Turbine Hall

The turbine hall at White Bay Power Station is a long, high-roofed space with overhead crane rails running its length, the floor patterned with the bolt-down marks of turbines that have since been removed. The walls are exposed brick on the lower courses, painted institutional cream above. Tall windows along both side walls admit even daylight. A single overhead crane is parked at one end of the hall. The roof is steel truss, with skylights set between the trusses. The acoustics in the empty hall are unusually long; sound carries the full length of the building.

White Bay Power Station was built from 1917 onwards to supply electricity to Sydney's expanding tram and rail network and to the surrounding industrial and residential districts. The turbine hall housed the steam turbines that turned the generators, fed by steam from the boiler house next door. Coal arrived by ship at the wharf below the plant, was conveyed up to the bunkers, and burned in the boilers to raise steam. White Bay ran continuously for sixty-six years before being decommissioned in 1983. The hall in this photograph has been empty for over four decades. It is heritage-listed and the subject of ongoing redevelopment proposals.