Battersea Power Station — Pink Floyd's Animals

Battersea Power Station on the south bank of the Thames — a coal-fired power plant built in two phases between 1929 and 1955, with its four distinctive chimneys rising above the river — became permanently associated with Pink Floyd through its appearance on the cover of Animals in 1977. The cover photograph showed an inflatable pink pig tethered to the southern chimneys of the station, floating above the Thames. During the photo shoot, the pig broke free from its moorings and drifted into the flight path of aircraft approaching Heathrow Airport before eventually coming down in Kent, where a farmer reportedly received it without enthusiasm. The image was one of the most memorable album covers in rock history.

Animals is Pink Floyd's most explicitly political album — a reimagining of Orwell's Animal Farm in which dogs, pigs, and sheep represent the predatory, the powerful, and the compliant strata of contemporary society. Roger Waters's lyrics, written at a moment of severe cynicism about both the music industry and British political life, deployed the power station's industrial grandeur as a backdrop for a vision of capitalism as organised brutality. The station's vacant monumentality — it had been decommissioned in 1983 — made it one of the most photographed buildings in London: simultaneously beautiful and ominous, a piece of Victorian civic confidence that the twentieth century had left stranded.

Battersea Power Station is currently being redeveloped as a mixed-use residential and commercial district. The Apple store in its turbine hall opened in 2021 and the surrounding development includes flats, restaurants, and public spaces. The transformation of the power station that served as the visual backdrop for Pink Floyd's most savage record into a luxury property development has a certain Orwellian quality that Waters himself has commented on. The building is now publicly accessible and the view of its chimneys from the Thames continues to draw Pink Floyd fans.