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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
A 136-foot glass cylinder built to hold hot water piped under the Thames from Battersea Power Station.
TowersIndustrialModern movementFree
Churchill Gardens had the first district heating system in Britain, and it was heated by somebody else's waste: hot water came across from Battersea Power Station through an existing tunnel under the river, and this is where it was kept. Powell and Moya built the tower between 1947 and 1950 for Westminster City Council, with Kennedy and Donkin as engineers.
It is 136 feet high and stands on a plinth of rough granite setts: site-welded steel plates, insulated, inside an independent welded steel frame glazed from top to bottom with rough-cast panels in anodised aluminium, eighteen tiers of them. They could have clad it. Historic England's phrase is that the tower was designed as an architectural form, its round translucent shape set deliberately against the rectilinear solid blocks of flats around it, and Ian Nairn thought the machines and the fine-drawn glass and steel cage around them a perfect match.
It won a Festival of Britain Merit Award in 1951, together with the four blocks it stands among.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.