The boilerhouse ceiling is thirty metres up. Three of the four original Babcock and Wilcox boilers were removed during the 1990s decontamination. Boiler No. 1 remains in situ in the northern section. The structure itself is intact: four bays, overhead travelling cranes still on their rails, the full height open above you. It takes a moment to register how much room there is.
I tend to find very large rooms difficult to photograph. Not impossible, but the task is different. Most of the spaces I work in have a human scale, even in ruin. You can locate yourself in them, understand where the edges are, find the frame that makes the space legible. A room that is thirty metres to the ceiling asks something different. The perspective lines are longer. The surfaces are further away and return less light. The decisions about where to put the camera are not the same.
The light in the boilerhouse comes primarily from the harbour side. It's diffuse, reflected off the water and the buildings across the bay. That gives the room a particular evenness that's unusual for an interior this size. The cranes break across the upper portion of every frame from the floor. They're the fixed element. Everything below them changes depending on the angle and the time of day.
The building was put together over about three decades across three stages: A Station from 1917, B Station from 1923 to 1928, C Station completed by 1948. Each phase added capacity and altered the configuration. The turbine halls across the three stations each have a different quality: different proportions, different window placement, different relationships between the floor and the space above. You can move between them within the same building and be in a distinctly different room.
There's a staircase in the boilerhouse that wasn't there when the station was operating. It was built for a film production in the early 2000s and it's still standing. The easy decision would be to avoid it, to find the angles where it doesn't appear and photograph as though it isn't there. I didn't do that. The staircase is part of the room now. To frame it out would mean deciding that the building's working life is the only version worth recording, and that whatever happened since doesn't count. That's not a position I can defend. The photographs I made include it.
I try not to move things. If something has been in the same position for twenty years, moving it for a better composition means I'm photographing my idea of the space rather than the space as it is. A staircase that's been in a boilerhouse for two decades is part of the boilerhouse.
White Bay is in a different position to most of what I photograph. It's a venue now. Conservation work has been done. The floor is clear, the building is maintained, and other people have been through recently. Working inside it is not the same as working in a building that hasn't been touched since it closed.
That changes the photographs in ways that are hard to describe exactly. Not worse, not better. The building has a different kind of presence than a building that's been sitting alone. It's in a new conversation with the city, and the photographs sit inside that conversation whether or not I intended them to.
