Battersea Power Station – open for visitors

Every morning, at around 9:20AM, and then at some time in the early evening, I stare out of my train window at the great Battersea Power Station, which lies right next to the train line on the route into Victoria Station. It’s one of the few highlights of my short commute, second only to the view out across the river, and is always an impressive site. Impressive but depressing, because the power station, a landmark of London, sits there unused, undeveloped, and slowly falling apart.

If you take a boat trip down the Thames, the guide will probably refer in his commentary to the Battersea Power Station as looking like an ‘upside down table’, an observation which is indeed famous enough to have almost become a nickname for the building. Built between 1929 and 1955 in two stages, the building contained two huge coal fired power stations which generated most of the electricity for the surrounding area.

I learnt this, and more, during my trip to visit the building as ‘part 1′ of China Power Station, an exhibition put on by the Serpentine Gallery. What this boils down to is the opportunity to spend five pounds and get a rare glimpse inside the building and around the site, to look at some artworks by Chinese artists, watch a promotional video by the developers, and have tea in the Serpentine pavilion building from 2002.

At the front of a queue to be let into the building, an official bod explained, somewhat alarmingly, that numbers inside the building had to be restricted in case the floor caved in and caused the chimneys to collapse. Inside, a makeshift viewing platform led you halfway into the cavernous space in the middle of the building, between the two turbine halls. Roofless, the space has been exposed to the elements for a couple of decades, and so with grass growing up through the floor, feels more like an enormous walled neglected garden than the centre of what was once the world’s biggest brick building.

The neglect reflects many years of failed development plans. In 1983, when the generators were finally turned off, a design competition was held for potential future uses of the building, which was now listed, and the surrounding land area. The competition was won by a consortium who proposed the building of a theme park based around the theme of British Industry and Engineering. One member of the group though was John Broome, the then-owner of Alton Towers, who proceeded to take control of the consortium and alter the plans to be more like the American-style theme parks, in line with how Alton Towers was developing. Despite some opposition, planning permission for this was approved by the local council and work began, including the removal of the roof, a supposed temporary measure in order to enable several large fairground rides to be installed. You can get a glimpse of these ambitious plans in the latter half of this Alton Towers promotional video from 1988. As costs escalated though, work halted, and in a last ditch attempt to make money, Broome came back with a plan to build offices, shops and a hotel on the land around the site instead. This too was granted planning permission, but again work failed to happen, and the company eventually went into receivership.

In the 1990s, the site was sold to the current owners, the developer Parkview International. Their main plan is to turn the building into an entertainment complex, with cinemas, shops, swimming pools, and so on, surrounded by new buildings containing hotels, offices and homes. They’ve had several rounds of planning permission granted, including, controversially, permission to demolish the four chimneys and replace them with replicas, on the grounds that they are structurally unsound (claims which are questioned by local support groups).

It’s these plans which were presented in the video on site, and which are currently described on the The Power Station website (as the developer has called the site). I find it difficult to evaluate architectural drawings and models, but it did seem to me that the new buildings proposed to surround the power station would pretty much overshadow the power station (and ruin my views of it from the train). Despite that, I guess it would at least be good for something to happen with the power station, as despite some planning permission having already been granted, building work has not yet been given the go-ahead..

Having watched the video presentation about these plans, I went up inside the building to have a look at the art installations. All from Chinese artists, a huge tank was the first work to greet you, standing menacingly just inside the main entrance. Actually made from painted polystyrene by artist Xu Zhen, the tank fits in perfectly with the building, transforming it into the kind of sinister military factory that you could well imagine it to be. Most of the rest of the art is set up on three levels of long thin rooms inside one of the turbine halls. Dark, dank and somewhat spooky, the rooms seemed to complement the mood of the artworks, mainly video installations. With little in the way of interpretive labeling, I found most of works incomprehensible and alien, overshadowed by uncomfortable and oppressive space. The video that captured me most showed Chinese workers in a factory producing lightbulbs, the conveyer belts and machinery resonating with the context of an old electricity-generating powerhouse. The only other non-video piece was a wall of rotting apples, set up on the third floor, which didn’t capture me much, except to fill the room with a fermenting apple smell.

The curator of China Power Station, Philip Tinari, suggests in the exhibition programme that the key question for an exhibition of Chinese art is in establishing the power relations of a display “tied to the existence and presumed articulating power of a nation-state”. The siting of the exhibition within a power station is perhaps an attempted answer to this. Parallels with the Tate Modern might seem obvious, but the whitewashed walls of the Tate are a world away from this exhibition in the externally similar Battersea power station. Whilst the Tate Modern is one of London’s biggest visitor attraction success stories, I got the feeling that most of the people at Battersea had come to get a glimpse inside the fascinating building, rather than having been drawn there by the art.

Parkview’s plans for the building do include exhibition spaces, but these are alongside cinemas and retail areas to make an ‘entertainment complex’. The latest news on the development though, reported in newspapers earlier this month, and in this Times Online article, seems to suggest that the owners want to put the brakes on the plans for the power station development, and instead press ahead with just the buildings around it. Again this appears to be an attempt to concentrate on just making money from the land value, although the developers are claiming to still have ambitions for the power station itself. Without an understanding of planning law and a detailed look at the case, it’s impossible to know what’s really going on here (the Times article additionally suggests some dodgy relations between the council and the developers), but my bet would be on the place remaining an empty building site for some years yet.

China Power Station: Part 1 is open from Thursdays to Sundays at the Battersea Power Station until 5th November 2006. Tickets are £5, on the door or from Time Out online. Catch it while you can.

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