page_title: Battersea Power Station
section_title: In popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Battersea Power Station / In popular culture
caption_attribution_description: English: The Battersea Power Station is the largest brick building in Europe from across the Thames.
context_page_description: Battersea Power Station is a decommissioned coal-fired power station, located on the south bank of the River Thames, in Nine Elms, Battersea, in the London Borough of Wandsworth. It was built by the London Power Company to the design of Leonard Pearce, Engineer in Chief to the LPC, and CS Allott & Son Engineers. The architects were J Theo Halliday and Giles Gilbert Scott. The station is one of the world's largest brick buildings and notable for its original, Art Deco interior fittings and decor.
  The building comprises two power stations, built in two stages in a single building. Battersea A Power Station was built between 1929–35 and Battersea B Power Station to its east, between 1937–41, when construction was paused owing to the worsening effects of the Second World War. The building was completed in 1955. "Battersea B" was built to a near identical design to "Battersea A" which provided the iconic four-chimney structure.
  "Battersea A" was decommissioned in 1975. In 1980 the whole structure was given Grade II listed status; "Battersea B" shut three years later. In 2007 its listed status was upgraded to Grade II*.
context_section_description: Battersea Power Station has become an iconic structure, being featured in or used as a shooting location for many films, television programmes, music videos and video games. One of the station's earliest appearances on film was in Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage, which shows the station before the construction of the B station. The interior of the A station's control room was used for the "Find The Fish" segment of Monty Python's 1983 film ,The Meaning of Life.
  The station makes a brief appearance in The Beatles' second film, Help!, in 1965.
  It also appears during the first daylight attack on London sequence in the 1969 movie Battle of Britain, in the movie as in real life used as a navigational landmark by the attacking Luftwaffe bombers. More recently, in October 2007, the power station was used as a filming location for the Batman movie The Dark Knight. The station's stripped, empty interior was used as a setting for a burnt-out warehouse.
  A close-up of the station can be seen as stand-in for the exterior of a London railway station in Michael Radford's 1984 film, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
  The station has appeared numerous times in the long-running British science fiction series Doctor Who. It appeared briefly in the story The Dalek Invasion of Earth in 1964, which saw the station in the 22nd century with two chimneys demolished, and a nearby nuclear reactor dome.
  One of the likely reasons for the power station's worldwide recognition is its appearance on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1977 album, Animals, which sold millions of copies worldwide. The cover photograph showed the power station with the group's inflatable pink pig floating above it. The photographs were taken in early December 1976 and the inflatable pig was made by the German company Ballon Fabrik and Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw. The inflatable pig was tethered to one of the power station's southern chimneys, but broke loose from its moorings and, to the astonishment of pilots in approaching planes, drifted into the flight path of Heathrow Airport. Police helicopters tracked its course, until it landed in Kent. Video footage of the photoshoot was used in the promotional video for the song "Pigs on the Wing". The album was officially launched at an event at the power station.
  The opening sequence of the Agatha Christie's Poirot television series, set in 1936 England, features a stylized rendering of the A Station, accentuating its iconic Art Deco architecture.
  
  In recent years, the power station has been used for various sporting, cultural and political events. Since 22 August 2009, the station has been used as a venue on the Red Bull X-Fighters season. On 13 April 2010 the station was used as the venue for the launch of the Conservative Party's 2010 general election manifesto. Between 6 and 7 May 2010, the station site was used by Sky News in their coverage of the election.
  Recently, Spanish poet Eduardo Moga has written about the building; and a picture of it by Joel P. has been used as the cover for another Spanish writer's short tale: David Ferrer's La verdad sobre Mr. Henry Baker (cuento de Navidad).
caption: The station has become an iconic structure and has been featured in many forms of culture in its more than eighty-year history.
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