Central Station

Central Station is a former water, gas, and electricity station, now disused, designed in 1899 and opened in 1901 by Clifford Smith for the London County Council. It is constructed of yellow brick with red brick dressings, topped with Welsh slate roofs. The building comprises a three-stage water tower enclosed by lower two-storey and one-storey ancillary buildings, forming an L-shaped plan.

The tower has ashlar cornices between its stages. Red-brick quoins, keystoned archivolts, and shaped panels are located below the windows. The south side features two round-arched windows to the lower stage, with a lunette above, similar lunettes are present on the north and west sides, with three lunettes on the west side, the outer ones being smaller. Tall, red-brick machicolations are found on the upper stage, below a projecting cornice topped with a metal water tank, the tops of whose north and south sides are inverted triangle-shaped.

Attached to the south side is a low, three-bay, single-storey building with segmental brick-arched windows (the one on the left being smaller), raised, corbelled verges, and a central ridge stack. A similar, larger, two-storey building is situated against the west side, with end gables featuring keyed oculi and raised gable bands. A two-storey gabled block projecting on the east side is a later addition and of less significance; however, to its right are two paired original, gabled, single-storey ranges each having keyed, round-arched windows, the left range with two windows flanking a tall recess and the right range with three windows, gable bands, and louvred roof ridges.

The tower's interior is reported to retain a well head surrounded by railings on ball-finialed, fluted columns, and the original pumping machinery and engine. The station originally served five nearby London County Council hospitals and included a 400-foot well shaft, a gas works, an electricity switching station, a weigh-bridge, a boiler house, an engine house, a storage-battery room, a machine-tool shop, a rail terminal, a 40,000-gallon water storage tank, a cooling water reservoir, an electric lighting plant, and a water softening plant.

At the time of inspection, the building was unused and in a state of disrepair.