Building on the past

London was an industrial city until remarkably recently. It seems extraordinary now, but Bankside Power Station was built in 1947, by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to burn oil right on the banks of the Thames, opposite St Paul’s. What’s more, Gilbert Scott’s other great power station, Battersea, built in 1929, is less than a mile upstream.

In the early 1970s, more than 1.1 million people in the capital — almost a third of the workforce — had manufacturing jobs. Now only 117,000 do — one in 40 workers.

Still, the old industrial architecture survives in pleasingly generous quantities. Rotting and ignored for decades, it has lingered into an age when, at last, we appreciate the beauty of these things; and appreciate how easily these handsome, solidly built, cavernous buildings can be converted.

Bankside Power Station is now Tate Modern, its oil tanks cleaned out to make a new exhibition space this summer. And, after 29 years of dereliction, Battersea Power Station, it’s just been announced, is to undergo an £8 billion transformation into a hotel, offices, flats and entertainment quarter.

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The latest survivor to be unveiled is the 67-acre Great Northern Goods Yard, north of King’s Cross station, the biggest single-ownership site developed in central London for more than 150 years — since the yard was first built, in fact.

I grew up near King’s Cross in the bad old days — on the early-morning school run along Goods Way, I remember seeing a vast blonde prostitute in a red swimming costume and red high heels cheerily playing patience. These days, she’d have a much greater range of leisure activities to kill the time between clients. Opposite her patch, on the site of the old petrol station, where the prostitutes used to buy their condoms, she would now find the Filling Station, a frighteningly fashionable beer and pizza bar, popular with Hackney types.