Battersea Power Station

31 January 2025

On Saturday we made a first visit to the recently restored Battersea Power Station in London. This iconic Art Deco building designed by J. Theo Halliday and Giles Gilbert Scott has been beautifully refurbished to create a complex of shops, restaurants and a cinema on the banks of the Thames. Compared to the Bankside Power Station that became the Tate Modern Gallery with its huge turbine hall, Battersea is on a different scale with its dual turbine halls and immense chimneys. It feels like a secular version of a Norman Cathedral - but bigger! We were there to see The Light Festival 2025 - a free interactive art trail of eight light installations by artists inside the Power Station and in the area outside it. We also took the journey up Lift 109, a large circular elevator that rises through one of the Power Station's giant chimneys to emerge above the top of the chimney (like 'Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator') with 360 degree views across the Thames and most of London. It was a bright sunny day and the views from 109 metres above the river were spectacular. But it's the building itself that's the star, a redbrick Art Deco behemoth dwarfing everything around it. Well worth a visit.