Battersea Power Station

Where it sits. Battersea Power Station stands on the south bank of the Thames at Nine Elms, in the London Borough of Wandsworth, between Chelsea Bridge and Vauxhall. Its four white chimneys are among the most recognisable objects on the London skyline, and the building is one of the largest brick structures in the world. Since 2021 it has had its own Underground station on the Northern line extension, a two-minute walk from the turbine halls; Battersea Park and Queenstown Road overground stations are also close, and a river bus pier serves the development directly.

How it was built. The station was commissioned by the London Power Company, formed by private electricity suppliers in response to Parliament's 1925 decision to unify the grid under public ownership with common standards. Rather than many small stations, the company proposed a few very large ones; Battersea was the first, planned in 1927 for an eventual 400 megawatts on a 15-acre site that had held reservoirs of the Southwark and Vauxhall Waterworks Company. The site was chosen for river cooling water, coal delivery by ship, and proximity to the load it served. Leonard Pearce, the company's engineer in chief, led the design with CS Allott & Son; the architects were J. Theo Halliday and Giles Gilbert Scott, brought in to make an industrial building the public could accept. Battersea A was built between 1929 and 1935 and Battersea B, to its east, from 1937, with work paused by the war and the structure finally completed in 1955. B copied A almost exactly, which is what produced the symmetrical four-chimney silhouette. Coal arrived at the jetty, where two cranes could unload two ships at once at 480 tonnes an hour, feeding a conveyor system and a concrete store holding 75,000 tonnes.

Decline and return. Battersea A was decommissioned in 1975 and B in 1983. The whole structure was listed Grade II in 1980 and upgraded to Grade II* in 2007. It then stood empty until 2014, roofless for much of that time, with a succession of failed redevelopment schemes — a theme park, a football stadium — leaving it a picturesque ruin visible from every train into Victoria. In 2012 administrators agreed a deal with the Malaysian developers S P Setia and Sime Darby, and the restored power station building opened to the public in October 2022 as part of a 42-acre mixed-use development with shops, restaurants, offices (Apple among the tenants) and flats. The Art Deco Control Room A has been restored and now operates as a private event space; the chimneys were dismantled and rebuilt to the original specification, and one now houses a glass lift that carries visitors 109 metres up for a rooftop view.

On screen. The building has been a location and an image since before the war. Alfred Hitchcock filmed it for Sabotage (1936), when only the A station existed. The Control Room of Station A provided the backdrop for a scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and the same space — now restored as Control Room A — was later used as a location for The King's Speech. Ian McKellen's fascist-Britain adaptation of Richard III (1995) staged its final battle here. In Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) the station serves as the "Ark of the Arts", a government art bunker holding Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica and Banksy's Kissing Coppers; Cuarón floated a pig balloon past the chimneys as a deliberate homage to Pink Floyd, and the conversion of a power station into an art store was itself a nod to Tate Modern, Scott's other Thames-side station. Christopher Nolan shot at Battersea for The Dark Knight (2008) in mid-October 2007 — the interiors and exteriors of Rachel Dawes held hostage among barrels of gasoline. Because the building was listed, the production built a false wall in front of it and lined that with the explosives; local residents rang the emergency services believing the blast was a terrorist attack.

The Pink Floyd connection. The station's most famous image is not from a film at all. In December 1976 a 12-metre inflatable pig was flown between the southern chimneys for the cover shoot of Pink Floyd's Animals; it broke free on the second day and drifted into Heathrow's flight paths before coming down in Kent. The cover was ultimately a composite, but the pig has become permanently attached to the building in popular memory — which is exactly why Cuarón put one in Children of Men thirty years later.

Getting there and timing. Battersea Power Station station on the Northern line puts you at the door; the walk from Chelsea Bridge along the river is the better approach, because it reveals the mass of the building gradually. Entry to the turbine halls and the shops is free; the Lift 109 chimney ride is ticketed and timed, and clear days are worth waiting for. The interiors are fully step-free with lifts throughout. Turbine Hall A retains its 1930s Art Deco finishes in Italian marble and polished parquet, while Turbine Hall B is austere 1950s steel and concrete — the two halls read as different decades of British confidence, and walking from one to the other in five minutes is the single best thing the restoration achieved.