With its four distinctive chimneys Battersea Power Station remains an iconic part of the London Skyline, the building says "London" much as Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament or Buckingham Palace do. Although it looks like, and is, one building it was built as two separate power stations, Battersea A, built in the 1930's and Battersea B built in the 1950's. Among its claims to fame is the fact that it is Europe's largest brick built building. In 1983 the power station was decommissioned and the great boilers went cold, the noise of the mighty turbines fell silent and smoke no longer billowed from the chimneys. When it closed the question was "what do you do with such a huge redundant building?" Several schemes came and went and the building was eventually granted Grade 2 listed status meaning that it couldn't be demolished and that its owners had to maintain and repair it, the biggest headache for potential developers being that the four chimneys were suffering from serious corrosion and were becoming dangerous. I often wondered what it would be like inside. Then in 2013 I found that as part of the Open House London scheme the new owners would open part of the building. Looking at the building from the railway line does not give any real idea of the scale of the building, but once inside you cannot help but be impressed by the sheer scale of the place. We were only allowed into the boiler room and could look across into the vast turbine halls, the transformer and control rooms were deemed unsafe for a large number of visitors without safety equipment. But where we were allowed to go still gave a lasting impression of the huge scale of the building. Over the two days it was open somewhere around 40,000 people had the opportunity to look inside but there were reports of many thousands who queued for hours and still didn't make it to the entrance before closing time. I just feel very fortunate, even honoured, to have been one of those who was able to get inside .

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