Everything about Battersea Power Station is on an astonishing scale. This iconic London building, begun in 1929, is still the largest brick-built structure in Europe. You could fit St Paul’s Cathedral inside the central boiler house structure. Its exterior is clad in six million bricks to a decorative design by celebrated architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (the man behind the red London telephone box), and the original Art Deco interiors were sumptuously decorated with Italian marble-lined walls, parquet floors, and doors sculpted from bronze.
Yet despite the lavish details, it was very much a working power station. At its peak it produced one fifth of all London’s electricity, and continued to generate power until 1983.
Thereafter, a series of developers attempted to reinvent the
