Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture

Standing on the south bank of the Thames, today, its chimneys reconstructed, its brickwork restored, its roof replaced, Battersea Power Station betrays few of the troubles that plagued its development and redevelopment (Figure 1). Like many of London’s power stations, Battersea began as two separate units: Battersea A, the western wing, opened in 1933, and Battersea B, the eastern wing, in 1955. Unlike many of these other power stations, however, in which the ‘B’ building formed an ad hoc response to rising energy demand, and often came to stand for the complex as such (what we today know as Bankside, or as the Tate Modern, is in fact Bankside B, Bankside A having been demolished in 1959), Battersea A and B were planned together from the start, two parts of the same building. ‘Battersea Power Station, as it stands, is a dream only half come true’, wrote one journalist in 1937. ‘Not until all that corrugated iron has been stripped away and another building of the same size has been joined to it, with two more gigantic chimneys pointing to heaven, will the whole dream be realized.’¹ The fourth chimney, granting the building its iconic symmetry, would not be completed for another eighteen years.²

Other early observers described the power station as a ‘cathedral of bricks’, a ‘temple of power’, these epithets reflecting not only a certain fossil fetishism, a quasi-religious awe at the scale of energy exploitation, but also the brute reality of Giles Gilbert Scott’s design, which had to complement St Paul’s Cathedral, across the Thames, and appease the Archbishop of Canterbury.³ The smokestacks at either end of Battersea A were thus to be perceived as twin spires. Gilbert Scott gave the building its grooved brickwork and neoclassical chimneys, while architect James Theodore Halliday could take credit for the control room’s gleaming art deco interiors, no less marvellous than the frontage. Situated directly opposite the St Paul’s, we ought to note, Bankside had to show still greater deference to the cathedral. Gilbert Scott (who had been brought onto the project after his success at Battersea) therefore designed it with a single chimney, topped off at a lower height, to obscure St Paul’s as little as possible.⁴ The aesthetics of Battersea and Bankside arise from a simultaneous mimicry and self-effacement, aspiring to the image of the cathedral while genuflecting before it.

Battersea Power Station is now arguably a cultural icon on a par with St Paul’s. As the new owners’ signage reminds visitors, the station once supplied a fifth of London’s electricity, and it could claim to be the largest brick building in Europe. But the social function of the power station today is quite different. As I write, the transformation of the building and its environs into a gentrified multi-use complex – into luxury apartments, offices and shops – is almost complete. The process of the power station’s redevelopment began in the late 1970s, when its boilers reached the end of their lifespan. The success of the National Grid undermined the need for local power stations, while the emergence of nuclear power and the broader decline of coal-fired power stations in the United Kingdom made replacing the boilers financially unviable.⁵ Battersea A was decommissioned in 1976, Battersea B in 1983. In 1984, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) sold the power station to a consortium of developers, which had won the board’s competition, for a paltry £1.5 million, and they sold it straight on to John Broome, the mastermind behind Alton Towers. In 1987, work began to turn the defunct building into an indoor theme park, but Broome could not raise the capital needed for the project without accepting a diminished stake. Subsequent attempts by Parkview International (a Hong Kong firm) and Treasury Holdings (from Ireland) fell through, their budgets also insufficient for a task of such scale. Chelsea Football Club had shown interest in converting Battersea Power Station into a stadium since 2008, but it was only with the site’s acquisition by a consortium of Malaysian firms in 2012 that serious work, including an extension to the Northern Line, commenced.⁶

But what appeared, from the perspective of capital, a period of uncertainty and delay was also a time of great cultural speculation. The dormant power station inspired an array of architectural visions, many of them whimsical, satirical, even (notably for our purposes) science-fictional. One submission to the CEGB competition, by architect Cedric Price, proposed to demolish the building’s walls but preserve the smokestacks, which would then hang in mid-air. The remaining structure, ‘Bathat’, could function as a ‘micro-climatic machine’, according to one of Price’s sketches (Figure 2), the chimneys used to draw up warm air and suck down cooler air.⁷ Later on, during the Parkview years (which saw a range of outlandish designs considered), architect Ron Arad submitted a plan for a hotel, called ‘The Upper World’, situated between the power station’s chimneys. Its guests transported to their rooms in shuttle pods, Arad’s drawings present the hotel as ‘a space-port dropped on top of the power station’, according to Peter Watts.⁸ Slightly less far-fetched was Terry Farrell’s 2014 proposal to replace the east and west walls with a colonnade, allowing the public to walk freely into the building, its interior reconceived as a park. The control rooms, the directors’ hall, and staircase would remain, albeit (recalling Price’s vision) suspended, off the ground.⁹

The awe-inspiring scale that seemed to attract so many developers to Battersea Power Station also appealed to location managers in the film industry, who could take advantage of the CEGB’s desire, at the end of the power station’s life, to maximise its auxiliary uses.¹⁰ The building had made its screen debut long before that, of course. The power outage that opens Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) has its origins in Battersea A, whose turbines the saboteur stuffs with sand. Hitchcock cuts from the silhouettes of the Palace of Westminster and Nelson’s Column, where the lights have just gone out, to the fuming power station, Battersea already finding its place among London’s premier landmarks. In Roy Boulting’s High Treason (1951), the turbine hall becomes the setting for a shootout between communists, seeking to disrupt the nation’s power supply, and the police. Ken Loach uses the smoking chimneys of Battersea Power Station to introduce us to the working-class milieu of his 1965 film Up the Junction (adapted from Nell Dunn’s 1963 short story collection of the same name), and Peter Collinson’s 1968 version of Up the Junction includes the power station in its title sequence for much the same reason. When the power station had ceased to generate electricity, Battersea’s brickwork began to lend an air of industrial decline to films as diverse as Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995) and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008).

We can see why a nodal point of London’s ‘critical infrastructure’ such as Battersea Power Station would become an apt setting for chauvinistic thrillers, just as we can discern its utility as a shorthand for the industrial and postindustrial concerns of social realist cinema. But the building also proved popular with the makers of a great many science-fiction films, for reasons perhaps less obvious. In The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), directed by Val Guest, Battersea Power Station represents London’s entire power-generating capacity, which must be channelled to kill a growing, mutating alien. Guest’s 1961 film The Day the Earth Caught Fire has the building engulfed by rising fog, the latter a consequence of nuclear-bomb testing. The titular character of Ian Curteis’s The Projected Man (1966) heads to the power station to recharge himself with electricity. Battersea loses two chimneys and becomes a nuclear plant in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, a 1964 Doctor Who serial, and serves as a factory for turning humans into ‘Cybermen’ in the 2005–6 series. The building appears fleetingly but menacingly in Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) and hosts a significant scene in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006, an adaptation of P. D. James’s 1992 novel of the same name), in which it has become a kind of elite museum, preserving works of art saved from war.¹¹

Indeed, it is particularly the representation of Battersea Power Station in Radford’s and Cuarón’s films – which are not simply works of science fiction but dystopias, constructing worlds appreciably worse than our own – that this essay will examine. Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four draws an equation between Gilbert Scott’s imposing frontage and the image of Big Brother (Figure 3); it thus makes for interesting reading alongside Children of Men, which subverts the Orwellian dystopia and does so by citing perhaps the most famous depiction of the power station: the cover art of Pink Floyd’s Animals (1977), the album itself an Orwell adaptation. As we shall see, Orwell too had much to say about the social effects of machinery; most significantly, he linked its dominance to the rise of totalitarianism, albeit in different ways at different moments in his intellectual development. In Radford’s and Cuaron’s films, accordingly, Battersea Power Station serves as a means for thinking or rethinking the relation between mechanical and political power, and thus also as a means of positioning themselves relative to a dystopian tradition on which Animal Farm (1945) and, even more so, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have exerted a profound influence.

I would propose that this comparative study of Battersea Power Station’s speculative reconstructions holds interest, however, not merely because it illuminates the internal development of the dystopian genre – the ‘anxiety of influence’ that pervades the post-Orwellian dystopia – but because it promises to tell us something, too, about the kinds of environmentalism that have gained traction within Anglophone dystopias. The utopian valorisation of Nature in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is inseparable from the author’s attitude towards urbanisation and mechanisation, for instance, as the next section of this essay will show. But it is precisely that sentimental contrast between country and city that Radford erodes, while Cuarón exploits our association of coal-fired energy infrastructure with social progress to emphasise the sterility and inertia of his postindustrial dystopia. To focus on the representation of energy infrastructures in dystopian literature and cinema is to argue that ecological relations are as central to the genre as scholars have long recognised political and economic ones to be.

‘Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of religion’, Orwell observes, with not a little irritation, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), his account of working-class life in the industrial north of England. ‘The kind of person who most readily accepts Socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress, as such, with enthusiasm.’¹² Orwell writes here with customary generality; when he does reach for examples, they come, notably, from the utopian tradition. Thus Orwell reserves some of his sharpest criticism for H. G. Wells, whose utopias (he has in mind particularly Men Like Gods (1923) and The Dream (1924), though the same theme was already present in A Modern Utopia (1905)) imagine the future ‘as an ever more rapid advance of mechanical progress’, and places himself closer to Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) not only dramatises a fully mechanised, Fordist civilisation, but also posits the link between such innovations and communism – as is witnessed, most obviously, by the naming of its characters (Bernard Marx, Lenina Crowne).

For Orwell, clearly, the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation and (perhaps most importantly for us) the rise of machine power were to be lamented, not celebrated. The Road to Wigan Pier formulates at least five criticisms of machine civilisation: humans will no longer be able to satisfy their ‘need for effort and creation’; nature will become ordered, regimented, rationalised, such that ‘nothing goes wrong’; the human organism will degenerate into a repulsive ‘softness’; the machine will corrupt aesthetic tastes; and mechanisation will advance under its own momentum, automatically.¹³ Advocating a ‘materialistic Utopia’ where mechanisation is an end rather than a means, socialist intellectuals are responsible for pushing the working class towards fascism, which appears as ‘the last line of defence of all that is good in European civilisation’.¹⁴ What troubles Orwell is not only the coming of machine civilisation, but also the reactionary desire such prospects stir for a kind of fascistic collectivism defined, ostensibly, against visions of total mechanisation.

It is worth pausing here to note what Orwell’s analysis in The Road to Wigan Pier must overlook, namely that fascism knew its own forms of machine worship. Take, for instance, the Italian futurists’ paeans to speed, electricity, and industry, in which the power station instantiates a new aesthetic ideal. ‘Nothing is more beautiful than a great, humming electric power-station that holds water pressure as high as a chain of mountains,’ Marinetti wrote in 1914, ‘and electric power as vast as the horizon, compressed into its four distribution columns, bristling with meters, control panels, and shining levers.’¹⁵ A year earlier, the futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia had produced the first in a series of drawings of hydroelectric power plants. More romantic than his better-known La Cittá Nuova project, Sant’Elia’s worm’s-eye-view drawings turn the power stations into hulking fortresses, impassable and forbidding.¹⁶ As Paul Goldberger points out, Sant’Elia’s architecture anticipates the towering cityscape of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), which has exerted in turn a profound influence on dystopian cinema.¹⁷ But we can also trace a direct line from these futurist exaltations of industrialism to the lavish, art deco interiors of Battersea Power Station’s control rooms, standing in sharp contrast to the building’s austere façade.¹⁸

Orwell’s aversion to machinery shaped his conception of literary form, too. In ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), his lament for the state of English prose, Orwell attributes his contemporaries’ clunky, imprecise writing to their use of ‘ready-made’ and ‘prefabricated’ phrases, their language suffering the same standardisation that Orwell deplored in the products of the machine.²⁷ It is hard to find ‘a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech’ in political writing in particular, Orwell contends. The implication is clear: prose must show the craftsmanship – the skill, strength, dexterity – that machinery destroys. Authors are most susceptible to such vices when they write automatically, unconsciously: thus the political writer who employs dying metaphors (‘iron heel’, ‘blood-stained tyranny’, ‘stand shoulder to shoulder’) ‘has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine’, as Orwell puts it.²⁸ Bad thinking and bad politics are the almost inevitable result.

What about good writing, by contrast? It is notable for our purposes that Orwell prefers to define this in visual terms – recall his oft-quoted claim (in ‘Why I Write’ (1946)) that ‘[g]ood prose is like a window pane’.²⁹ Orwell’s dictum bespeaks his commitment to clarity, but it also demands that the author suppress the vainness and egotism that, in Orwell’s view, likely motivated them to write in the first place, and that get in the way of truthfulness. At other moments, Orwell suggests that visualisation ought to come prior to writing: ‘Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations’, he advises fellow writers, who can then ‘choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning’. This effort, Orwell concludes, ‘cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally’.³⁰ The ideal of clarity (‘vagueness’), the sanctity of the visual (‘mixed images’) and the critique of machine civilisation (‘prefabricated’) here come together, Orwell’s composite ideology of form.

The dystopia, however, is not a window pane but a magnifying glass, enlarging or intensifying certain bad things about the author’s world. Herein lies the curiosity of Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptation, which was released in 1984, the moment at which Orwell’s extrapolation arrived. Such timing encourages viewers to compare Orwell’s fictional world to their contemporary socio-political situation, but it also raises questions about the trope of dystopian dating in general. Is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four a prediction about what the world would look like in 1984? Surely not, though Goldstein’s book offers a superficially plausible explanation how the real world of the early twentieth century might become divided into three totalitarian blocs. Is it, perhaps more convincingly, a warning that humanity is merely a few decades from such a world?³¹ If so, the ironic implication is that, in an alternate universe where Orwell had not written Nineteen Eighty-Four, the latter’s representations would be more likely to come true. Can the book therefore be read as a counterfactual, a prediction of what might have happened had it, and other cautionary tales of its kind, not existed? It is also worth noting that ‘1984’ reverses the last two digits of the year Orwell handed in his manuscript, 1948.³² Is the famous date not then best understood as a metafictional acknowledgement of the similitude (‘19—’) and difference (‘—84’) constitutive of the dystopia itself, which must speak to our present state of affairs, but opts to do so through the technique of estrangement?

Yet Radford’s film is by no means a line-by-line re-enactment of Orwell’s novel. Notably for us, the scene in which Battersea Power Station appears is Radford’s own, and it encapsulates the difference between the two texts. Amidst the crowd gathered in Victory Square to watch the executions of Eurasian prisoners, Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) slips Winston (John Hurt) a piece of paper with directions for the place of their liaison. Radford then cuts to a low-angle shot of Battersea Power Station, which rises between the roofing of the train station from which Winston will leave the city (Figure 3). The camera tracks down and to the right, pausing on a telescreen hanging from the station’s rafters, and cuts to Winston on the platform, where a group of children pass him and a fellow Party worker asks him whether he is travelling alone. The novel, on the other hand, delivers us straight from the mournful face of the final prisoner to the countryside and comments on the journey itself only after establishing this contrast.³³ If Orwell thereby sharpens the distinction between country and city, the natural world standing in utopian contrast to the dystopian city, Radford’s decision to elaborate the journey and return it, chronologically, to its place between execution and rendezvous reduces that contrast, makes country continuous with city. But what is the broader dramatic function of the change?

The answer, I want to suggest, is already implicit in the film’s depiction of the power station itself. Radford shows us the building as if in close-up: we see its face, as it were, the famous grooves running up it, and only the bottom of its smokestacks. The shot’s composition mimics the staging of the two minutes’ hate, where we see Big Brother for the first time above the workers’ crossed arms (the latter recalling the station roof), while the movement of the camera, which tracks from the power station to the image of Big Brother on the telescreen, reinforces this equation between the power station and the Orwellian despot. Looking through the gap between two roofs, we peek at the face of power, at the face of the despot themselves, as though the power station were a kind of panopticon projecting a gaze almost too intense to return. Thus far, rendering Orwell’s equation of industrial with totalitarian power, the film remains true to its source material.

But there is also something phantasmatic about Radford’s power station, which forms the focal point of the establishing shot but is nonetheless drained of colour, massive yet ghostly. Portrayed as such, the building instantiates a certain psychological weight, quite literally hanging over Winston. It serves Radford’s amplification, widely observed by critics, of the psychological aspects of Orwell’s novel.³⁴ Herein lies the logic of the power station’s placement at the beginning of the travel sequence, for the countryside into which Winston arrives at the end of it is itself a kind of psychic construct in Radford’s film – signalled by its existence behind the door of Room 101 in several of Winston’s dreams and by O’Brien’s (Richard Burton) recurrent appearance there in Winston’s other visions. When Winston and Julia first arrive in the countryside, Winston indeed describes it as ‘a dream’, the phrase meaningful to him in its literal as well as its figurative sense. The spectral Battersea Power Station, a nightmare looming over London, thus marks the beginning of Winston’s journey from the cold, hard reality of the city to the quasi-mythical ‘Golden Country’, whose ontological status is – in Radford’s adaptation, at least – closer to that of the dream.

I began by observing that Radford takes the power station out of its urban context, but this context returns, suddenly and uncannily, at the end of the film. Confronted with the flesh-starved rats in Room 101, Winston betrays Julia. Radford then cuts to the familiar shot of the Golden Country, which fades out. The image that fades in, opening the film’s final section, is an establishing shot of London, obscured somewhat on the left by a screen showing Big Brother. The city looks more or less as we expected it to: most of the buildings are drab, grey and brown boxes. Rising above the rest, however, are three towers, each identical, formed in the image of Battersea Power Station, the grooves betraying their origin in Gilbert Scott’s design.³⁵ This surreal (if not surrealist) moment, where the landmark becomes, first, autonomous from itself (the brickwork detached from the chimneys, for instance), and second, repeats across the city suggests not the closure of Winston’s dream (or nightmare) but its expansion, such that it suffuses the space of the city, infests urban reality too. It is as if the city has itself been contorted, reshaped by dream-logic, the power station – and the totalitarian power it represents – now everywhere, its image repeating ad infinitum. The implication is clear: if Nature exists, for Orwell, as something outside the ambit of dystopian power – the kestrel flying over the gasworks – for Radford there is no escape.

Released in 1984, Radford’s film comes seven years after Pink Floyd’s Animals, whose cover art perhaps inspired Radford to use Battersea Power Station in his own Orwell adaptation. The album itself reworks Orwell’s allegory in Animal Farm: the lyrics portray the pigs as capitalists, not communists, for instance, and narrate the story of the pigs’ usurpation by sheep. The album cover, a photograph depicting a balloon pig flying above Battersea Power Station, modifies the Orwellian allegory again, for now its setting is not agricultural but industrial, the despotic swine lifted from Mr Jones’s farm, blown up, and attached by string to the looming infrastructure of coal power. If the windmill represents the threat of industrialisation within the pastoral setting of Orwell’s allegory, the photograph brings out this threat, gives it expression in the towering brickwork and smoking chimneys of the power station (Figure 4).³⁶

The effect of the image derives, most fundamentally, from its bathetic juxtaposition of the inflated capitalist pig and the great cathedral of bricks. The red tincture and the amplified contrast between the low sunlight angling in from the west and shadow covering the power station’s eastern flank makes the building itself sinister, portrays it as the source of its own dystopian power, distinct from that of the defanged Orwellian tyrant. Battersea Power Station is no longer mere infrastructure, bending before St Paul’s; it dominates the skyline, and the rest of the city shrinks into its shadow. Equally, in the very act of foregrounding the power station, the photograph cannot but register its senescence. An inspection of the smokestacks reveals that the station is operating at half capacity: fumes rise from the eastern chimneys, those of Battersea B, while Battersea A’s are inactive. In the same moment that the Animals artwork shifts the locus of dystopian power from the pig to the power station, in the same moment that it offers fossil fuel infrastructure as the symbol of that power, it indexes a mode of fossil capital in decline. It betrays a certain anachronism: the analogy between fossil power and political power is imprecise, late. The photograph’s clear spatial demarcation, according to which the power station organises the city around itself, coincides with a temporal unevenness, as the allegorical referent of the dystopia slides from the individual despot to the great avatar of industrial power, which is then itself shown to be running out of steam.

The Pink Floyd photograph holds additional interest for us because of its citation in Cuarón’s Children of Men, which completes the postmodern and postindustrial transformation of the Orwellian allegory that the album cover begins only unwittingly. The protagonist of Children of Men, Theo (Clive Owen), is visiting Battersea Power Station to obtain official papers from his high-ranking cousin. Cuarón’s establishing shot portrays the power station square on, the other side of a computer-generated bridge, which resembles, curiously, the Millennium Bridge connecting Bankside to St Paul’s. The balloon pig floats between the smokestacks, but Cuarón also nods to Radford’s Battersea in the colour palette, this having flipped from the verdant greens of St James’s Park, which Theo has just passed, to the austere, washed-out greys characteristic of Radford’s Oceania (Figure 5).

Yet if such a citation, alongside the armed guards, the checkpoint and the Alsatian, seems to suggest a dystopia of the industrialised, militarised, Orwellian type, Cuarón subverts our expectations with a cut to the power station’s interior. Theo’s Rolls Royce stops in a brightly lit room that some viewers will recognise as the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Now we see why Cuarón moved the Millennium Bridge along the river: Battersea is here Bankside. Meeting his cousin on the top floor, Theo finds Michelangelo’s David and Picasso’s Guernica held there, shielded from the vicissitudes of history (the cousin notes that they were unable to save Michelangelo’s Pietà). We glimpse again, now from the inside, the Pink Floyd pig, which has likewise become just another historic artefact. Cuarón’s, we are meant to conclude, is a postmodern dystopia in which the decommissioned powerhouses of industrial capitalism serve as museums for the elite. The Orwellian critique of totalitarianism has been recalibrated for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, at least in the West: the ‘War on Terror’, the destruction of the public sphere, the growth of defensive and gentrified urbanism and the ‘end of history’ are all evoked, in one way or another, in the Battersea scene.³⁷ It is thus precisely by repurposing Battersea Power Station – by picking up the thread that begins with Orwell and runs through Pink Floyd and then Radford – that Cuarón seeks to distinguish his dystopia from its forerunners, to articulate its contemporaneity and its specificity.³⁸

Of course, utopias and dystopias are replete with repurposed or refigured landmarks, often the source of a profound estrangement-effect. The trope can be traced back at least as far as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), in which the river Anyder, running through the capital, is a thinly veiled reconstruction of the Thames (though the Utopians built their London Bridge further downstream, more practically).³⁹ In News from Nowhere (1890), William Morris’s narrator discovers that the Houses of Parliament are now used, in part, for storing manure, while the utopian visitor of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) remarks how the ‘few old landmarks which remained’ in Boston intensified the strangeness of the new city for him, his memories of the old Boston blurring into the present one like ‘the faces of a composite photograph’.⁴⁰ In Nineteen Eighty-Four, by contrast, Winston laments the erasure of ‘[s]tatues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets’, severing Oceania’s link to England. This explains Winston’s interest in the ‘oranges and lemons’ nursery rhyme, whose invocation of St Clement’s and St Martin’s calls up ‘the illusion of hearing bells, the bells of a lost London’. St Martin’s, we learn, is now a propaganda museum, while Trafalgar Square has been renamed ‘Victory Square’, Big Brother replacing Nelson on the column. The National Gallery continues to serve its old purpose, though.⁴¹ The point is precisely the unavailability of the dual perspective of Bellamy’s protagonist – and, too, of the reader, for whom such moments might indeed create the impression of a ‘composite photograph’, holding present and future together and bringing out, thereby, the differences between their London and Winston’s. Read in this light, Cuarón’s Battersea is an effort to combine, in his composite picture, not just present and future, but Pink Floyd’s and Radford’s presentations of the power station as well, this moment in Children of Men supercharged with contextual and intertextual meaning.

Yet I have still not touched on the most significant aspect of Cuarón’s Battersea Power Station, namely its role in the film’s energy politics. Children of Men opens in 2027, eighteen years after all women became suddenly, inexplicably infertile. The end of biological reproduction has set in motion a process of social breakdown; particularly conspicuous is the mass incarceration and deportation of refugees. This constitutes the film’s dystopianism. But Children of Men has its utopian moment too, for Theo is recruited by a group of revolutionaries to help Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) – a Black woman who has become pregnant – escape Britain. Children of Men depicts Kee as a beacon of hope, an instance (several critics have noted) of reproductive futurism, tethering the future of humanity to the prospect of childbirth.⁴² Crucially, this background of universal infertility reveals the place, within the film’s symbolic structure, of the museum at Battersea, which represents a correlative cultural infertility. As if to emphasise the point, near the end of the film, Cuarón recreates the Pietà in the midst of battle, the lost sculpture restored to a living context. Great art, Cuarón seems to suggest, belongs in the place of political struggle, not cloistered behind the brickwork of a renovated power station. Indeed, it is precisely the heat, noise and energy of the billowing power station that confers the deadness, sterility and inertia on the exclusive art gallery.⁴³ Drawing from our association of the power station with social and historical progress, Children of Men finds the defunct and then repurposed building apt as a symbol of cultural stagnation.⁴⁴ The film articulates its reproductive futurism in and through a kind of fossil futurism.

The film’s futurism of the past, its nostalgia for the moment of coal power, opens up, finally, a new way of understanding the prevalence of Battersea Power Station in science-fiction films in particular and British and American cinema in general. We have observed Radford’s and Cuarón’s use of the power station negatively, as an emblem for what is dystopian about their dystopias: in the first, the oppressive psychology of totalitarianism, and in the second, the social ills of ‘late’ or postmodern capitalism. The power station is a tool for critique, a ‘composite photograph’ positing the dystopia, unnervingly, within the present, within the materiality of the landmark or monument itself. At the same time, it is difficult to shake the feeling that these films portray Battersea Power Station for an altogether different reason – namely, because it is a kind of spectacle in its own right, an attraction, exerting its own pull, soliciting a tourist gaze. Cuarón’s location manager, Michael Sharp, speaks of the building in such terms. Echoing the teratological metaphors that abound in discussions of Battersea Power Station, Sharp describes it as ‘a great beast that dominates everything around’, one fulfilling the production’s desire for ‘strong images’ that would ‘represent London […] authentic London’.⁴⁵

But perhaps we can be still more specific, and identify more precisely whence the building’s appeal derives, beyond the awed acknowledgement of its scale. In his short essay, ‘History: A Retro Scenario’ (1981), Jean Baudrillard reads the profusion of historical films in Hollywood as compensation for precisely that loss of historicity that Children of Men documents. Yet it is not any history that reappears on the screen: by analogy with the Freudian analysis of fetishism, according to which the subject fetishises, precisely, the last thing they witnessed prior to the traumatic moment (in Freud’s example, the child’s discovery of their mother’s castration), Baudrillard argues that there is, in the cinema, a privileging of the era immediately preceding our own ‘irreferential’ one – hence ‘the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro’.⁴⁶ These ‘historical’ films do not merely reconstruct the past, moreover, with greater or lesser accuracy to the moment in question: their fetishistic histories are ‘hyperreal’, more real than those past realities themselves, somehow, and more authentic.⁴⁷

Could we not venture a similar explanation for the appeal of Battersea Power Station to the films considered here? One of the last great monuments of industrial England, its exterior, Janus-faced, looks back to classical antiquity and forwards with futurism. Its earliest cinematic portrayals, by Hitchcock and Boulting, conceptualise it as a site of political antagonism – the place, in particular, of communist sabotage, the red scare. A coal-fired power station, it cannot but recall the 1980s miners’ strikes, the open flame of class struggle, extinguished by Thatcher. This is all to say that Battersea Power Station was born into the stream of history, into the cut and thrust of warring political and economic systems, which its image cannot but conjure up. If the building then serves Radford and Cuarón as a tool for the critique of totalitarianism (albeit of distinct kinds), is this not because that very association exerts, at the same time, a deep attraction – not for totalitarianism itself, but for its moment? Does Battersea not appeal to us because it stands as indissoluble proof that there was once such a thing as history, the certainty of historical change? What draws us to the great cathedral of power if not the desire to find what we know we have lost irretrievably?