Lost for over a decade, Battersea’s last remaining industrial heritage cranes are languishing in pieces at an abandoned landfill site rather than being restored as promised. Despite being protected as part of the Grade II listed power station, these rare riverside features face an uncertain future as developers continue to delay their return.
The Thames was once lined with a forest of cranes, which were central to London’s status as a city trading with the world. Battersea was no exception, with factories, warehouses, and docks lining most of the river from Vauxhall to Wandsworth, turning out all manner of things from candles and crucibles to flour and glucose. As the city moved on, the cranes started to melt away, gradually at first but then increasingly quickly as the industrial riverside caught the eye of property developers.
Most were unceremoniously scrapped, but as we got down the last few, Londoners started to recognise their value as the last witnesses to a major part of the city’s history – and we have late-1980s developments to thank for the preservation of a handful of cranes in Canary Wharf, Silvertown and Canada Water.
And a couple at Battersea Power Station – where particularly large and powerful travelling cranes were built on the jetty, to lift coal from barges in to a huge coal bunker in front of the power station, from where it was put in to conveyors. Battersea Power Station was actually quite a late arrival to the Thames crane game, with its two large travelling cranes being built alongside the two wings of the main power station, in 1936 and 1947.
They were both made by Stothert & Pitt of Bath, famous UK crane makers who built hundreds of cranes that once stood along both sides of the Thames, as well as around the country and further afield – they were described as ‘building cranes for the world’ (and they’re are still in business – making spares and aftermarket support for all their dockside and offshore cranes that are still in operation).
Our photos here are of a model of the power station from when it was still running, and show how these two cranes worked. Barges full of coal would moor up next to the jetty, the cranes would lower great big scoops in to them and lift coal out of the barges, and then drop it on to a pair of hoppers (also on rails) which then transferred coal to a conveyor that ran along the jetty, and – via a series more conveyors and another giant travelling crane – sent it to either a large store in the area between the power station and the river (where the park is now but which would have been a series of big hills of coal) or up to the power station boilers. The cranes were hugely powerful, and carried on unloading up to 240 tonnes of coal hour into the power station until it closed for good in 1983.
John Broome took over – with plans to turn the power station in to a theme park, building on his success at Alton Towers. He may have only paid the relative pittance of £1.5 million for the power station, but he spent £45 million of his own money on a huge programme of works, removing asbestos and much of the machinery in and around the site (as well as a large part of the original roof) and shoring up the foundations.
This saw the big travelling crane over the coal storage area removed and destroyed in the late 1980s. The coal conveyors also vanished, although the space where the conveyor fed in to the riverside wall of the power station is still there, and is now the window of one of the flats in the power station (which – having one of the largest windows facing the river – was rumoured to be the one bought by bear Grylls).
All that was left after the big 1980s clearout was the two travelling cranes on the jetty. They used to be able to travel along rails covering the full length of the jetty, but only short sections of the rails remain in place. John’s plan was to keep them as a key historic feature, linking the power station to the river. Obviously that plan all fell apart, work ground to a halt in 1987, and the whole place spent a few decades in the wilderness. Your author took the photo below in 2007, when our cranes were still standing proud, if a little wistfully, over the wasteland that surrounded the power station.
Battersea, and London, has changed a lot since 1987. Following the demolition of the last few riverside warehouses near the heliport further west, our two cranes are now the very last trace of Battersea’s riverside heritage. Fortunately they’re now part of the listed building (the Historic England listing for the Power Station describes them as ‘parts of the original complex and now rare riverside features’). So they should be safe, right?
There’s just one small problem – which is that Battersea’s big cranes aren’t currently at Battersea. Worse – there’s a bit of a mystery about their current whereabouts.
In 2014, both cranes were temporarily dismantled and removed from the jetty by the developers of Battersea Power Station. This was part of the linked project to extend the Northern Line to Battersea – the idea was that the earth dug out from three kilometres of new tube tunnels & stations (as well as works on the Battersea site) would be taken out to the pier on a modern conveyor belt system, and put in to a barge – and then floated off to Goshems Farm in East Tilbury in the Thames estuary where it was used to cover over an area of poor quality, polluted land and create new farmland. A clever reuse of the pier, and also an ingenious way of avoiding many thousands of lorry journeys through central London.
The cranes were taken by barge to the Port of Tilbury, which remains one of London’s largest ports, and the place where most of the things that are not ‘standard’ containers arrive. At the time the line was that the cranes were being taken to Tilbury for safe storage and specialist restoration; and that they were expected to return to the new Riverside Park three years later in 2017.
The cranes definitely made it to Tilbury – there are a few photos of them being unloaded. But from then on things went very quiet. 2017 came and went without even a whisper of the cranes’ restoration.
The new riverside park opened, the power station opened, the new riverside boat service opened, the Northern Line opened, even the pier the cranes once worked on opened to the public thanks to new footbridges and railings. It was all done to a very high standard – with a lot of care taken to preserve the remaining heritage features of the power station. But …
…where were the restored cranes?
OK, so maybe there was a bit of a delay. There was clearly work to do on the cranes – they needed rustproofing, a proper repaint, and probably also some works to ensure their long term preservation. At least they were safe in the hands of specialist restorers, and they would no doubt come back to join the other preserved historical aspects in pride of place on the Battersea pier.
Or maybe not. Because more than ten years later, there’s still no sign of the cranes. We got curious about what was going on a while back, and so did a fair few others. You can’t just wander in to the Port of Tilbury – but you can get a feel for what is inside, thanks to Google! And after a certain amount of digging around, we established that the cranes have indeed been in ‘storage’ for many years at the Port of Tilbury. The two cranes are more or less in the middle of the photo above, in and among the scrap metal mountains and heaps of gravel and aggregate.
Unfortunately it’s not especially good ‘storage’. It would maybe be fairer to say that they seem to have been left in a hundred or so pieces spread along a thin strip between the large heap of gravel and a service road within the port.
The closer we look, the more we can see the state of the cranes – all the pieces are there, but this doesn’t look great for the promised ‘careful restoration’ – which we imagine means some stripping of old paint, some painting with rust resistant paint, maybe new glazing, and making sure the structures were able to continue as one of Battersea’s key riverside features.
Some might say it looks more like the cranes have been there for a decade mouldering away – without any restoration at all!
The actual location of that storage is here – they are, at the time of writing, visible in the current Google maps aerial photo view, along the side of the gravel storage heap.
A bit of further digging led to some photos taken from the ground. Would this reveal that at least some work was underway?
Oh dear. This is one of the big pulleys, which you’ll recognise from the photos at the top of this post. Not looking too good.
Blimey O’Riley… not looking good at all. This is, or was, one of the main support legs, plus what looks like some old spray cans, some plastic sheeting, some unknown manky green stuff, and some weeds. There are also some worryingly brutal cutting lines in the steelwork where the cranes were chopped up for transport and storage.
The situation’s not much better when it comes to the operators’ cabs, which are also in a rather frightening condition (and we should note that these four photos aren’t ours – they were posted on X by @dsb_malloy).
Fortunately we’re not alone in being a bit worried about this key bit of Battersea heritage.
The Twentieth Century Society, indefatigable campaigners to save the architectural heritage of the last century, are also on the case. In 2023 they published an article exploring the mystery of the cranes, and their case worker got on the case to try and work out what was happening.
They spoke to the Port of London authority, who confirmed that the crane components were still in storage at Tilbury Docks, but who also let slip that that to their knowledge no restoration work had yet been undertaken! The society also contacted a spokesperson for Battersea Power Station Ltd, who issued a short statement on their plans for the restoration and return of the listed cranes:
‘To date, we have been focused on successfully opening the restored Power Station which welcomed the public for the first time in October 2022 and since then, we have introduced new heritage items throughout Power Station Park, such as original turbine equipment and segments from the original chimneys. The cranes remain in storage at the port of Tilbury in Essex, and we will be bringing forward a plan for these in the future.’
Fair enough, the developers been busy, there was a lot to do on the power station, and we’ve all been impressed by the results of their work, which has rescued the main power station building from the last chance saloon, and created a thriving new destination.
But reading between the lines it’s clear that the 20th Century Society weren’t especially impressed at being told that even making a plan for the cranes, nearly a decade after they’d been shipped off, was still ‘in the future’ – let alone actually doing any of the promised restoration work. They noted that they cranes are a key listed structure of the wider Battersea site and a rare original industrial feature, and the Society called on the developers to expedite their plans for the restoration and return of the cranes.
But wait, because it gets worse.
A decade exposed to the elements in a mangled heap in Tilbury wasn’t great for the cranes, but they were at least in a secure perimeter in a busy port. Since then, word has reached us that the cranes aren’t in Tilbury any more…
So where are they? No one knew – and it took a bit of minor detective work to find out.
We spotted an unrelated post on X that shows the laying of some new tarmac. It’s definitely a tidy effort, and who doesn’t like the satisfying sight of a road roller making a crisp clean new surface that’s immediately walkable and driveable… But in this case what we’re interested in is not the fine resurfacing work, but what can be seen in the background:
Yep – it’s Battersea’s cranes. We’d recognise those bits of tangled steelwork anywhere! More detective work ensued, to try and track down where this new location actually is. Helpfully there’s a dock crane in the background labelled ‘Cory Environmental’, which pins it down to London – where Cory, who grew a major business transporting coal up the Thames (where, in a curious twist, they used to supply the coal to Battersea), but who now specialise in transporting rubbish down the river – have much of their business.
The unusual design of the cranes helps too, because there aren’t many of those cranes left either.
We’ve pinned it down to an abandoned landfill (maps link) at Mucking Marsh, way down the Thames. Not many people have ever heard of this and even fewer have been there, but many of us have contributed to it because it’s the site where millions of tonnes of London’s rubbish got dumped over the years – this was one of the largest landfills in western Europe. The aerial photo below shows the spot.
Mucking marsh landfill is a very remote spot. The dump closed in 2010, and it’s now a mix of bird sanctuaries, big skies, and simply empty space – you can’t really build anything on it because – like most old landfills – the land is slowly subsiding, and the rubbish beneath is still making methane.
Now other than that bit of rather smart resurfacing work we saw earlier, this doesn’t feel like the sort of place anyone is about to do any specialist crane repair work – there’s nothing there except the three dock cranes that used to offload waste from barges, no buildings to safely store tools, not a lot of power, no water supply, nothing.
So why are the cranes way out here in the wilderness? The leading theory is that this is cheaper ‘storage’ than the Port of Tilbury, not least as the Port is within a security perimeter whereas this, realistically speaking, is a field. Maybe the space by the gravel heaps in Tilbury was needed for something more active.
But maybe more likely is that this super-obscure location just another step to hoping we all forget about our cranes, or that they get vandalised to the point where they can be declared ‘beyond repair’.
Another photo of the cranes emerged a few months later, in August last year, suggesting the cranes were still there – there’s not so much clue as to the location other than there being a tree in the background (so clearly not Tilbury docks) – it may also be Mucking Wharf Landfill although there’s not a lot there either in the way of trees. Condition of the cranes again leaving rather a lot to be desired.
This part of the old landfill is not somewhere you can officially get to – it’s deep in to private land, even if in practice this is largely left to itself most of the time – the end of the road at the access checkpoint is shown below.
Which really raises the question – is this remote and forgotten landfill the end of the road for Battersea’s cranes?
We hope not, but it’s time we all made a bit more noise about them before we lose them forever, because this ongoing neglect of listed local landmarks just won’t do. It seems no work has yet been done on restoration, even though they have now been off site for over a decade, and were supposed to be back, on site and restored, in 2017. They’re a core part of a listed building, and a pretty famous one at that, one of London’s most recognised buildings.
This feels like a bit of a screw up by a developer who have otherwise not really put a step wrong, and who have to their credit used the heritage in the main building wisely.
I’m not really sure why the cranes fell out of favour: they’re not huge, renovation isn’t a particularly big or pricey affair (we’re talking safety check on the various bolts and struts, bit of sandblasting, a few panes of glass, some red oxide primer and a couple of coats of grey paint really), and they’d make quite the landmark for the tourist trail.
Perhaps importantly, the cranes are easily compatible with the food and drink offer that’s being developed on the pier – which has been launched as an outdoor extension of the Arcade food court. In the original design for the redeveloped power station, the cranes and hoppers act as features on the boardwalk, and we don’t see any obvious reason why this wouldn’t still work.
They’d also make the pier – which already sees huge crowds arrive by boat on the weekend, and even more arrive from the west alongside the riverside pathway – even more of a landmark feature.
The power station as a whole came off the ‘heritage at risk’ register four years ago, and the work by and large has been solid and carefully thought through. Killing off our cranes through wilful neglect (“oh no, they’re too far gone to be reused now…”) seems to be a real mistake.
You only need to look at how the UK’s other heritage cranes have fared. Glasgow’s Finneston Crane, for example, has become an emblem of the city, guaranteed to feature in some form or other alongside the tartans and saltires in any tacky souvenir shop –
Bristol’s M Shed Cargo cranes, built in the 1950s by the same people as Battersea’s cranes and pictured below, have become a core tourist attraction of a similarly maritime city – and part of the adjacent museum’s core collection, drawing crowds to the M Sheds and the south of the dock; these cranes were listed in 2022. Saving the cranes wasn’t a walk in the park there either, and there was a battle to save the Bristol cranes back in 1974 when the docks were closed, as the Bristol Museums report:
Many of the remaining cranes were sold for scrap, including four of the eight that served M Shed. A group of local people recognised that the cranes were an important link to Bristol’s past and set up the pressure group City Docks Ventures in order to save those that remained. It was a very close thing, but City Docks Ventures managed to buy back two of the cranes from the scrap merchant they had been sold to, and Bristol City Council bought the remaining two.
Back to Battersea’s suffering cranes – the core point here is that Battersea Power Station development Corporation Ltd need to do the right thing, get their act together, and actually get the cranes back where they belong, as part of the listed building.
We don’t want to become a repeat of the dismal scenes in Manchester where their last two cranes were summarily demolished in 2013 due to a lack of Council funding (and, frankly, imagination in Salford’s Council). With over 22 million tourists already having visited the power station since its reopening, getting these features back is a no brainer. Restoring these is hardly rocket science from a technical perspective, the quayside’s ready to have them back, and considering the scale of the whole development the cost of renovating the cranes ids pocket change.
But regular readers won’t be surprised to hear we’ve also gone and had a dig through the planning documents to work out what’s gone on here and whose responsibility it is to sort this mess out. The full details are in the box below – and you probably only want to venture there if you have an interest in planning detail! – but the summary is that this is in the power station developers’ hands (even though TfL also have some role, as they used the jetty for a fair few years as part of the Northern Line construction work), and that the process is characterised by a long series of mysterious delays and vagueness.
Ultimately these cranes are supposed to be put back – the commitments have been made, and it’s a requirement of the works to the listed building – but, as of yet, there is no sign of any real action or even planning for how they will be returned.
We asked Battersea Power Station Development Company about the status of, and plans for, the cranes, and their spokesperson said:
“The cranes remain in storage and we will be bringing forward a plan for these in the future. In the meantime, Battersea Power Station has appointed maritime consulting engineers to conduct regular condition reports to ensure they are being stored correctly.
Celebrating the industrial heritage of Battersea Power Station has always been a key priority throughout the redevelopment of the site and is evident in the transformational restoration of the Grade II* listed building itself, where we have preserved as many of the original features as possible. We have also continued to develop our heritage programme to provide new ways for visitors to connect with the landmark’s rich history, including the launch of the official guided tour of the Power Station, which offers visitors rare access into Control Room A, and the installation of heritage elements in Power Station Park, such as original turbine equipment and segments from the original chimneys.”
Fingers crossed the cranes’ stay at the very outer fringe of London is only a temporary one. But in the meantime please do spread the word about the cranes – as the more people know about them, remember them, and care about them, the more likely they are to one day make a return to Battersea. The last thing we want to hear is that they’ve been deemed ‘beyond rescue’ and disappeared forever.
The small print: The long, complicated planning history of the cranes
We’ve dug through the planning process, and it’s complex! The first big planning permission setting out the commitments to preserving and restoring the heritage elements dates back to 2004 (case 2004/1367 – these are all available in full detail at wandsworth.gov.uk/planning). This was a big planning case, covering most of the power station development (we remember seeing the paper version at the time, which was heaps of ring binders).
It explained that the existing jetty would be retained and developed to provide facilities for riverboat transport, with new bridges going out to the pier, and boarding piers for three boats at once added on the outer side of the jetty. Most of the jetty surface would remain open as a notional extension of the riverside walk with sheltered seating. A new two-storey building, raised above the jetty, would provide ticket, information kiosks and toilet facilities for passengers, with a cafe on the top level. The two cranes would be refurbished and retained as features. The image below shows the sort of layout that was envisaged.
This was followed by a listed building consent (case 2004/4645) seeking approval for the removal of the grab buckets from the cranes, which was approved on the condition that a detailed photographic record be made of the jetty and structures and sent to the local authority as well as English Heritage (and the record is available online, it’s a high quality 64-page report). A somewhat grainy scan of it is available online. Another condition was that “following removal the grab buckets should be stored in a safe position on site in a location to be notified in writing to the local planning authority and shall not be broken up or disposed of without the prior written approval of the local planning authority”.
A couple of years later another listed building consent (case 2006/3346) was granted for repairs, alterations and additions to the jetty to provide pedestrian access, riverboat and associated facilities including the installation of a new pontoon with covered ramp and stair access; bridge links to the land, structures to provide ticketing, toilet, information/educational, and allied facilities; new surfaces, and associated works. The Power Station site changed hands to at the end of December 2006 through the purchase of the owning companies.
The big planning permission moment (from the perspective of the cranes) came a few years after this (case 2009/3577, approved in 2011 – which was part of a bundle of four applications covering the whole development), which allowed the dismantling for the power station work-
“Repair, restoration, installation of structures on, and other works to the jetty in association with its conversion to provide pedestrian access and a river transport facility including a passenger terminal building, a pontoon with waiting shelter, ramps, new surfaces, restoration of the cranes and hoppers and associated structures, bridge links to the land; and, works to the river wall including raising its height, and provision of infrastructure connected with the delivery of fuel from barges in association with the development of the former Power Station and adjacent land“.
This was a mammoth planning proposal, probably one of the biggest ever seen in Wandsworth; even the committee summary report is 312 pages long! This was a full / detailed application for the jetty and riverside structures as well as the power station itself – in other words, the works that are also subject of listed building consent applications – and a broader outline-level plan for some of the later phases on the site.
Under these plans the jetty would serve different purposes during different phases of the development. Its eventual purpose would be to serve as a passenger facility for a riverbus service and as a form of extension to the riverside path, and also as a facility for fuel delivery by river to the energy centre.
In the interim, it would function as a muck away and materials delivery point for barges to facilitate the use of the river for construction and thereby relieve pressure on the road network (our photo below shows it in action, with the conveyor built to the pier).
A temporary pier would be constructed to the west of the jetty, to accommodate a riverbus service until the jetty was no longer needed for construction purposes and the works to develop the jetty for its final purpose were complete. At that stage, the riverbus service would transfer to the new jetty facility and the temporary pier would be removed.
The works for the eventual form of the jetty would include the construction of a passenger terminal building towards the east end of the Jetty, and the installation of a passenger pier on its north side comprising of a floating pontoon (with its own passenger shelter). Two new wide bridges would connect the jetty to land. A key point is that the existing cranes and hoppers would be refurbished and retained in a position at the west end of the Jetty.
The application noted that the jetty and two steel framed and clad cranes are important reminder of the historical industrial nature of the riverside location – and that the jetty, cranes and river wall are significant curtilage structures to the Grade II* Power Station giving a reminder of the historic link between the Power Station and the River and are therefore of particular importance in views along the river.
The planning application explained that the cranes would be refurbished in accordance with a method statement, providing for removal of deleterious and health threatening materials such as asbestos and bird droppings; transporting cranes elements and hoppers to Turbine Hall B (in the power station) for shot blasting, repairing components as necessary and repainting; and, the re-assembly of cranes and hoppers onto the jetty.
The plans noted that “Current thinking” expected the whole power station site development to be phased over a 14 year period (early 2011 to end 2024), divided into seven main construction phases. The Jetty was to be completed between May 2014 and June 2019.
The planning inspectors recommended approval – with a condition that prior to works commencing on the cranes, a detailed method statement should be submitted to and approved in writing by the Local Planning Authority to show how dismantling/re-assembling the cranes would take place – and that works should be begun not later than ten years from the date of consent.
Work finally got properly going – and the riverside park opened up. Our photos here show it part way through, when a huge excavation was udnerway to build (among other things) a huge heat and power plant underneath.
In 2019 temporary permission was granted for footbridges and decking so the pier could be opened to the public for the following three years (application 2019/1595), which went ahead and which has proved popular with visitors.
In 2022 the developers sought permission to keep the arrangements on the pier for another 18 months, albeit there was no mention of the cranes (application 2022/1449); they said at the time that
“As previously discussed with Officers from the London Borough of Wandsworth and Historic England this temporary Jetty is intended to remain operational until the permanent Jetty solution is developed. The permanent Jetty solution will involve a comprehensive redevelopment incorporating a mix of uses to help activate the space and respond positively to the river, its use as well as the Power Station and its park.“
For reasons unknown, no decision was ever made on the 2022 planning application.
The 2022 application also said that
“the design for the permanent Jetty solution, including the cranes, will be progressed early next year, with a subsequent application being submitted to [Wandsworth Council] and Historic England“.
However several years later, there’s no sign of the promised follow up on the ‘permanent jetty solution’.
There was a second, rather similar, application made a couple of years after the main big one for Battersea project – but this one wasn’t by the developers, but by the Mayor of London & Transport for London. This one (case 2013/3009) sought permission for ‘the repair, restoration and installation of structures on, and other works to, a jetty in association with its temporary use to provide a river transport facility for the exportation of excavated materials in connection with the Northern Line Extension project, including the temporary relocation of cranes and hoppers, refurbishment works to the footprint, […] and subsequent restoration of the cranes, hoppers and associated structures and bridge links to the land.‘
This TfL application was essentially a backup – so that even if the power station development was unpicked or somehow delayed, TfL still had what they needed to get the northern Line excavation works going. It is similarly unambiguous on the importance of the cranes, and the commitment to reinstate them. The heritage statement says, right at the start –
2.2 The Significance of the Structures: There is a consensus that the Jetty, Cranes and River Wall are significant curtilage structures to the Grade II* Battersea Power Station, their special interest being as a permanent reminder of the historic link between the Power Station and the River Thames, without which the building would never have been constructed. The structures, therefore, are of particular importance in views along the river, but also as a reminder of the industrial nature of the long use of the site.
In the end, this is a long way of telling us what we already knew – this is a key bit of a listed building, and restoring and above all returning the cranes to Battersea needs to be done. Dates and timelines have been left to run and run, and while (unlike start dates) there aren’t set dates for finishing developments, it’s time this was sorted out.
Our thanks to those who helped track down the cranes. Headline image adapted from this image by Mike Hudson, and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
This article was originally published on lavender-hill.uk.
Lavender-hill.uk is a community site covering retail, planning and development and local business issues, centered loosely on the Lavender Hill area in Battersea, with more occasional more detailed articles on local history, and other subjects of community interest. If you found this interesting you may want to sign up to receive new posts (for free) by email – and if you have tips and leads to share, get in touch.
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