Architecture

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.

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Battersea Power Station

Four white chimneys on one of the largest brick buildings in the world, dark for forty years.

IndustrialArt DecoYou can go insideFree

Photo by Aurelien Guichard from London, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two power stations, built to look like one. The A station went up between 1929 and 1935 and the B station beside it, to almost the same design, was finished in 1955, which is how the four chimneys arrived. Leonard Pearce engineered it; the architects were J. Theo Halliday and Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also doing Bankside and the red telephone box, and who was brought in to make an enormous industrial shed acceptable to look at. It worked: a 1939 poll of the Architectural Review's panel put it second among modern buildings, and people called it a temple of power. Halliday's A station control room is Art Deco down to the dials. It stopped generating in 1983, stood empty for thirty-one years, and reopened in 2022.

Where
Circus Road West, SW11 8AT
Nearest station
Battersea Power Station · 3 min walk

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