Battersea Power Station..after the rain!

Despite the heavy rain I went with a friend to Battersea Power Station today as planned. We walked from Queenstown Road station through Battersea Park and got soaked!, 
However after a nice lunch at Megan’s we went into the newly opened shopping centre. Outside there is already a functioning ice rink…interestingly it seems to be sponsored by Jo Mallone as in the blip. Lots more wooden kiosks/ huts were being put up for selling goods and food presumably. 

Inside is vast…lots of shops a mixture of high end, high street and lots of restaurants. Today it was not busy but at weekends apparently it is packed. We saw one of the Control Rooms with all the old dials, switches etc…you have to go into one of the restaurants to see this. The other Control Room is bookable for private functions but not available for the public to see.
 The signage was quite poor but there is a good display giving the history of the power station with photos. A couple of facts I thought interesting….in 1940 during the war only half of the present structure was built, so only two chimneys…RAF pilots used the plumes of white vapour from the chimneys to guide them home in the mist. The Luftwaffe also used the plumes for navigation which explains why the Power Station was not bombed! By 1955 the fourth chimney and the second stage was completed and apparently the space inside the main boiler house is so vast that it would be possible to fit  St Pauls Cathedral within the space.

There is a lift which., for a fee, takes you to the top of one of the chimneys. We decided not to do this today.

Interesting to visit but I don’t think I need to go again very soon!

Earlier I booked a Christmas delivery with Tesco. They had started letting people book at 6am….when I logged on at 8am I was 296,006 in the queue with a wait time of about an hour!! I find it difficult to believe there were really over a quarter of a million people trying to book??? It did take about an hour but I did book a slot for 22nd December! We never did online orders before COVID and Tesco was the first one I could get to deliver so have just carried on periodically as it’s good for boring things like washing liquid and some tins and freezer foods etc etc. We still buy fresh food in person usually,