21 January: Battersea Power Station

Pink Floyd’s album Animals was released on this date in 1977. It features Battersea Power Station on the cover. 10 things you might not know about Battersea Power Station:

1. The proposal for a huge coal burning power station on the site was first proposed in 1927, and met with some opposition. One Conservative MP opposed it because it would ‘kill every Green thing within two miles of Battersea, rot all the buildings and bleach all the babies’. (Far cry from now when Tories couldn’t care less about dead trees and bleached babies as long as they and their mates are making money out of it!) People thought the power station would render 20 square miles of London uninhabitable. King George V was one of those against the proposal.
2. It took over 20 years to build, and was only half built when it began operating in 1933. The final chimney wasn’t completed until 1955.
3. At its peak, Battersea Power Station supplied a fifth of London's Electricity.
4. The building was designed by Leonard Pearce, chief engineer of the London Power Company, with James Theodore Halliday creating the interior. Concerns that the building itself would be an eyesore as well as polluting everything were addressed by calling in Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, famous for designing the Red Telephone box and Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. He later designed another London power station, Bankside, which is now the Tate Modern art gallery.
5. Coal wasn’t the only fuel used to generate power. During WWII, it also burned bundles of surplus banknotes so that they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy, and the US Embassy later used it as a means of getting rid of confidential documents.
6. People may have disliked it, but stray Cats loved it. The area around the power station was lovely and warm, so about 200 stray cats formed a colony there. It may have been warm, but also dangerous as their human neighbours began exterminating them, so by the time the station closed, there were only six cats left.
7. From 1950, Water from the power station boilers was pumped through a tunnel beneath the Thames to provide hot water and central heating for Pimlico’s Dolphin Square flats and Churchill Gardens housing estate.
8. It was used as a landmark by the Luftwaffe during WW2 but was never directly targeted.
9. The iconic structure has made numerous film and TV appearances including the opening scenes of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 film Sabotage, Beatles films, Doctor Who episodes, Slade’s video for Get Down and Get with It, featuring Noddy Holder dancing on the roof dressed as a spaceman. Bear Grylls has abseiled down the structure, and of course, it featured on that Pink Floyd album cover along with the flying Pig which broke loose and floated into the flightpaths of passenger jets.
10. After it closed in 1983 there was the dilemma of what to do with the building. By this time it was listed so knocking it down wasn’t an option. The whole thing was on sale at one point for £1.5 million, less than the cost of one flat in the latest development. Michael Jackson wanted to turn it into a ‘self-contained fantasy centre’. Margaret Thatcher arrived by Helicopter wearing a hard hat to launch the theme park development by John Broome, creator of Alton Towers, which saw the roof taken off before the plan folded. Other proposed uses for the building have included football ground, cinema, casino, mosque, museum, gallery, Noddy theme park, ‘urban ruin’ and racecourse. However, in 2022 it has finally been developed into a swanky space with housing, hotels and shops which opened in October 2022. It’s possible now to take a Lift up one of the chimneys to enjoy panoramic views of London.

Character birthday

Shimmer, member of the villainous Combat Team Omega, and his deceased twin, John. The twins were genetic variants with the ability to teleport and were studied by Prof. James Lovell (Unicorn). The twins were severely co-dependent and when separated to test whether they could communicate telepathically, one or other would teleport to where the other was. One day a fire broke out in the building where John was. Shimmer went in to teleport him out, but John died from a combination of injuries from the fire and damage suffered from being teleported. Shimmer’s mental health subsequently suffered. He blames Unicorn for his brother’s death and has extreme revenge fantasies. Shimmer was briefly a member of Combat Team Delta, but other members of the team expressed concerns about his behaviour and he was fired. He then sought out Team Omega and was taken on as their tepeporter. Not yet in a published story.