2. Bankside Power Station and the Industrial Sublime

Scott’s ability to meld the old and new, the religious and secular, into an architectural icon is most apparent in his masterful work on Battersea’s sister station, Bankside Power Station. The power station’s intended location, on the south bank of the Thames in Southwark, was directly opposite from St. Paul’s Cathedral. Before Bankside’s construction, it had been the site of another, older, power station that had become too small to meet London’s electricity demands.[1]  Due to the great deal of controversy surrounding the construction of the power station, Scott was selected to design a facility appropriate for the London waterfront, while still functional as an energy supplier. Indeed, Scott felt that, if there truly needed to be a power station on the site, “he might as well be pragmatic as he was surely the best person to improve its design and mitigate its impact.” [2] Constructed using a “steel frame with brick cladding,” the power station is another example of Scott’s ability to work well with 20^th century building materials.[3] 

The body of the power station was elegant and symmetrical in design, clad with sparse, tasteful, and jazz-inspired ornamentation, similar to the façade of Battersea Power Station. The result was “a controlled, subtly detailed composition of dramatic planes of beautiful pinky-grey brickwork laid on a subtle batter and enhanced by careful touches of abstract detailing,” a reinvention of the industrial form necessary for Bankside to adequately mirror its neighbor, St. Paul’s Cathedral. [4] Believing that the “contrast between plain surfaces and sparse, well placed ornament can produce a charming effect,” Scott designed a façade composition consisting of “overlapping planes,” enhanced by “horizontal bands of vertical fluting.” [5] The building’s parapets are enlivened by “small brick finials, like Greek acroteria,” and vertical brick mullions break up the large windows opening into the interior boiler and turbine houses, which in turn are treated as gaps between the outer discrete planes of brick.

In addition to the ‘jazz modern’ design work of the façade, Giles Gilbert Scott borrowed elements from his previous work on Liverpool Cathedral, in order to guarantee the iconic status of his power station and to endow the structure with a sense of sublimity. This relationship between Liverpool and Bankside is most apparent in his design of the power station’s central chimney. While the initial design for Bankside Power Station had two chimneys, one on either end, Scott, using the design power he had not possessed when editing Battersea, combined them into a single square, tapering smokestack, or “campanile,” placed directly across the river from St. Paul’s. [6] This smokestack, flanked by symmetrical wings, is reminiscent of Liverpool’s Great Tower, and can be seen as a reduction of an iconic religious architectural motif, made suitable for Scott’s “supreme cathedral of power.” [7] The smokestack tower was enhanced through the use of “slight entasis and by central bands of fluting on each face…designed to emit ‘a smokeless shimmer or vapor’ from the nozzles of the four metal chimney shafts confined within.” [8]  This chimney rose straight from the ground, just as Ruskin had insisted of cathedral towers, a century earlier, in his tenets of Gothic architecture. [9]

The similarities between Scott’s “cathedral to power” to Liverpool Cathedral and other religious buildings extend beyond the chimney tower. Some superficial similarities are immediately apparent – they are both symmetrical buildings, essentially rectangular prisms intersected by their massive central towers. Additionally, Bankside’s longest side lies upon the east-west axis, a common orientation for cathedrals and other religious buildings, while its tasteful, though sparse, use of ornament is reminiscent of Scott’s reduced Gothic ornamentation on Liverpool Cathedral. Most importantly, the interior of Bankside, a vast, three-story Turbine hall, conveys a sense of religiosity through the use of the sublime, “the former turbine hall ha[ving] the proportions of a medieval cathedral” and dwarfing its inhabitants.[10]  It is in this use of gigantism to convey sublime awe that Scott succeeds most in creating a ‘cathedral to power’ – just as the Liverpool Cathedral used its massive scale to connect human beings to the power of the divine, Bankside Power Station links humanity to the awesome power of industrial Britain through its sublimity and elegant design.

[1] Moore and Ryan, Building Tate Modern, 178.