Posted originally November 3, 2019 (revisited after the Ramses exhibition at Battersea Power Station 2026).
The little-known Battersea Park railway station is a distinctive Victorian building set between two railway bridges.
Designed by Charles Henry Driver (who in 1864 was assistant to Sir Joseph Bazalgette on the Thames Embankment project, as well as on the Abbey Mills and Crossness pumping stations), it features a Venetian Gothic façade in polychrome brickwork and, inside, a monumental staircase—though rather too steep for those less agile.
This is the station where my wife, Alexandra, used to arrive as a young girl before continuing on to the school she attended, which was only about fifty metres away.
At the time, Notre Dame High Grammar School still had a Battersea branch, which has since been closed due to a reorganisation of secondary education in London.
Today, the nineteenth-century buildings—gloomy in the darkness of a typical autumn evening—where Alexandra studied, played, made friends, practised, was teased, praised, dreamed, and occasionally complained, are far removed from the sound of schoolgirls’ voices. They have been repurposed as small business and enterprise units.
Only the melancholic chapel remains in the hands of the Church, and Mass is still celebrated there every Sunday.
The Notre Dame High School in Southwark, however, still exists and remains very well attended. It is a Catholic comprehensive girls’ school located at Elephant and Castle in south London. Pupils attend between the ages of eleven and sixteen. The current headteacher is Sister Anne Marie Niblock, with previous heads including Sister Myra Poole (SND) and Sister Rosemary O’Callaghan (SND).
The school was founded by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in 1855 and in 2005 celebrated its 150th anniversary. The order bases its spirituality on the teachings of its foundress, Saint Julie Billiart, canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1969.
The sisters run several other schools across the United Kingdom, including two in Liverpool and others in Surrey, Glasgow, Plymouth, Norwich, Leeds, and Sheffield.
It is interesting to note that the school was inspected by OFSTED in the autumn of 2012 and received an “Outstanding” report—the only school in central London to have achieved this rating at the time—continuing the founder’s tradition of excellence. No wonder, then, that I found such a remarkable wife there.
How many vain hopes
on these darkened broken stairs:
Silently night falls.
I first visited this place in 2019, when I wrote the original version of this post in Italian. We returned again recently, after the Ramses exhibition at Battersea Power Station, and I found it as evocative as ever.
For my wife, too, the return carried a particular weight. It was not only her former school, but a landscape of memory—of adolescence, of friendships, of the small, vivid experiences that shape a life long before it becomes a story.
Revisiting it, I was struck again by how these old school buildings hold more than architecture. They contain versions of ourselves that no longer exist. We do not simply return to a place; we encounter a past self, briefly reanimated in stone, corridor, and chapel.
And so, as we walked through the familiar surroundings, something else emerged: a quiet sense of what has been lost. Not in a dramatic or regretful way, but in the simple, unavoidable passage from youth to age—from expectation to hindsight, from futures once imagined to futures already lived.
Instead of facing forward with the untested confidence of what was once ahead, we find ourselves more conscious of what now lies in front of us—not as promise, but as certainty. There is, after all, something that awaits us all, something even the pharaohs, with all their monumental attempts to resist time, ultimately could not escape.
Yet the place itself does not feel merely elegiac. It also holds continuity: the chapel still breathes, Mass is still said, and memory—personal and collective—still quietly accumulates in its walls.
And perhaps that is what makes returning feel so powerful: not only what has gone, but what, in some form, stubbornly remains.