Battersea Power Station is one of London’s modern icons. Its four distinctive chimneys and great cathedral-like turbine halls are instantly recognisable, and have featured in films, advertisements and, famously, on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals, where a 12m long inflatable pink pig floats between two of the chimneys.
But it might never have been built, such was the furore when the London Power Company (LPC) proposed its construction on the site of an abandoned waterworks company on the south bank of the Thames in 1927. Lined up in opposition were the Mayors of Chelsea and Westminster, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and countless others – including the local MP, Sir Edward Hilton Young, who wrote that power station would “kill every green thing within two miles of Battersea, rot all the building and bleach all the babies”. The soot, it was claimed, would damage venerable buildings from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament, corrupt paintings held in the nearby Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) and destroy the plants in Chelsea Physic Garden. For its myriad opponents, Battersea’s new power station would be enormous, ugly, polluting and extremely dangerous to health.
