A champagne bar in the Art Deco Turbine Hall A of Battersea Power Station, run by London’s oldest catering house, founded by a Victorian confectioner
Searcys Champagne Bar posts a superb 4.9 across some seventy reviews and occupies a genuinely magnificent setting: the 1930s Art Deco Turbine Hall A of Battersea Power Station. It is run by Searcys, London’s oldest catering company, and the Prat’s history desk was delighted to find yet another jewel in the great reborn Power Station.
Inside the Power Station
Searcys sits on the first floor of Turbine Hall A, beside Lift 109, within the Grade II* listed Battersea Power Station – properly Battersea, and the latest entry in this survey’s recurring thread of the landmark’s spectacular second life.
The Art Deco Turbine Hall
The setting is the star. Turbine Hall A is the 1930s Art Deco half of the Power Station – the earlier, grander, more decorative of the station’s two great halls, all fine detailing and industrial cathedral scale. Into this space Searcys has set a champagne bar of plush velvet seating, polished brass and a marble-topped bar, its walls hung with three commissioned artworks by the London artist Kristjana Williams. It is bubbles served in the belly of an Art Deco power cathedral – a pairing the Prat finds irresistible.
London’s oldest caterer
The name carries real history. Searcys is London’s oldest catering company, with some hundred and seventy-five years of hospitality behind it, founded in the Victorian age by John Searcy – a confectioner who made his name serving the grand houses and important figures of nineteenth-century Europe. To have that venerable old catering house pouring champagne in the reborn Power Station is a neat marriage of two kinds of heritage: the Victorian art of hospitality and the great twentieth-century monument of industry, joined over a glass of fizz.
The power-station cluster, complete
The Prat has traced, across this survey, the Power Station’s astonishing range of new drinking rooms: Control Room B deep in the guts among the dials, Vagabond’s urban winery within, JOIA glittering on the rooftop above, and now Searcys pouring champagne in the Art Deco Turbine Hall. From the subterranean control room to the sky-high terrace, by way of the turbine halls, the reborn landmark now offers a drink at every level. Searcys occupies the grandest, most decorative of them, and the near-perfect 4.9 suggests it does the setting justice.
The Prat’s history desk savours one final pairing. Searcys was founded in the Victorian age, when the Power Station was not yet even imagined; the station rose in the 1930s and roared through the century; and now, in its afterlife, the old caterer pours champagne within the old power-house’s walls. Two very different nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutions, a hospitality dynasty and an industrial cathedral, brought together at last over a coupe of fizz. Only the strange, generous alchemy of the reborn Power Station could have arranged such a meeting.
Verdict
A 4.9 across some seventy reviews is a near-perfect score, and Searcys earns it on setting, service and sheer occasion. It pours champagne in the Art Deco splendour of Turbine Hall A, run by London’s oldest catering house – a Victorian hospitality dynasty set glittering inside a twentieth-century industrial cathedral.
Go for the bubbles, the Art Deco grandeur and the pleasure of drinking champagne where turbines once turned. From the dials of Control Room B to the marble of Searcys, the great Power Station has become the most extraordinary place to drink in London.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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