Very Good Things about London: #2 Battersea Power Station

Roofless.  Listed.  Utterly lovely, and utterly unloved.

I suppose I was always going to love the building (BPS, to those of its friends who like making up acronyms).  The outside was designed by the same Gilbert Scott who did Cambridge's University Library.  The North Wing Floor 3 of which being my second home for my final year (and, quite co-incidentally, where the very fittest girls in Cambridge hang out.  True dat).

There's something reassuring about the weight and scale of the building, compounded by the use of those small, densely packed 30s bricks.  And it's pretty much impossible to photograph if you ever do get into the grounds - it's simply too large.

It seems currently to be held together by an internal scaffold made from the girders which once supported the roof.

I can track my progression through cameras by looking at my huge number of BPS photos. The earliest, from 2003, are wet-film, using a Canon 300V SLR.  Then, a series of experiments with early Olympus digital cameras (one or two of which were excellent, but laughably boxy, ugly and battery-thirsty by today's standards).  For some reason, although everyone tells me that Nikons are better, I have stuck with Canon, and now lug around the heavy and simply great 40D.

BPS is partly famous for its Art Deco control room.  I suspect that this come in part from the mystery that surrounds it: given the building is no-that-far from falling down, few people are allowed inside the building and into the control room.  I, clearly, am special.

There are, consistently, plans afoot to regenerate the place.  One - which thankfully has gone away - would've seen BPS dwarfed by an incongruously massive glass ecotower thingy (more evidence of my fetish for models of London).

Most recently, a consultation doc popped through my door, seeking locals' views about getting the Charing Cross branch of the Northern Line to perform a handbrake turn at Kennington, and spin off westwards to Nine Elms and then BPS itself (details here, in case you were wondering).  This would, excellently, make the Charing Cross branch less rubbish (other option: rebuild / destroy Tottenham Court Road station)

As a side thought, I suspect that BPS might've been quite horrid when it was a working coal-fired power station.   But, it's now half derelict, like a tragic hero improbably and unfairly crippled by the caprice of the guy who owns Alton Towers.