I’ve been following and photographing this icon of London architecture for many years now but couldn’t resist another shot of it as I recently visited the capital for another concert. This time the band were Pulp, but I met some friends a few days in advance for a chilled out break with just one thing firmly on the itinerary: Cocktails in Battersea Power Station’s new Control Room B bar…
This is the first time I’ve actually been inside the newly reopened complex and it’s been done pretty well, from leaving swathes of the old fabric exposed inside – including plastering, tiles and stairs on the huge glazed end walls, to restoring the design finishes of the 1930s Art-Deco A station and the more austere 1950s modernist B station. There is a lot you can’t see – office and residential space makes up a sizeable proportion of the complex now – but the lower turbine halls are now shopping arcades open to the public. As is that bar…
As a concept it really has been done well, with the half moon arrangement of aluminium gauges, dials and switchgear curving around the back of a circular cocktail bar. We sat at a high table by the balcony overlooking the atrium below and enjoyed – in my case at least – an ‘Acid Wash’ and a ‘Battery Licker’ from a menu of cocktails that had been created specifically for the setting.
I’d photographed it at night before, most recently last May, and this time my intention was to capture it as the setting sun cast its orange glow over the brickwork. The sun had other plans that day though, having found a thick bank of cloud to sink behind half an hour before it was due to set, and so we wandered to another pub and waited for the blue hour – which is what you can see here, and which I’m really pleased with.
One thing that strikes me every time is that there were two Stothert & Pitt coal cranes on the riverside while the site was derelict, and which were removed to Tilbury for specialist restoration at the start of the project in 2014. Others have noticed the absence as well and it turns out that while they are indeed at Tilbury, no restoration work has yet taken place on them. Mysteriously, the web page that I found last year documenting the plans for them has vanished…
It’s still my favourite view of London, statement architecture of the kind that just isn’t attempted these days, and it looks fabulous. But those cranes really finished the view off, linking it back to the Thames and contextualising it as an industrial icon, a cathedral of power. They form part of the site’s official Grade II* listing and they need returning. But mystery surrounds them, and nobody is rushing to confirm when – or if – they will return…
Further pictures and musings can be found in my previous articles London Electricity and Repurposing London’s Industrial Heritage.