After decades of disuse and wild plans for its redevelopment, Wilkinson Eyre’s restrained conversion of this huge London landmark embraces the bravura of the original design, while the new flats are not so successful
The first thing that hits you is the scale. Have so many bricks ever been piled up like this anywhere else? It’s a cliff, a behemoth, a Babylonian monolith. Up close, you keep recalibrating your sense of proportion, like a confused camera lens, not quite believing what you see. Crowded though it is by high, dense, profit-seeking apartment blocks, they can’t shrink Battersea power station.
The next thing you might notice is the bravura of its original architects, Giles Gilbert Scott and J Theo Halliday: the four pale chimney columns that carried nothing but plumes of smoke; the muscular hunching of its masonry; the insistent flutings and striations of its art deco, faintly Maya, ornament. There’s a play of rough and refined that continues inside, into its two old turbine halls, where pillars clad in handmade faience carry girders of much-riveted steel. There are two glorious control rooms – the 1930s version (Control Room A, a private events space) contains batteries of dials and knobs with a crystalline glazed ceiling worthy of an ocean liner’s ballroom; the 1950s Control Room B – a bar – offered a more futuristic proto-Tardis.
