How I teach Battersea Power Station

Written May 2025
Having recently added blogs posts about how I teach the Olympic Park and the Carpenters Estate to a series of blogs about Regenerating Places, the last of my in-depth case studies left to write about is Battersea Power Station. So, here goes!

Battersea Power Station is one of the in-depth case studies that I use to teach EQ3 and EQ4 of the Regenerating Places topic and somewhere we visit as one of the 4 required fieldwork days when studying A-Level geography. This blog is about the teaching of the case study as another will explore it as a fieldwork location.

We start by looking at the key facts and figures of the development and what it looks like- looking at lots of photos of how the area around the power station has been developed and how the heritage of the building has been maintained inside. This video is invaluable for setting the scene and developing a sense of place whilst this timeline is also useful for the broader context of the final redevelopment.

Personally, I like to teach this case study having done Cornwall and the Olympic Park and so, by now, students are used to looking at Census data and IMD data to considering why regeneration was needed in the area. As always, students will complete A3 summary sheets after each lesson to summarise and consolidate what we’ve learnt under the corresponding spec points. This is to ensure that they know how everything we’ve discussed matches up to what they need to know and how they can apply their knowledge to a wide range of exam questions. As you can tell from these sheets, we cover or revisit 4.7a, 4.8b, 4.8c, 4.9a, 4.10a, 4.11b and all of 4.11 through studying Battersea Power Station.

Having looked at the regeneration project and the quantitative data, we move onto looking at a range of different sources to consider how different stakeholders will assess success using different criteria. The screenshots below show the range of different sources used- you’ll notice I used the early Google reviews of the redevelopment too.

When discussing the ‘success’ of the regeneration of Battersea Power Station, you quickly get onto the issue of the lack of affordable housing in the development. This short video clip is good but I’m grateful to Rachael Robinson for making me aware of an even better clip. From 48 minutes onwards this BBC documentary discusses the Battersea Power Station development and is gold dust for our teaching of this case study!

At this point, we discuss and unpack three different articles about the regeneration project. Each has a different perspective and viewpoint and discusses a slightly different element of the project. This opinion piece is as a handout here. My second handout uses text from the Wandsworth council website that is no longer online- hence the lack of original source. Finally, this infamous article is, in my opinion, a must-read with students. It is a a handout here.

Although not one of the articles we discuss in depth, the headline of this article is also included in my resources.

To consolidate the ideas of 4.10, we discuss how there will be a slight lag time before the data reflects the ‘success’ of this regeneration (given the last Census was in 2021 before the Power Station opened) but what we might expect the data to show and why. We look at the development’s website to consider how it is being branded and made to look attractive (4.9a) before wrapping up the case study by looking at whether or not it will have reduced inequalities with the area (4.10b).

So, compared to the Olympic Park, the teaching of this case study takes far less lesson time but it is complimented with a fieldwork day- more on that soon! Finally, although I wouldn’t use this with students, this clip is well worth a watch for your own knowledge of the regeneration project.

If you teach this case study too, please do share any resources or ideas that I might have missed- I’d love to hear other ideas of how to teach this regeneration project.