Battersea Power Station Tube Station

During the final stages of construction, artist and researcher Nina Wakeford brought together queer staff working across Transport for London for an informal track walk along the full length of the new tunnels, from Kennington to Battersea Power Station. The walk took place while the railway was still an active construction site, closed to the public and not yet part of the everyday transport network.
As participants moved through the space, they shared personal stories about working on the railway and within London’s transport system — often at times when being openly queer was difficult, risky or impossible. These memories included friendships, relationships, nights out after shifts, and the experience of navigating workplaces shaped by silence, coded behaviour and, at times, outright hostility.
At the Battersea crossover box, the group paused to remember London Underground staff who had died from HIV and AIDS, scattering red remembrance ribbons across the concrete floor. The moment linked the physical labour of building the railway to the human cost of the epidemic, and to the loss of colleagues whose lives were rarely acknowledged in official histories.
The walk passed beneath Nine Elms, an area with a dense queer social history. Participants spoke about venues such as the Market Tavern on Nine Elms Lane, remembered as a key meeting place for gay men and lesbians in the late twentieth century, and about nearby cruising sites including the Nine Elms Cold Store, which formed part of the area’s wider sexual and social geography. These were spaces tied to long working hours, post-shift routines, and the overlapping worlds of labour and nightlife.
Music accompanied parts of the walk, with participants sharing chosen tracks associated with lost venues, former partners and moments of freedom. Rather than creating a performance, these shared sounds acted as memory triggers, allowing stories to surface in a place usually associated only with infrastructure and engineering.
Wakeford later documented these conversations and experiences in her book Our Pink Depot: The Gay Underground which explores the queer histories of London’s transport workers, and the hidden social worlds connected to depots, stations and late-night routes. By bringing queer memory into unfinished public infrastructure, the track walk made visible lives that normally remain undocumented — connecting tunnels, trains and construction sites to the communities that have long existed above and around them.