Battersea Power Station was once hailed as a temple of power rivalling St Paul's
Four towering chimneys on the Thames, a brick shell among the largest anywhere, and a control room dressed in Art Deco marble: Battersea was built to generate coal-fired electricity but was admired like a cathedral. After decades of standing derelict, it reopened to the public in October 2022 as shops, homes and offices.
In 1925 Parliament wanted Britain's patchwork of small power companies, each with its own voltages and frequencies, replaced by a unified grid. Private firms responded by forming the London Power Company, which proposed Battersea in 1927 as its first super station. The riverside plot offered cooling water and coal deliveries right in the heart of the city. Locals feared an eyesore and pollution, even worrying about paintings in the nearby Tate Gallery, so the company hired Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of the red telephone box, to shape the exterior, and permission required emissions to be treated to stay clean and smokeless.
The first half, the A station, began in March 1929, generated power from 1933 and was finished in 1935 at a cost of £2,141,550. Its biggest turbine, rated at 105 MW, was the largest in Europe, and architect J. Theo Halliday lined the interior with Italian marble, parquet and wrought iron. War halted the mirror-image B station, which came online gradually between 1953 and 1955 with plainer stainless steel fittings but boilers larger than any yet built in Britain. Together they supplied a fifth of London's electricity, and a 1939 survey ranked the building second among celebrities' favourite modern structures.
Its chimneys, each 103 metres tall, became famous worldwide when Pink Floyd put the building on the cover of Animals in 1977. A fire on 20 April 1964 blacked out much of London and delayed the launch of BBC2 until the next morning.
The A station closed in 1975. The whole building was listed at Grade II in 1980, three years before the B station shut, and was upgraded to Grade II* in 2007, the empty shell decayed as one redevelopment plan after another collapsed under debt. In 2012 Malaysian developers S P Setia and Sime Darby took on the site, and Apple is among the office tenants.
Source: Battersea Power Station
