Report - Barking Reach Power Station (September 2020)

Sprackles · Feb 9, 2021

Barking Reach Powerstation. September 2020

Here is my report about Barking reach power station.

The history.

Barking Powerstation was originally built up of 3 power stations, you had Barking power station sites A,B, and C these were all built to use coal and were all decommissioned by 1981 once the government had started to to fade out of the use of coal fired power stations in order to combat the problematic situation of global warming.

This is where Barking reach powerstation came from, in order to keep up to date with countries high demand of electricity a new power station was built further away from london and closer to dagenham, and this power station was built to run on gas. The site begun construction in 1992 and finished in 1995, and its was the first in a while to be built in london for many years. it was one of the largest independently owned generating plants in the UK, it was even capable of producing 1000MW of electricity which sounds like a lot which is it is but compared to the uk’s power demand its only about 2%. Still impressive tho.

The station used Combined cycle gas turbine technology along with gas as its primary fuel, it was owned by Barking Power LTD but was maintained and managed by Thames Power Services. By July 2014 a decision was made to close the power station within two years although it didn't start decommissioning until 2018 when the chimneys were blown up in March 2018. Amazingly the two 55 metre chimneys were brought down with only 10KG of explosives. The site is planned to be used as a huge 42 acre whole sale food market.

The explore.

Me and my friend first got a lead about this place when a manager of ours pointed it out to us as we driving along the A13, he knew we were urbexers and give us a potential new location.
Us being explorers we decided to check out this vast site, access was not easy in the slightest, a massive 12 foot palisade fence surrounded the entire site meaning that climbing over was not going to be easy, also the power station was surrounded by active sites so it was going to be very bait. I

We begun looking around the site and was amazed at how big it actually was with multiple different parts of the station all around the site, but we went straight for the turbine hall, with multiple open doors this was no problem. Straight away we went up some stairs to look at the turbines which there was 4 of and they were all vast and impressive, to see a turbine completely intact was cool. Unfortunately it was extremely dark in this power station making it hard to take pictures.

After looking around the turbine hall we wanted to try and find the control room, this proved more tricky than expected, after a few left and rights through some corridors we finally had found the control room. We were amazed by the amount of stuff that had been left behind to rot, there was minimal decay which was only the food left in the kitchen

The control room was really cool to see the controls that would have once maintained the power station and provided this London borough with electricity. There was multiple offices in the control room and one room even had an apple mac computer left behind, along with COSHH gear and gas mask for the workers!

After probably spending around 3 hours in the control just looking around at all of the old documentation and engineering drawings we decided to get some fresh air and headed to the roof of the building, this was a fairly hard task to do as we went through a labyrinth of corridors filled with electrical cable and control panels but alas we found a stairwell that took us to the roof. The roof was a little bit too obvious to hang around on and take pictures due to neighbouring sites.

We had another look around the turbine hall but this time we was on the upper levels of the walkways these were quite nerve racking as you could see straight through the walkway and down to floor which was about a 40 ft drop so we made sure to tread carefully. The overhead cranes for each turbine were very impressive, unfortunately there was no way to turn on any lights to get some good shots but there was something else…

We had begun to start seeing most of the site apart from a spooky dim light at the far end of the turbine hall which we decided to explore last incase it activated some sort of alarm but as we walked closer to the light it became clear we was safe, this aloud me to get some better shots, strangely at some point the light turned off as we walked past and then the opposite end lit up?This confused as and we decided it was time to leave.
With most of the site explored apart from the flooded basement we decided to leave and made our way back to the entrance of the hall, on the way back we saw some creepy but amazing paintings of what appeared to be Jesus and religious followers on the back of some machinery. After this we made our way out and the explore was somewhat completed, there was still a few outer buildings to check out but we thought we would save these for another time.

Here are the pictures that I gathered from the explore.

1. Old cooling towers

2. Outer Pumping Station

3. Inside Pumping Station

4. Exterior photo of Turbine Hall

5. Turbine no. 1D (4)

6. Interior of turbine (main body)

7. Interior of turbine (back end or exhaust)

8. Front end interior of turbine. Fun fact the cement/plaster looking stuff is actually an asbestos cement based material and is used to contain the heat.