Power to the people

Long gone is the Thames-side wasteland– a new neighbourhood is thriving and the transformation of its centrepiece, Battersea Power Station, completes in September

- Annunciata Elwes

YOU don’t have to be a fan of Pink Floyd or inflatable livestock to admire Battersea Power Station’s ‘toppled table’ silhouette. (For the uninitiated, a blow-up pig was tethered to it for the 1977 Animals album cover—it escaped and caused havoc with the Heathrow flight path before landing in Kent.) For decades, this dramatically decaying ‘temple of power’ has been surrounded by a vast, fenced-off wasteland, but a £9 billion regeneration has changed its fate; once complete, this buzzing area will provide 4,239 homes.

Built-in two halves from 1929 and designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott of red telephone box and Tate Modern fame, its boiler house (the central part) is so enormous you could fit St Paul’s Cathedral inside. At one time, it produced one-fifth of the capital’s power, responsible for electrifying the BBC Television Centre, Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Carnaby Street and Wimbledon.

We were lucky that, during the Blitz, the Luftwaffe (like our RAF pilots), found the plumes of white vapour from its two 331fttall chimneys too useful as a navigational tool to risk bombing it. Then, in 1955, the icon as we know it was born with the completion of the second half of the ‘table’. However, electrical output waned and both stations ‘A’ and ‘B’ were shut by 1983; thus began decades of conjecture over the Grade II*-listed building’s future.