A cocktail bar inside the actual 1950s control room of Battersea Power Station, where the dials once sent a fifth of London’s electricity out into the city
Control Room B carries a 4.4 across more than fifteen hundred reviews, and it has, without exaggeration, one of the most extraordinary settings of any bar in London: the genuine, restored control room of Battersea Power Station, where the switchgear and dials once distributed a fifth of the capital’s electricity. The Prat’s history desk regards this as close to the platonic ideal of adaptive reuse – drinking cocktails in the nerve centre that powered the city.
The cathedral of power
Battersea Power Station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott – the same architect who gave Britain the red telephone box – is one of London’s great landmarks, a Grade II* listed brick cathedral with four white chimneys. It is, pedants will tell you, really two power stations: an A station built around 1929 to 1931, and a B station added after the war. Each has its own control room. At its peak it fed a fifth of London’s power, lighting Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament alike, until the whole thing was decommissioned in 1983 and left to decay for decades.
Control Room B, restored
This bar occupies Control Room B, the 1950s room, which opens directly onto Turbine Hall B – a contrast with the earlier, separate Art Deco Control Room A. Being post-war, it is more brutalist in style: faience tiling throughout, and its original human-scale stainless-steel control panels arranged in a great arc. The control desk once synchronised the station’s sixty-six-kilovolt output to the national grid; the switchgear behind managed power across the whole plant. Those original dials, switches and panels have been fully restored and remain in situ. You order a cocktail beneath the instruments that once ran the city.
Frozen in the 1950s
The bar leans into the theme with mid-century glassware and furniture and a drinks list themed on the building’s electric heritage; it opens from mid-morning for coffee and pastries before turning to cocktails. It is run by the group behind such theatrical London bars as Mr Fogg’s and Cahoots, who know their way around a heritage setting. The effect is of a room frozen in the 1950s and switched back on – the dials glowing softly, the steel gleaming, the power all now flowing into your glass.
The wider resurrection
Control Room B is one small, lit chamber in an enormous act of resurrection. After the station shut in 1983, it stood derelict for decades – roofless at one point, a vast brick ruin that became one of London’s most famous empty buildings, appearing on album covers and in films while scheme after scheme to save it collapsed. The eventual regeneration turned the shell into shops, restaurants, offices and flats, with a lift running up one of the chimneys for the view. To drink in Control Room B is to sit at the heart of that whole improbable rescue – the one room where the original purpose of the building, the marshalling of electricity, is still legible in the dials on the wall, even as cocktails go out where power once did.
Verdict
A 4.4 across fifteen hundred-plus reviews is a strong score, and the setting alone would justify a visit at almost any rating. This is a cocktail bar inside the working heart of Battersea Power Station, among restored panels that once sent a fifth of London’s electricity out to Buckingham Palace and Parliament. Few bars on earth can say as much.
Go for the dials, the arc of steel and the sheer improbability of drinking in the nerve centre of London’s power. Raise a glass beneath the switchgear, and thank Giles Gilbert Scott, who designed the box and the cathedral alike.
Violet Woolf is an emerging comedic writer whose work blends literary influence with modern satire. Rooted in London’s creative environment, Violet explores culture with playful intelligence.
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Someone’s going to send this to their MP and the MP will do nothing.
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