Blackwall Point Power Station – notes and sources

RIVER WAY

BLACKWALL POINT POWER STATION

Summary Report

The first Blackwall Point Power Station was built in 1900 and extended in 1906 for the South Metropolitan Electric Light and Power Company Ltd. The site adjoined to the south the South Metropolitan Gas Company’s East Greenwich Gasworks. The power station was evidently a small facility generating at 3000 volts alternating current. It was replaced in 1947-52, the work planned and commenced by the South Metropolitan Company, but completed after nationalization under the British Electricity Authority. The site was cleared c1987.

Derelict remains in the 1990s of an entrance gate to the power station

The later station was a small and compact power station on a 3.5-acre site. Its main buildings were steel framed with brick and glass cladding. There was a tall box-like boiler house with a low engine room on its south side, a switch house to the west, and a single tall reinforced-concrete chimney. Architecturally it was an early if pedestrian manifestation of an anti-monumental functionalist approach whereby the layout of plant dictated the external form of the building. There were three pulverised-coal fired boilers and three 30 MW turbo- altemators made by English Electric.

Sources

D K Cross, ‘London Power Stations, 1979’, Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society Newsletter, no. 67, 1979.

Greater London Record Office, LCC/MIN/12,701, London County Council Special Committee on Electricity Supply, Committee Papers, 1912.

National Power Picture Library, photographs 1952-1985.

H V Pugh, ‘The Generation of Electricity in the London Area’, Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, cv, 1957, pp. 484-502.

Report by Peter Guillery

May 1995

THE POWER STATIONS OF THE LOWER THAMES

September 1995

Crown Copyright

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