Image © Will Pearson.

Bankside Power Station was built by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott - his name may not be familiar, but his other major London building will be - Battersea Power Station. He also designed the much-loved Red Telephone boxes (you can see four of these in a virtual tour here), the Salvation Army’s William Booth Memorial Training College in Camberwell, and Waterloo Bridge.

Bankside had the reputation as a debauched and squalid area, packed with brothels, bear-baiting pits and (horror of horrors) theatres! Bankside had suffered much from bomb damage during the war, and plans were afoot to regenerate the entire area. Many people felt that a building a large power station at Bankside was hardly in keeping with this regeneration and there was huge local opposition to the building of the power station, with questions raised about ‘noise and sulphur or other noxious fumes’. The proposed Bankside Power Station was considered architecturally incongruous with St Paul’s Cathedral (which is directly opposite), threatening the views to and from the cathedral. Lord Llewellin said in Parliament that “However good the architect, however well designed it may be, it will be rather like introducing an alligator into the water-lily pond in one’s garden.”

Another peer, Viscount Samuel imagined tourists on a Thames boat trip a century down the line demanding to know how such a thing could be built, asking why the people of London tolerated such a thing without rising up against it.

In the end, the government overruled those against it (namely the City of London and St. Paul’s, apparently alongside 822 other cultural bodies in the country) and went ahead with the construction of Giles Gilbert Scott’s edifice in the name of private enterprise. The power station was built in two stages, between 1947 and 1963, in deco style. The central chimney is 99 metres tall - designed to be lower than St Paul’s 114 metre dome opposite.

Bankside Power Station started generating electricity (from oil) in 1952, with the Eastern half of the station starting to generate in 1963. The power station didn’t remain useful for long - and was closed in 1981 after just 29 years of electricity generation. The hike in oil prices in the 70’s meant that other forms of electricity production became more cost-effective, rendering Bankside an expensive white elephant.

For 13 years, Bankside Power Station remained empty, until the Tate Modern acquired the site in 1994. Various international architects competed for the contract to redesign the site, with Herzog & de Meuron the eventual winners. Their design was the only one which retained the existing power station shell substantially intact, with the two storey glass roof being added to allow light in to the gallery. The building of the Tate was funded by the Millennium Commission (monies from the National Lottery fund - £50m), further funding was provided by the Arts Council, English Partnerships, the London Borough of Southwark and donations from corporations and private individuals to a total of £134m.

The Tate Modern has been a great success fom the day it opened - two million people visited in the first three months alone. The gallery complements St Paul’s Cathedral, and tourists can walk across to the Cathedral from the Millennium Bridge directly outside the Tate Modern. With Tate Modern, the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, shops and offices (and not a bear pit in sight) Bankside’s regeneration could finally be considered complete. And we can only guess at whether Lord Llewellin would still think of it as an alligator in his lily pond.

To see a virtual tour of the Tate Modern, please click here.

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Tags: bankside, bankside power station, giles gilbert scott, herzog and de meuron, London, millennium bridge, red telephone boxes, st paul's cathedral, tate gallery, Tate Modern

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 2:52 pm and is filed under London History & Information, London Landmarks, London Virtual Tours, Tate Modern. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.