Lift 109 Experience at Battersea Power Station

Challenge

Battersea Power Station is an icon of the London cityscape: a Deco-era, red-brick hulk on the south bank of the Thames. The station might once have powered a fifth of London, but it needed storytelling power to succeed in its next chapter.

To introduce Londoners and tourists to the Power Station’s new era, Battersea Power Station Development Corporation sought a welcome experience that would serve as the perfect prequel to the views awaiting guests atop the station’s northwest chimney.

Solution

Journey partnered with some of the world’s foremost architects and exhibition designers to create the Lift 109 experience. Set within Turbine Hall A, the exhibition combines dynamic animations, interactive tables, immersive media, and soundscapes to tell the story of the Power Station before visitors ascend 109 meters above London.

A New Chapter for Battersea

Shutting down in 1983, Battersea has since become a global beacon of creative reuse, welcoming a mix of retail and corporate tenants, plus apartment dwellers, into its bulk since officially reopening in 2022.

Set in Turbine Hall A, the exhibition features dynamic animations, interactive tables, and immersive media and soundscapes. In a nod to the station’s electricity-generating roots, film, images, particles, and color animate across immersive digital screens.

Descriptive text emerges out of blocks of color, mimicking the movement of Lift 109 out of the chimney top. Throughout the experience, graphics and icons carry the style of technical drawings, with energy flowing along circuit diagrams.

In the planning stages we leaned heavily on a real-time VR model of Turbine Hall A to review media and test processing speeds before buildout in the real-world space began.

A Cohesive Visitor Experience

This kind of cohesion doesn’t happen by coincidence. Across AR web apps, immersive spaces, interactive tables, LED screens, and lighting sculptures, we worked with our partners to tell an aesthetically and tonally cohesive story that would leave visitors as awed by this marvelous structure as they’d soon be by the views 109 meters up.