St. Pancras Power Stations

The St. Pancras Power Station was a pioneer in municipal engineering, famously known by locals as The Destructor. When the station opened in the eighteen nineties, it did more than burn coal to generate electricity for the borough. It was designed to incinerate local commercial and industrial refuse, using the heat from the burning trash to help generate steam for the plant's dynamos. This waste-to-energy experiment marked an early, if ultimately temporary, effort by the St. Pancras Vestry to manage municipal waste while powering the streets and homes of a rapidly growing London.