The question of whether it was smoke or steam emitted from the chimneys of Battersea power station is less straightforward than either of your previous correspondents suggests. The Rev Keith Burchell (Letters, 9 October) is correct that cooling water was drawn from and returned to the Thames without any steam being generated by the cooling process, and the chimneys emitted smoke. But Claude Scott (Letters, 7 October) is also correct that steam issued from the chimneys. This came not from the cooling process, but from the curtain of water jets used to wash the smoke clean of anything regarded as injurious or offensive. A detailed description of all this can be found in a 1937 edition of Wonders of World Engineering (price 7d weekly).
Mike Lee
Rossendale, Lancashire
• There may have been “plenty of cooling water to be had from the Thames” to service Battersea power station, as the Rev Keith Burchell says, but actually an innovative use was found for the waste heat that it generated. A large social housing estate, Churchill Gardens, was built in Pimlico, on the opposite side of the Thames from the power station, and homes there were heated by waste hot water piped under the river. The system also provided constant hot water for residents. One of my school friends lived in Churchill Gardens in the 1960s and, at a time when very few homes had central heating, it was always a treat to visit her family’s warm and cosy flat.
Jane Marsh
London
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