Pigs might fly

Roger Waters is a miserable bugger. That much has been perennially true. The founder member of Pink Floyd has recently been resolutely ignoring the generally wise advice that when one finds oneself in a hole, stop digging. Having railed, in recent years, against everything and everyone from Israel to Donald Trump, the 79-year-old has recently dismissed claims of war crimes in Ukraine by Russia as “lies”, and wrote an open letter to Ukrainian first lady, Olena Zelenska, calling on her husband Volodymyr Zelensky to reach a peace deal with Vladimir Putin. No wonder the good people of Poland have called off Waters’ tour dates there next year.

As much as I hold my hat high to the work of the Floyd, Waters’ relentless misanthropy is exhausting. In 1977 he was just as splenetic. In fact, he has long maintained that by the time Pink Floyd’s album Animals came out that year, the band was already in decline, having peaked with the juggernaut that The Dark Side Of The Moon became, and capitalised on with its reflective follow-up, Wish You Were Here.

Animals, however, was certainly not a happy record. Loosely based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm - itself a statement about Stalinism - Waters used the album to lay in to the perils of being a fabulously wealthy rock star, something he has continued to do into his eighth decade while continuing to be...er...a fabulously wealthy rock star. It was in Montreal, on the Animals tour in 1977, that during a performance of the album’s Pigs, Waters spat at an over-exuberant fan, leading to his feelings of alienation in the spotlight, which part-inspired the cheerful narrative of The Wall in 1980. Animals is not a bad album, by the way. Part of my musical upbringing, in fact. It has also just been re-released with the usual super-deluxe package of remixes and surround sound goodies. 

But that isn’t, you might be surprised to learn, the point of this post. Animals’ cover art remains distinctive, in the great gallery of 1970s albums, for its depiction of Battersea Power Station with a pig flying above it (geddit?). It was Waters’ idea to use the distinctive Grade II listed building, dating back to the 1930s, as he used to drive past it on the way to his-then Clapham home. Hipgnosis - Floyd cohort Storm Thorgerson and partner Aubrey Powell’s legendary design studio - developed the concept further. With the inflatable pig, Algie, still aloft for a second day’s photography it slipped its moorings and floated off, first interfering with incoming flights to Heathrow Airport before veering south-east to land in Kent. There is a story that Floyd’s management had hired a marksman to take out the pig had it had been necessary, but that he didn’t turn up for that fateful second day of pictures, allowing Algie to escape.

Picture: Battersea Power Station Lrd

Today it is the power station itself, not Algie, that is returning to prominence, with the formal reopening of the complex as a retail, hospitality, residential and office working venue, following a £9 billion, ten-year project to transform the art deco building and its surrounding site. At its peak of operations it supplied a fifth of London’s electricity before being shut down permanently in 1983, laying idle beside the Thames for commuters to glance at out of their train windows as they make their way into Waterloo Station. Various ideas were floated as to what to do with it including, at one point, a plan for Chelsea to build a new stadium on the site, clearly on the opposite bank of the Thames to the club’s Stamford Bridge ground today. 

Picture: Battersea Power Station Ltd

Ten years ago a Malaysian property developer plunged in, launching an ambitious plan to repurpose the distinctive structure - one of Europe’s largest brick buildings - hollowing out the main turbine hall and, over six floors, installing offices (including Apple’s new UK headquarters over six floors), flats, restaurants and shops belonging to brands like Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Nike, Mulberry, Uniqlo, Mango, Superdry and Levi’s. It’s not the first time a sizeable Thameside industrial property has been reborn like this: the former Bankside Power Station in Southwark became the Tate Modern. But thanks to Battersea’s prominence on the London skyline it has, for its 80-odd years, been one of the most recognisable fixtures of the capital’s topography. Helped in no small measure by Pink Floyd, it even worked its way into the celebrations of London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics.

While it may not be a landmark in the same realm of architectural marvel as the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral or Buckingham Palace, the Malaysian investors clearly saw Battersea’s potential, prompting a daily outlay of £2 million at the height of construction work. When architects WilkinsonEyre got to work in 2012, the main building was lacking a roof and grass was growing on its floor. It was a mouth-watering creative challenge. “We were stunned by the scale of the building,” project director Sebastien Ricard told The Guardian. “We wanted to retain it. We didn’t want to over-restore it.

The mammoth nature of the project also involved extending the London Underground’s Northern Line to a new, dedicated station serving the site. This was key to the project’s evolution, says Simon Murphy, chief executive of the Battersea Power Station Development Company. “Without [the Tube station] we wouldn’t have brought our office occupiers, we wouldn’t have brought the retailers. Neither project could survive without the other.” The station also serves the vast new American embassy less than a mile further along Nine Elms Lane, along with the forest of new residential towers that have sprung up in the area.

So, what can the visitor expect from today? Journalists have compared the reborn power station to a cross between a Westfield shopping mall and the aforementioned Tate Modern, but along with the shops and restaurants there’s a much more on offer, including a cinema and a theatre, a gym and a health club. On 11 November (my birthday folks!) a 1200 square metre ice rink will open in time for the Christmas season. There is even a glass lift that’s been built into one of the power station’s four iconic chimneys, which takes visitors up 109 metres to a 360-degree viewing platform.

Some of the original power station’s original spaces have been cleverly repurposed, such as the art deco Control Room A, which is available to hire for events (and has already been used for the film The King’s Speech), while other features and even machinery of the once-working facility have been kept intact to enhance the industrial appeal of the building. Control Room B has been turned into a very cool bar, making good use of the stainless steel control panels and instrument panels. Elsewhere there are art deco designs and traces of 1950s functional industrial chic.

© Simon Poulter 2022

When my wife and I visited the site in April - with the power station’s main building not yet reopened - it was clear that it was a ‘destination’ in the making. The few riverside cafes already open on the site were still getting used to business. There is, though, already, a sizeable number of people living in the development. “In the past 18 months we’ve sold over £600 million of residential [properties], largely to Brits,” Simon Murphy told journalists, explaining that the first of the entire power station site’s 4,000 homes was occupied in May last year. Filling all of them, with prices starting at just over £800,000, is going to be a challenge given the cost of living crisis, inflation and an expected pressure on the housing market. 

Indeed, as so often is the case with modern developments, there is little at Battersea to address the lack of affordable housing in London, although the developers have promised 386 such homes, representign less than a tenth of the project’s total residential stock. “The number of affordable homes in the plan had to be revised down because of the massive cost of restoration and because the developer was expected to provide the infrastructure,” Patricia Brown of the British Property Federation told the Evening Standard. But, she added: “This project has had so many false dawns. It is a brilliant addition to London and in a few years’ time people will be flocking there.”

A large part of that attraction will be the retailing operation, with the dizzying array of brands moving in. That, though, provides a further challenge to the site’s operator, given the rate of shop closures on our high streets and the looming recession. That said, the developers are hoping to attract up to 30 million visitors a year. It’s a gamble, for sure, but while you can surely question the wisdom of such an ambitious and expensive project - especially through the current economic despair - you do wonder whether a white elephant, and not a giant inflatable pig, has been installed on the Wandsworth stretch of the River Thames.

Picture: PinkFloyd.com

Perhaps prophetically, Pink Floyd returned to Battersea Power Station for the reissue of their album Animals. Designer Aubrey Powell took new shots of the complex, including the cranes of urban development that weren’t there in December 1976 when the original cover art was captured. “With the original album cover being such an iconic piece of stand-alone art, I had the chance to update it, which was a rather daunting task,” Powell said recently, adding that the new photography allowed him to reflect a changing world.“By using modern digital colouring techniques I kept Pink Floyd’s rather bleak message of moral decay using the Orwellian themes of animals, the pig ‘Algie’, faithful to the message of the album.” A somewhat miserable thought, given the regeneration of Battersea Power Station that has been achieved. Roger Waters would surely approve of that sentiment.