The shiny box on a London roundabout is hiding a power station
22 September 2026 – Faraday's 235th birthday
Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in Newington Butts, which is now the Elephant and Castle roundabout in south London.
In 1961 the city put a monument to him in the middle of that roundabout: a stainless-steel box by architect Rodney Gordon. Inside it is a London Underground electrical substation, feeding the Northern and Bakerloo lines. Gordon first designed it in glass so you could watch the transformer work; they switched to metal because vandals would have smashed it.
So the man who worked out electromagnetic induction is remembered by a sealed cube full of electricity that almost nobody knows is there. In 2001 Aphex Twin claimed he had bought it and was living inside.
Faraday turned down a knighthood and refused to publish his lectures, so people would redo the experiments themselves. He wrote: “I have always loved science more than money.”
Photo: Images George Rex, CC BY-SA 2.0, 2019.
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