December 1976. A morose pink pig hovers between the South towers of Battersea Power Station and, breaking away from its strings, floats up from the belching towers into the dark smoky skyline of industrial London, to the consternation of unsuspecting pilots.
This surrealist journey seals the fame of an urban landmark, which had been making regular cinematic appearances since 1936 (including Hitchcock, the Beatles’ ‘Help’ and Monty Python) and was voted second most popular modern building by a score of celebrities in 1939 (in a survey by the Architects Journal). By then, the South London power station was already partially closed. In 1975, the older half of the building, known as the “A” station, which supported the first two towers over sumptuous Art Deco interiors of Italian marble, polished parquet floors and wrought iron staircases, was closed after generating electricity for 42 years. The third and fourth chimneys did not appear until the mid 50’s, when “B” station began operating, boasting the highest thermal efficiency of all power stations and providing one fifth of London’s total electricity supplies. With its exterior brick cladding and the tower-like bases of the four chimneys, it became the largest brick building in Europe but was in fact of steel girder frame construction. Its functional existence expired in 1983, a mere thirty years later. Battersea Power Station, located on the South Eastern edge of Grosvenor railway bridge, was designed by architect Sir
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Giles Gilbert Scott. Fourteen years later, Gilbert Scott was commissioned to design another power station, further down the Thames and halfway between Blackfriars and Southwark bridges. Bankside Power Station (Battersea’s younger sister) was also built in two phases, between 1947 and 1963, and also clad in brick. Its presence on the South bank of the Thames river was altogether more discreet however, with one single chimney at the centre of a calm, assertive, horizontal profile - of more aristocratic elegance, arguably, than its older sister’s silhouette, described once by Cedric Price as that of an upturned table. Bankside Power Station entered our iconic consciousness many years beyond its closure in 1981, when it became reincarnated as Tate Modern in 1999, boldly transformed by Herzog de Meuron Architects into a cathedral of Contemporary Art. It is now a success story of international renown, breathing vibrant confidence into a gigantic regeneration intervention which linked the North and South of the river with Norman Foster's exquisite Millennium footbridge, and opened up a continuous public path stretching West to East from Westminster Bridge all the way through to Tower Bridge.