Battersea

Coming across the Grosvenor Bridge yesterday, I saw two men in a gantry on the flanks of the luckless Battersea Power Station. The promised investment projects in the area show the body of the building restored, hooked up to a glittering retail centre like a patient on a life support machine. As it is, however, the building still remains, with a wall and roof missing, and the rest in a poor state of disrepair. It sits on the south bank of the river like a the remains of the turkey on Boxing Day.
The rest of Battersea visible from the train station is in harmony with the general air of having been forgotten. A huge factory building on Lombard Road has been converted to a branch of 'safestore - self storage', with large signs explaining to businesses and individuals how easy and convenient it is to bring their possessions to Battersea, lock them up in a dry, safe space, and then forget them.
Another warehouse of the forgotten, Battersea Cats and Dogs Home, spreads out its neat concrete pens under the eyes of the commuters - empty when I passed, jammed in under two diverging sets of railway tracks.
The tracks are a defining feature of Battersea: tributaries from all of South London and beyond into Victoria. The station itself, Battersea Park, is a Victorian infant of a railway station, jammed in between such a weight of lines, and neglected by the majority of trains that pass through, it wanted to grow up as grand and well turned-out as other railway stations, but it is thin and sickly and in need of investment: a few thin platforms and rickety staircases barely large enough for two people abreast.
Knots and tangles of railway lines around South London are the more or less direct result of the report of the Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, which in its 1846 report laid down a golden line surrounding London beyond which no overland railways should penetrate. Hence our current pattern of major termini surrounding the whole city, and only underground railways in the centre. The logical pay-off of preserving the centre as railway free is the creation of areas such as Battersea, where huge amounts of the business of rails and signals and steelwork and sidings need to congregate: the landscape of 'utility', of which the power station itself is a part.
I have been quizzing my architecturally clued-up friends as to whether any other power stations in the world were built, as Battersea was, by one of the leading architects of the day. Preliminary results seem to suggest that there were not many: In the UK they are put out of sight, and so design by Foster and associates would be wasted on an audience of sheep and/or seabirds. The remaining nuclear power stations in the UK are Dungeness A and B, Hartlepool, Heysham, Hinkley Point, Hunterston, Oldbury, Sizewell, Torness, and Wylfa. How many of these places had you heard of? Battersea Power Station is a relic of a time before the need to forget where our energy came from overwhelmed us.