Power and glory: Battersea Power Station in London by WilkinsonEyre

London’s Battersea Power Station is often described in pious platitudes. The familiar silhouette actually comprises two power stations, Battersea A and Battersea B, completed in 1935 and 1955 respectively, creating four chimneys that reached into the sky and bellowed smoke over the city they powered. When the first turbine started to generate power, the Daily Herald described it as a ‘flaming altar of the modern temple of power’ and journalist Felix Barker would go on to compare it to the Cathedral of Saint Cecilia of Albi in France. Even its motives were holy, representing the beginning of the nationalisation of electricity generation and supply, away from the network of small private power stations and the chaotic competition between them. Giles Gilbert Scott, of the gothic revival Gilbert Scott dynasty, is the architect most often associated with Battersea, but he was only brought in at the later stages of the project, as wealthy Londoners complained that a power station might taint their skyline. He addressed concerns with a brick-gothic style facade, continuing the then tradition that public infrastructure should be solid and elegant – but obscured. 

That Gilbert Scott was selected to placate residents speaks as much to the centrality of energy to modern London as it did to the city’s need for this to be invisible. Gilbert Scott went on to design the red telephone box, the domed top of which is said to have been modelled on John Soane’s mausoleum, once again taking familiar signs and symbols and applying them to something new, so it might seem that they had always been there. 

Battersea became a permanent fixture on London’s skyline, but the UK could not continue to worship at its coal‑fired altar: Battersea A was decommissioned in 1975, and Battersea B in 1983. The country battled with what to do with its post-industrial monuments, as many political powers linked the country’s supposed greatness with the mining and burning of coal. Over the following decades, a series of futures would be imagined for the building, but none would satisfy the site’s many would-be developers or the Conservative Wandsworth Council, long a flagship for Thatcherism. The first proposal was Alton Towers-owner John Broome’s theme park, which would see the site contain 200 rides. Margaret Thatcher declared it a ‘wonderful example of private enterprise and local government working hand in hand for the benefit of Britain’ in 1988. It ultimately did the most damage to the original building. The entire roof of the boiler house was taken off to remove heavy machinery, and on finding extensive sulphur damage to the west wall, this was demolished too, never to be rebuilt as was originally promised. The unexpected complications of the complex industrial behemoth, and a 1990 recession, nearly bankrupted Broome. The monument to nationalised utilities cost this Thatcherite much of his wealth, as well as his ambitious dreams of ‘The Battersea’ theme park. 

‘The nostalgia for industrial Britain that Battersea articulates so clearly reveals the murkier imperial link that some hold on to between coal and “great” Britain’

Today, awaiting the reopening of the final stage of WilkinsonEyre’s redevelopment as a mixed-use funfair of retail, residential, leisure and office space, energy is at the forefront of our minds. The modern project was to conceal the relentless extraction and depletion of resources that kept society moving. As conflict closes pipelines and energy crises threaten society’s everyday functioning, the influence of hydrocarbons on our lives has never been so visible. 

In the decades of ruination since the last turbine was decommissioned in 1978, Battersea was excommunicated from its ecclesiastical beginnings – if the Battersea of the mid-20th century was a monument to the heat and light it threw out over the city around it, then to post-industrial Britain it was surely a decaying memorial to the failings of property speculation, free-market economics and the unelected wealthy developers that control our cities. Power, property and politics flow freely around the turbine hall of Battersea Power Station, but the view most will know of it, with no reason to see the forsaken site close up, is from the train, approaching Grosvenor Bridge before arriving at Victoria station – signalling your arrival in the big smoke. In the meantime, the familiar silhouette has become a cultural icon, immortalised with a flying pig between its chimneys on Pink Floyd’s album Animals (1977), reimagined as the Ark of the Arts in Children of Men (2006), or as a dystopian backdrop to Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). 

After Broome’s plans fell flat, the landmark saw a tumultuous change in ownership and ambition, ranging from a permanent home for the Cirque du Soleil to a UK Neverland theme park, and from waste incinerators to Chelsea’s new football ground. Over the decades, so many looked up at the crumbling smokestacks, and down to the barren land, and dreamt of what it, and the London around it, could be. 

Cedric Price, in all his whimsy, suggested that London just keep of the power station what it needs. His idiosyncratic plan Bat Hat (1990) proposed demolishing all but the four chimneys, propping them up on steel supports, and using the site for housing, joking that the site is frozen in time due to the importance of its silhouette. (The irony would come later, when the chimneys were entirely reconstructed in 2016, removing and reinstating 600 tonnes of concrete for each chimney.) In 2012, Terry Farrell proposed demolishing the side walls, replacing them with colonnades, and opening it up as a public park. The control rooms, which are now private event spaces, would hover inaccessibly above. Compelling plans, but how would it be funded? The proposed Underground link would be scrapped, 100 luxury apartments would slot into the north facade overlooking the Thames, and the residential blocks of Rafael Viñoly’s masterplan (which today crowd around the power station) would be retained, albeit reduced in scale. It was an alluring idea, but even the most romantic among us are not safe from the seduction of property speculation.

In 2013, WilkinsonEyre was appointed by a consortium of Malaysian state-owned companies who had bought the derelict site for £400m in 2012. They have restored the vast turbine halls, which will open to the public as a shopping centre this autumn. The art deco spaces always had an air of luxury, sculpted from Italian marble, bronze and wrought iron. In the new polished concrete floors of the shopping centre, a trim traces where the turbine once sat. Small echoes like this, and the old steel gantry a new elevated walkway hangs from, remind the visitor of its former life, when it might be easy to forget that these were once spaces of labour.

Above this sit Apple’s new 46,000m2 London offices. Steel and glass insertions create a six-storey atrium that floods light into the deep floor plan. Flanking the power station, in Switch House East and Switch House West, and above the Boiler House, are luxury residential units. The Boiler House properties are accessed through a glass lift at the base of one of the chimneys, with views up and out of it. One of the rebuilt chimneys will become a public viewing platform, with a glass lift emerging from it.

Owing to the structure being open to the elements in the decades since the roof and west wall were demolished, much of the brickwork had to be removed to repair the steel, and new brickwork sits in its place. The entire west wall has finally been reconstructed, and new openings made down the length of both the east and west facades. Above this, the new glass volumes step back to preserve the familiar silhouette. Strewn throughout the development, steel industrial ephemera – decontaminated and glistening – is left in entrances, at the bottom of lightwells and in lobbies. These remains may wish to memorialise the past, but they speak to a need to preserve a sanitised version that never actually existed.

Much of UK capitalism was built on coal production – it literally fuelled the empire – and the postwar move to other fuels threatened the foundations of British imperialism that control of resources was tethered to, as the UK had less access to oil. The closure of the mines in the 1980s instilled a deep trade-union culture in UK society and there are many reasons to remember this monumental struggle, and the solidarity that followed, but that is not the only story to be told. Coal mining in the UK was often characterised by appalling working conditions and worker exploitation. The nostalgia for industrial Britain that Battersea, before and after regeneration, articulates so clearly reveals the murkier imperial link that some hold on to between coal and ‘great’ Britain and the memory of struggle that it erases. 

Battersea Power Station walks the same path of working-class appropriation as the railway arch brewery, the warehouse apartment or the multistorey car park bar: spaces of labour and industry transformed for middle-class leisure, devoid of the purpose they were created for. The residential units within Battersea itself, and the surrounding blocks by SimpsonHaugh, dRMM, Foster and Gehry, are testament to this – but the dark irony of it all is that the workers who are needed to sustain middle-and upper-class lives (and once sustained the power station they now live in) will not be able to afford to live there. The extension of the Northern line into Nine Elms and Battersea has redrawn the map of south London for these new Zone 1 stations. The more central Zone 2 areas of Kennington and Stockwell have migrated south on the Underground map, and Battersea north, so they appear level. Real estate speculation reshapes the city and this comes back round to bear on the people who can live there. None of the homes in the power station will be classed as affordable, and just nine per cent across the wider development will be. When I visit on a scorching August morning, after weeks of sun and longer without rain, the rooftop gardens at Battersea are lush and blooming – the only green I had seen in London for weeks. How does a city obsessed with growth continue to expand, when its lowest paid workers are pushed to the edges of a bubble so desperate to burst? 

‘We have seen the past today. We will be back again in two years’ time to see the future,’ said Thatcher in 1988, standing in the derelict power station to reveal Broome’s elaborate plans for The Battersea. It took 34 years to see a future, and it looks remarkably like the past. Battersea has always reflected the society being built around it and its changing fixations. So, what does the Battersea of today say about 2022? Huge expanses of the station’s brick walls have been rebuilt, all four chimneys have been entirely recast, and independent glass and steel structures slotted inside. The building is a fake. Price’s Bat Hat was a joke on the listing system and its unattainable standards of preservation, but the future that was built seems equally farcical. The site held so many beginnings since the power was switched off, but the most promising and the least exploitative visions involved untangling it from the flows of power, capital and politics that tether it to the city. We would sooner see a pig soaring through the simulacrum of its four chimneys.