When workers broke ground on the intended site of a Power Station at Battersea on the south bank of the Thames in the summer of 1929, they triggered consternation from the great and the good of the British establishment. Curators at the Tate just across the river winced that fumes might imperil the collection. Members of the House of Lords feared that the predominantly westerly wind might carry sulphurous vapours into the chamber, and that the great clouds belched forth from its chimneys might rot away the stonework of the Palace of Westminster.

Others were concerned that the massive power station would ruin the view from the river. They chided that—for propriety’s sake—the chimneys shouldn’t be taller than St Paul’s cathedral. The London Power Company’s (LPC) in-house architect, J Theo Halliday, had planned out a technically meticulous and vast scheme for two turbine halls, with four chimneys built over two phases. Dr S L Pearce, engineer-in-chief of the LPC, promised a journalist from The Observer that ‘the new station shall be one of the most imposing buildings on the banks of the Thames,’ which sounds like a threat.

Happily for the LPC, any aesthetic concerns were soon quashed by their appointment of Giles Gilbert Scott as the consulting architect. Scott was a wunderkind and scion of an architectural dynasty. He won the competition to design Liverpool Anglican Cathedral at the age of just 22. Scott had developed a discriminating ability to combine the sublime scale demanded by modernity with certain subtle touches of historical precedent, a skill which led one reader of The Listener to describe Scott’s work as ‘essentially modern, but not ultra-modern.’

Modernity without modernism, electrification that doesn’t endanger the view from the Tate—this was the subtext of the disciplining historicism in the design of Battersea Power Station. Scott himself wished that ‘Modernism had come by evolution rather than by revolution’, a peculiarly British compromise that speaks to anxiety about the political connotations of outright modernist architecture in fractious interwar Britain.

Scott used subtle but potent lashings of historicism to make the Power Station less actively threatening. The fluting on the chimneys render them into sublimated columns; expressionist geometries and voids lend abstract ordering of those bricky bastion walls. Like his design for the K2 telephone kiosk, this refracted classicism owes much to Scott’s time as a trustee of the Soane Museum, John Soane being an architect every bit as interested in the massy, spatial, and abstracting potential of classical architecture.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that Battersea Power Station has so often played a prominent role in fictional depictions of a specifically English sort of totalitarianism. It speaks to massive imposition by mannered consensus. In Richard Loncraine’s 1995 adaptation of Richard III, the wreck of the power station pulls together with the haughty art deco of Shell Mex House and louche Waughish excess to evoke a very British, slightly spivvy sort of fascism. The Power Station also featured in Michael Radford’s dour and Eurythmics-soundtracked adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 as a bastion of Ingsoc, the aesthetic of similarly abstracted classicism at Charles Holden’s Senate House having inspired Orwell while his wife Eileen worked there for the Ministry of Information.

Just as compelling was Battersea Power Station’s role in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, as the ‘Ark of the Arts’, where a fascist British state piles up ‘rescued’ masterpieces while the world burns. Particularly ironic among the saved works is Picasso’s Guernica, denuded of any content or anguish in its objectification by fascists. As Mark Fisher wrote of Guernica’s role in Children of Men:

Like its Battersea hanging space in the film, the painting is accorded ‘iconic’ status only when it is deprived of any possible function or context.

So what can we make of the ‘iconic’ status of Battersea Power Station now that it has been transformed into a shopping centre with luxury flats on top? What does it mean that Uniqlo’s huge shop inside Turbine Hall A is giving away merch emblazoned with the Power Station’s silhouette for free to influencers?

The Power Station appeared so frequently as a movie location because after forty years of generating one-fifth of London’s electricity, it began to be decommissioned in the ’70s and ’80s. It sat empty for thirty years, during which time innumerable schemes were proposed for its rehabilitation. Arch-Thatcherite and proprietor of Alton Towers John Broome bought the site from the nationalised Central Electricity Generating Board for a mere £1.5 million in 1987, an archetypal bit of neoliberal family-silver-selling. Broome’s proposal was for a central London theme park, but local voices suspected he only ever intended to carve it up for commercial development.

In the mid-’80s the Battersea Power Station Community Group had proposed an alternative development plan, providing community amenities, a museum, and council housing. The group’s work was defunded after the abolition of the GLC, but many local voices, not least the artist Brian Barnes, continued the call for community-led redevelopment. Meanwhile Polly Toynbee scoffed in The Observer in 1987 that the protestors against development were ‘often far too political’, in a critique typically dripping with condescension. For Toynbee, left-wing community organisers with their insistence on decent unionised jobs for the community and public transport investment were naïve and uncouth in their unwillingness to accept the only realistic outcome: rabid commercialisation.

With a sense of inevitability, then, we are left today with Battersea Power Station totally overdetermined by the realpolitik of the London property market. It is a sort of crass, vulgar commercialisation that can’t even summon up the noblesse oblige to offer meaningful public amenities; instead, we get Bluewater in the Turbine Hall. The scheme has admirably preserved some of the most beautiful details of the original building, with Turbine Hall A truly a brilliant achievement of restoration and retention. But I just can’t get over the fact that this crowning achievement of interwar architecture is now home to a branch of Lululemon. The imposition of these commercial units, with their language of post-industrial chic matte-black girders, make the least successful parts of the restoration feel like a steroidally overgrown All Saints.

Aside from the Westgate-ification of the Turbine Halls, the biggest affront comes with the piling-up of luxury real estate on top of the Power Station. These cash-grabs poke their heads above the flank of the building, a thin and insipid line of glass with only a passing thought to form or silhouette. The most expensive penthouse villa fetches £18 million on the private market, while the broader residential scheme has just nine percent affordable housing, all rammed up against the railway line. The project has proven the power of capital to bend even basic geography around it, with developers winning the right to count the newly opened Northern Line extension as Zone 1, even though you have to go through Zone 2 to get there. Meanwhile the rest of the Vauxhall Nine Elms and Battersea Regeneration Zone is marred by the segregation of ‘affordable’ housing residents from their neighbours through Poor Doors that exclude access to community amenities.

The tragedy and the bathos of the redevelopment reaches a peak when you walk out onto the Thameside terrace in front of the Power Station. Across the river stands the slab blocks of Powell and Moya’s Churchill Gardens, a vast post-war social housing estate, once communally-heated by the hot water run-off from the boiler rooms pumped under the Thames. The luxury blocks by Foster and Gehry which crowd round the Power Station and occlude its vistas seem so vainglorious by comparison. Like much else in London, the neighbourhood lies prostrate before the property market, willing to render up its history and its community on the altar of private development. There’s only one reasonable response to the enormities that have been committed here: municipalise the lot.