Recently I had a tussle with the 1.4GW Littlebrook D oil-fired station next to the Dartford crossing. Starting generating in 1981, Littlebrook ‘D’ had three 685MW General Electric Company units. It was conceptualised by the CEGB and built in response to an initiative to diversify energy fuel supplies away from solely coal at the time, ending up being rather clairvoyant of the ebbing UK coal supplies the miners’ strikes would bring a few years later. Described by a former worker as ‘a Ferrari amongst power stations’, it had some really nice capabilities; black start, a very responsive turbine output management system, and the station rarely had the opportunity to reach its stride and run at its full generating capacity of over 2GW. I believe I read somewhere on the www that during the strikes of '84-'85, it still holds the record for the biggest watt output of any UKPS ever over the course of a year, at 18,000GW. It was also designated as the station to keep electricity supplied to London in the event of a Soviet strike. It was one of several 2015 decommissions by grace of the usual EU emissions initiative’s 20,000 hours ultimatum. I am not too clued up on the power station urbex scene, but I do hear it has been extremely active and proficient the country-over, so I hope my recollection of events could evoke relatable fond memories to others who hit their first UKPS way back. This was my first dawn-raid of a UKPS, and I had been psyched on it for months. I had meant to do it the weekend prior, but the usual homie for 'not a fun day out' stuff, a non-member and old friend, had something come up. With the motivation kept through the week, we got to work with a 4am alarm on the Sunday morning.
Once at the scene, the immediate start was a bit Monty Python: the just-off-the-road, least intimidating and only non-barbed of the assault course of fences awaiting us was ironically our bitchiest, and the only one that ended up biting us by way of slashing homie’s palm, but I digress - the main obstacle to negotiate for the turbine hall was to be the personnel presence. With the immediate exterior of the station itself being floodlit (what felt like defeating a lot of the idea of going in under cover of darkness), after assessing who/what was about, our planned route inwards was gonna have to be a lot baiter than we would have liked. The infiltration powers-that-be must've given us the B of the D. I love a power station with a bit of Crust. We picked to have a go at a time at which I deemed the demolition job to be juuusst starting, although the intel on said progress was me, looking through binoculars from the Dartford crossing in a moving car the week before. Now playing the sitting-around-in-a-vast-turbine-hall-in-total-darkness-for-an-hour game, I first wanted to shuffle to the centre of the hall in very low phone screen light to see If my guess of demo progress was anything to go by and we weren't
ing. Ay, there were the GEC turbos in the darkness, Unit 1 and 2, unnoticeably tinkered with. Now the waiting game. We first started to make camp in the locker rooms that run along the south side of the turbine hall on the upper floor. After three or four whole minutes of sitting there we sacked it off as a basecamp due to a loud and rather jarring dripping sound from nearby (it was now raining). We shuffled back down to the hall floor and over to the north side, along where the turbine hall sort of morphs into the boiler house. A brief 5-minute stroll through the boiler house to find a suitable camp non-fruitful, our next and more agreeable nest was the highest mezzanine walkway we could find running along the turbine hall-boiler house border. 20 second exposure on for the mean time.
Time was generally passed in bit of an awe-stoned state, and I recall reaching a peak of restlessness by grace of a very prominent soundtrack of dripping, rustling, clattering, wind, vehicles outside etc...
After at least an hour it only started getting light enough to get some clearer and colourful long exposure shots.
Perhaps a bit too generous with the sunrise and approach timing estimations, but oh well.
The hall here has a colour scheme of surprisingly rich blue, red and yellow. None of these photos have the saturation whacked up.
Next, we started thinking about the control room. I was staying pessimistic. I’d actually never found an urbex snap of it within public but however-niche circles on cyberspace so it was a bit of a better get up there myself and clarify vibe. I was a tad inspired to see the door to its own separate building was open. After a 10m dash from a turbine hall fire exit door to the control room building’s fire exit, we caught a flash glimpse of another prowling vehicle 50m up the road. 6am on the sabbath, that’s some rota…
The stairwell we initially took up into the control room’s ‘outhouse’, which is about 5 floors, ran out on the 3rd floor. Here we saw a stripped out, flotsam and jetsam adorned, floor to ceiling tinted window kinda space, which brought a heavier wave of pessimism over me about the control room. It must look like this the whole way up, I assumed, or the lift shaft is the only way to the top, or something.
Ah...
Over the other side of this 3rd floor, though, there was another stairwell that continued upwards. Another 2 floors and the real deal! Spent a kid-in-a-candy-shop 25 minutes; 'wo check out this dial’, ‘look at this phone’, wow this, wow that. And perhaps, naively, neither of us focusing at all on taking pictures. Slightly regret this. Anyway, it looked, in a way, just like the powerstations.uk photo, just with more mess, and a more 'left in a hurry' feel, which was nice. Looters or contractors causing the mess and ripping the back of the workstations? Dunno... But yeah, I was very happy with the whole room. Shades of Tracey Island.
Pre-computerisation, just imagine
Now for the silent and invisible exit we were looking to be able to pull off. A quiet stroll back to the south west corner of the turbine hall, and we were peering at the now broad-daylight site. I would summarise observable the situation as; proximity of several new seemingly manned vehicles to our route out: uncomfortable. Extremely bait distance for us to cover in the open: about 50m. Anticipation by us of imminent wrist slapping: high. Somehow, after the next 3 minutes putting our spindly frames to use getting some further scratches from barb, we were both home and dry. Although not dry, it had started raining quite heavily. Both filthy and soaked, we headed back to Croydon with a loutish 8am 4 pack for a robust power nap
.
I put my feet up from this lark for about... a week. More to come..
Safe
Olkka
Once at the scene, the immediate start was a bit Monty Python: the just-off-the-road, least intimidating and only non-barbed of the assault course of fences awaiting us was ironically our bitchiest, and the only one that ended up biting us by way of slashing homie’s palm, but I digress - the main obstacle to negotiate for the turbine hall was to be the personnel presence. With the immediate exterior of the station itself being floodlit (what felt like defeating a lot of the idea of going in under cover of darkness), after assessing who/what was about, our planned route inwards was gonna have to be a lot baiter than we would have liked. The infiltration powers-that-be must've given us the B of the D. I love a power station with a bit of Crust. We picked to have a go at a time at which I deemed the demolition job to be juuusst starting, although the intel on said progress was me, looking through binoculars from the Dartford crossing in a moving car the week before. Now playing the sitting-around-in-a-vast-turbine-hall-in-total-darkness-for-an-hour game, I first wanted to shuffle to the centre of the hall in very low phone screen light to see If my guess of demo progress was anything to go by and we weren't
ing. Ay, there were the GEC turbos in the darkness, Unit 1 and 2, unnoticeably tinkered with. Now the waiting game. We first started to make camp in the locker rooms that run along the south side of the turbine hall on the upper floor. After three or four whole minutes of sitting there we sacked it off as a basecamp due to a loud and rather jarring dripping sound from nearby (it was now raining). We shuffled back down to the hall floor and over to the north side, along where the turbine hall sort of morphs into the boiler house. A brief 5-minute stroll through the boiler house to find a suitable camp non-fruitful, our next and more agreeable nest was the highest mezzanine walkway we could find running along the turbine hall-boiler house border. 20 second exposure on for the mean time.
Time was generally passed in bit of an awe-stoned state, and I recall reaching a peak of restlessness by grace of a very prominent soundtrack of dripping, rustling, clattering, wind, vehicles outside etc...
After at least an hour it only started getting light enough to get some clearer and colourful long exposure shots.
Perhaps a bit too generous with the sunrise and approach timing estimations, but oh well.
The hall here has a colour scheme of surprisingly rich blue, red and yellow. None of these photos have the saturation whacked up.
Next, we started thinking about the control room. I was staying pessimistic. I’d actually never found an urbex snap of it within public but however-niche circles on cyberspace so it was a bit of a better get up there myself and clarify vibe. I was a tad inspired to see the door to its own separate building was open. After a 10m dash from a turbine hall fire exit door to the control room building’s fire exit, we caught a flash glimpse of another prowling vehicle 50m up the road. 6am on the sabbath, that’s some rota…
The stairwell we initially took up into the control room’s ‘outhouse’, which is about 5 floors, ran out on the 3rd floor. Here we saw a stripped out, flotsam and jetsam adorned, floor to ceiling tinted window kinda space, which brought a heavier wave of pessimism over me about the control room. It must look like this the whole way up, I assumed, or the lift shaft is the only way to the top, or something.
Ah...
Over the other side of this 3rd floor, though, there was another stairwell that continued upwards. Another 2 floors and the real deal! Spent a kid-in-a-candy-shop 25 minutes; 'wo check out this dial’, ‘look at this phone’, wow this, wow that. And perhaps, naively, neither of us focusing at all on taking pictures. Slightly regret this. Anyway, it looked, in a way, just like the powerstations.uk photo, just with more mess, and a more 'left in a hurry' feel, which was nice. Looters or contractors causing the mess and ripping the back of the workstations? Dunno... But yeah, I was very happy with the whole room. Shades of Tracey Island.
Pre-computerisation, just imagine
Now for the silent and invisible exit we were looking to be able to pull off. A quiet stroll back to the south west corner of the turbine hall, and we were peering at the now broad-daylight site. I would summarise observable the situation as; proximity of several new seemingly manned vehicles to our route out: uncomfortable. Extremely bait distance for us to cover in the open: about 50m. Anticipation by us of imminent wrist slapping: high. Somehow, after the next 3 minutes putting our spindly frames to use getting some further scratches from barb, we were both home and dry. Although not dry, it had started raining quite heavily. Both filthy and soaked, we headed back to Croydon with a loutish 8am 4 pack for a robust power nap
.I put my feet up from this lark for about... a week. More to come..
Safe
Olkka
