Inside Battersea Power Station, again
Again? Yes, I was inside Battersea Power Station in 2010 for an art exhibition. Obviously I didn’t care about the art – I was all about the abandoned architecture. And now I’ve been in again, just after its recent grand opening. The iconic brick building has changed somewhat. For a start, it has a new tube station – the awkwardly named Battersea Power Station Station. Moreover, there are thousands of luxury flats (designed by Gehry and Foster, natch) surrounding the building, so much so that you can barely see it from some angles – you may just catch a glimpse of one of its famous chimneys.
Once inside, it feels (one of my boon companions said to me) like being in a duty-free shopping centre at an airport – soulless, airless and full of vacuous luxury brand outlets (with a Uniqlo for us plebs and actually a nice bookshop, restaurants, cinema, offices, more flats…). With flats costing up to £8m and shops including Cartier and Rolex, it has been called a rich person’s theme park, and as the Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright wrote, ‘every square inch [has been] monotised’, a depressing trend happening with all regeneration projects – see Coals Drop Yard at King’s Cross. They want you to have fun, as long as you pay for it. Heavily-leaden with CCTV and security guards, these areas might give the impression of being public spaces but they aren’t; they’re privately owned and guarded.
Anyway, despite such misgivings, it’s hard not to be impressed by the scope of the project, yet for me it’s actually all in the details. It’s wonderful how many of the art deco flourishes have been kept or faithfully reproduced; both Control Rooms, A & B (looking a bit like the ones in the Chornobyl reactor) have been restored, along with the herringbone parquet floor, ceramic tiles, steel girders, a rusty crane and many other touches.
I was really only interested in getting to Control Room B (pictured bottom), but it’s now behind a bar, which had a long queue to get in. A waitress must have felt sorry for us, and ushered us in a side entrance, avoiding the queue and bar altogether so we could get straight to the control room, and incur the glares of everyone in the queue (we could have just nipped to the bar after the seeing the control room, but didn’t).