, from which the station's controllers could invigilate the unruly forces at work below.
My tour takes me underneath one of the soaring chimneys. Here, in the "wash tower", the flue gases from the boiler hall were passed through a lattice of teak railway sleepers that was sluiced incessantly by an alkaline solution. All that is left is the supporting metalwork, visibly corroded by the product of this cleansing: sulphuric acid.
Then, via a vestibule lined with marble, we ascend to the control room of the A station. This is what I have been waiting to see: the silent, stilled mind of the deceased station. It is elaborately appointed: dusty cardboard hides a pristine parquet floor; large bay windows look out onto the upper reaches of the turbine hall. The room is dominated by a wall of switches and dials from the 1930s. A pair of walnut-veneered, glass-topped consoles stands sentinel in front of it, as if someone still expects a message from the depths of the station.
I am led through this Marie Celeste of the electric age by Ian Rumgay, a representative of Parkview International, the Hong Kong-based developers who own the site and plan to transform it in the coming years. Before we leave the control room, he remarks that the computing power housed in its serried instruments could nowadays easily be contained in a laptop. In a conference room back at the Parkview offices, I watch him conjure a computer simulation of the future of the station. Parkview plans to turn the building into an enormous retail, leisure and exhibition centre (to rival Tate Modern, along the river to the east: originally another of Scott's power stations). The area around the station proper, from which ancillary buildings and vast coal stores have long since been cleared away, will be filled with two hotels, an auditorium, offices and apartments. Battersea will be abuzz with new energies, magnetically drawing the interest of Londoners and tourists along the river to the west.
BUT THE HISTORY of efforts to find a use for Battersea Power Station is a dismal one, and others are unconvinced by this latest futuristic masterplan.
A local community group has for more than 20 years been campaigning to have the station not only preserved but remade as a resource for the people of Battersea. (The area immediately surrounding the station is one of the poorest in the borough of Wandsworth.) I meet two of the group's members, Brian Barnes and Keith Garner, nearby, and they recount, among other sorry stories, how the first developer to take an interest in the building sold off most of its fittings for scrap and knocked out much of the west wall. Their chief concern now is with the current owners' plan to demolish the four chimneys- the reinforcement has corroded, they say, and the concrete begun to decay - and replace them with replicas.
Each chimney weighs 500 tonnes, rises to a height of 337 feet, and is wide enough, so an enthusiastic engineering magazine of the 1930s reported, to house a tube station inside. The fourth was added in the 1950s; a local myth claimed it was a dummy. Structurally, the chimneys are unique: the concrete surrounds a dense double helix of steel mesh.
THE BATTERSEA POWER Station Community Group claims they can be repaired, and the architectural charity, The Twentieth Century Society, while admitting that redevelopment is the only realistic option - "if nothing happens then we might lose it altogether", says Cordula Zeidler, the caseworker assigned to the station - recommends at least that an effort be made to save these industrial monuments. In a way, the station has always been in the process of being rebuilt, has never really been finished: which is why it makes such a resonant ruin, an architectural spectre let loose from history. But it cannot survive forever as a fragile artefact of industrial archaeology.
In the opening scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage, the lights of London suddenly go out when the subversive Verloc succeeds in stalling the power station at Battersea. For a second, we see the gleaming turbine hall, before it grinds to a halt. The station has long been bound up with the image of London overtaken by disaster. (Miraculously, however, the one bomb that hit it in the Blitz failed to explode.) Whatever its future, in its ruined condition it is still a daily reminder of how the most momentous technological dreams eventually spin down, a hint of the slow time of decay at the heart of the city. As my train out of London pulls away from Victoria station and crosses the river, at least half the commuters in my carriage turn to gaze at the four pale chimneys before they are swallowed in the dusk.
Generation game: Battersea
• The station is situated on a 38-acre site. The building itself is large enough that St Paul's Cathedral could fit inside without touching the walls.
• It is a Grade II listed building, and is on the World Monument Fund's list of 50 most endangered monuments.
• At the height of its capacity, it supplied one fifth of London's energy.
• The original cranes, which delivered 1 million tons of coal a year to the furnaces, are still in place on the riverfront.
• The station is home to the only known nesting pair of peregrine falcons in London, and to an array of other fauna, including bats, kestrels and black redstarts.
• The power station is famously pictured on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1977 album, Animals (above). It has also appeared in numerous films, including Richard III and Superman III.
• The redevelopment will cost £1.1billion (€1.45bn); the Irish property company Ballymore has recently bought a stake in the project for £400 million (€581m).