Thames Day 2: Battersea Power Station...

We then skirted around Battersea Power Station, which is undergoing a massive rehabilitation. Presumably it will eventually be incorporated into the Thames Path itself. Built in 1929 and decommissioned in 1975, the former coal-fired power station is Europe’s largest brick building, utilizing six million bricks. The iconic building and the immediate surrounding area is now undergoing a £9 billion overhaul in seven phases to accommodate housing, offices and retail space as well as community centers.

Work began in 2014, overseen by Historic England, to painstakingly dismantle and carefully rebuild the four 338-foot (103-meter) chimneys to the precise specification of the originals thus ensuring they will have the same lifespan as the rest of the restored building. Incredibly, the two firms that had originally made the bricks to build the power station are still in business and have been tasked with hand-making 1.75 million more to match the originals.

Here’s the new US Embassy, the largest in Europe, which opened in 2018 designed as a crystalline cube.

We passed the Father Thames polychrome relief designed by Stephen Duncan in 1988 depicting London’s river god. Ironically, I just learned while researching this post that the most impressive representation of Father Thames is on the former Port of London Authority building which I just happened to photograph on Halloween.

When walking around such a large building, we spotted it from multiple angles and saw several information boards about the construction, one of which informed us that one of the chimneys is slated to become a glass elevator offering visitors a truly unique viewing platform (although I couldn’t find mention of this on the official website).