It was 5:38AM when the buzzing awoke me into the darkness. The Red LED lights of the same alarm clock I’ve used for 15 years pierced fuzzily into the room, And I knew It was time to get up.
Sadly, this was of my own doing. I have to be on a coach for 7AM, and that means the latest bus I can get is 6AM. So By 5.55AM, I’m already by the bus stop, Worrying slightly that I’ve missed the bus. I see two shadowy figures walk cloaked in darkness towards the bus stop. Hurrah, I think, I’m not the only insomniac getting the bus at this time of the morning. And then a flatbed truck pulls up and they get into the truck and drive off.
Crumbs. I really am the only insomniac at the bus stop now. This doesn’t ease my vague sense of uneasiness at having missed the bus. The stars twinkle in the darkness and the roar of loud music enters my head, as being soundtracked by my loud “best of 2006” compilation of tunes meant that I was in no danger of falling asleep. 6.08AM in the morning is far too early to be listening to Machine Head.
And the bus still hasn’t come. It should have left ten minutes ago. My paranoia kicks in and I run towards the bus stop a bit further along, where two routes meet, doubling my chances of getting there. I arrive, and see other people waiting. The bus arrives, And I get into town early.
6.32am. Its dark, and I’m walking through pigeon park. On the top of a rubbish bin is an empty bottle. An empty one liter bottle of Jack Daniels. Rock N Roll. What sort of Wino leaves a glass bottle of whiskey empty at 6.30 in the morning? Now that is the level of commitment that the ordinary sort of lush just can’t manage.It must be living in Birmingham that’s driven them to drink.
The streets empty, devoid, vacant of life. The Rotunda like a hollow glass shell, the stars by the bull ring pulsing in alignment over the dark blue sky as dawn prepares to rise. Its only a short walk from here to Dogbreath, as the rundown coach station is not so affectionately called by National Express Employees.
Just gone seven, the coach pulls off. Its Courtesy of the one pound funfares that I travel. Next to me is a Ninja. Well, a female Ninja. I huddle up next to the window and sleep, fitfully, for an hour and a half. Somewhere around about Mayfair, I awake, having missed the legendary ‘James Bond Car Park’; where the car chase in Tomorrow Never Dies was filmed. I stick the stereo back on, and the loud music commences. I eventually arrive, and disembark. Off to victoria, where makr rings me and tells me to meet him enroute at Charing Cross. So I get a travel card, and depart.
Travelling On The Tube to a perfectly timed Mogwai’s “Xmas Steps” is a dman eriee experience, I must tell you.It ends just as I leave, and I meet Mark.
Mark and I make it our mission to go to the Tate. We do so via the tube and I take a drink. (Its not Red Thunder – me and Mark had been discussing this alreadly, where I informed him I hadn’t bought any simply because a queue of half an hour in Aldi is just not acceptable for a new energy drink I haven’t tried before. Instead, I am pictured with Tesco Kick, a perfectly acceptable substitute for us ingesters of Taurine).
At the tate. we wanna go on the slide. Sadly, we arrive there to discover that the queue for the tickets for the big slide is erm… about 100 metres. Some two or three hours at current rate of movement. Balls. (Bolas, double oh seven). So instead we go up to the first floor and go on the small slide which has a fifteen minute wait. Its great. I leapt off it going ‘Again! Again!’ and then ran back up to the top before Mark had even gone in, jumping up and down excitably.
It is half eleven when we leave the tate, having played around on the interactive ‘expressionism’; quizzes and so forth. Next on is ‘game On’, but instead, we decide because we have to be at Battersea for half three, we should go shopping instead. So we stay on the tube to Notting Hill, and go to the local brances of MVE. I spend £9, but get some stuff I’ve been looking for for ages. Mark Is surprised I don’t spend more, but I’m not. I put back the CDs I already have burns of because I can still listen to the albums without spending £5 to do so.
Mark visits KFC. I don’t - I’ve been eating Tesco’s Ham and Cheese Slices (£1.16 for 2, 330g total, 42% of daily calorific requirement) all day to keep me going.
Now for the main event, Off to battersea power Station.
Its open to the public for the first, last and only time in its
History . Now Its little more than a gutted shell – thanks to a failed investment project in the eighties when the roof was taken off to facilitate the building of a never to materialise theme park ; leaving the place open and exposed to the elements for fiteen years. Inside it looks terrible, but fascinating. After all, as the Guardian says, Battersea Power Station is “as important an architectural landmark as St Paul's Cathedral”, and that’s no word of a lie. Its graced album covers and ingrained into the heart of Londons Architectural skyline. Its also a Grade One listed building, and taller than the statue of Liberty at 350 feet. It’s pretty damn historic as a piece of architecture, even if it does look like an upside down kitchen table made of redbrick.
It is without a doubt, bloody huge. So huge you could stick St Pauls inside it and not blink. I can’t blame you for thinking to yourself, ‘Well, its only a derelict power station’, but It’s a bit more than that. Its historical, iconic and now an empty, derelict shell. Its really, really difficult to get a sense of scale of it now compared to how it used to be, because with half of one of the walls missing and the roof removed, there’s little in the sense of comparison here. Think of large interior spaces of other buildings – like the inside of an arena – but the problem is, without a roof or an airship parked inside it (how cool would that be, turning it into a zeppelin hangar?) , there’s no real point of reference. Its all a bit abstract, except for just being bloody, bloody massive.
It is pretty astounding also to realise that once, it was but half of the building it is now, when it was doubled in size twenty years into its existence. There’s an excellent page on its History
here We are ostensibly here for an
Art Echibition . the Truth is different. We, like every one else here , don’t care about the art. The main exhibit here is the strucutre, the building, which is open to the public for the last time before it is converted into some steel and glass shopping mall. The actual plans for its ‘revitalisation’ are inb my opinion, nothing short of artitechtural vandalism. For a Building that has had £200 million spent on it to keepo it in its current state, it doesn’t look like anything has been spent on it at all. Its level of disrepair is currently pretty dismal, and Im not alone in thinking this way
Unlike mark, the Wuss, I feel no great feel or apprehension at being here. More a sense of curiosity and fascination at what is ahistorical curiosity, the largets undeveloped brownfield site in Europe, and an utterly iconic building. Its like peeking into St. pauls Cathedral if it had been closed to the public for a decade and a half. Any afficionado of Subbrit would have a field day.
Walking around here is eerie. Extremely eerie. It’s a hulk of a building, and walking into these dusty corroded corridors and building entrance ways is like walking around the inside of a whale, or a sleeping giant hoping not to awaken it. Silent, and foreboding. There’s a viewing platform in the middle of the main central open space now, and Its hard to think in a few years it’ll be completely changed forever. It’s the last time you’ll get to see the building as it is.
Within three years (or six, depending on the arctual reality of it), all that you will be able to see from afar will be the towers, and they won’t even be the original ones. The original towers are going to be torn down and rebuilt; they were originally built as concrete over steel framework, and that steel is corroding to the the point where it can no longer sustain the weight of the concrete it supports. So they need to come down and be rebuilt in accordance with its Grade II listed building status.
(As detractors point out though, this might not actually happen. The building Is currently owened by a company called Parkview, registered in the British Virgin Islands. Accordingly, if they bring down the towers and do not rebuild them, there may not be any legal recourse regarding this because of it being an offshore company. Therefore, if they do rebuild, what can the government do? Nothing, in all honesty. And this concerns a lot of people.
AT the end of the rather pretentious and uninterestingly faux-controversial art exhibition is a small room with a video display on the plans to rebuild the Power Station. It’s a corporate video filled full of jump cuts, quirky angles to make it look exciting and up to date. This fails dismally. There is also a small model of the redevelopment, and I describe it as nothing more than a descration of the site.
Because one of the most iconic buildings in the entire world is now going to be…A Shopping Mall. With a big Red circular walkway in the middle of it. That Empty space will be spoiled. My personal preference is to turn the building into a living building – by having people live there. Turn the entire building into a place where People can live. Or, Alternatively, the worlds most impressive concert venue, which would keep the entire of the interior intact inside an iconic shell. But no. Instead its going to become yet another mall, yet another shopping centre, yet another place for people to buy the same tat you can get anywhere else with a string of identikit homogenous shopping experiences with no individuality or character. Yet another cookie cooker place. Here, instead, will be the same array of the same high street stores – HMV, Virgin, Orange, Vodafone, primark, Selfridges, and so forth – that you can get anywhere else. What this building has is a history, and character, and all that will be thrown away for a glass roof and a overpriced sandwich shops.
Around the building, will be built a massive selction of Hotels, conferences centres, and ‘Luxury’ apartments, encircling the Power Station on three sides – every side except that open to the River. The only way to see the main body of the Power Station will from the other side of the River, and the encirclment will mean that all a traveller will be able to see soon will be acres of empty soulless modern glass hotels, playgrounds for the rich, and million pound penthouses. The sightlines will be gone forever, and the iconic status of the build pretty much reduced to nothing. All you will see really are the towers, and the redbrick will be swamped by a glass elephant of commercialism. Its pretty damn disheartening, a tragic squandering. I can’t express my disappointment in strong enough words; let alone explain my astoundment at the supposed number of jobs it will generate (a falsity, I should imagine) or for that matter, that there is no additional infrastructure or public transport to deal with the movement of people in and out of the area.
Its sad to realise that this place will soon be nothing more than a temple of consumerism. With that sadness I leave, knowing that this we will never see again, not as it is, not as it was, but as it will be – an empty and vacous squandering of a rich architectural heritage being used to sell people overpriced tat, stupid clothes and expensive meals.
Theres a certain sadness as I leave. There really is.
Anyway, here's some links. (I really do reccomend Sub-Urban pages on religious sites too - St. Francis In Manchester looks fascinating...)
i)Chronological history
here i)Shared pictures on the BBC
here ii)BBC gallery on its past
here iii)And Its proposed future
here iV) Some photos of a recent visit
here v)Sub urban page
here vi) batter Power Station Enthusaists updates
here vii)Michael Antony out of Van halen, replaced by Wolfgang, the guitarists son? WTF?
linky Anyway, gotta dash. Cheerio
