Danger Behind the Parade

The small brick electricity substation behind the shops was one of the first places where ordinary suburbia admitted it had a dangerous interior. Not a factory, not a railway line, not a derelict house with boards over the windows. Just a low municipal block with a metal door, a fence, weeds in the gravel, and a yellow sign that did not bother with euphemism. Danger of death. The phrase had the bluntness of a spell.

I remember these buildings as local shrines to adult knowledge. They sat at the edge of shopping parades, council estates, playing fields, and service roads, near enough to be part of childhood geography but never available for use. You could press your face to the mesh and see almost nothing: ceramic insulators, grey cabinets, a warning plate, perhaps the hum if the afternoon was quiet. The point was not secrecy. The point was that the real work of the place happened without any human scale attached to it.

That is why the old electricity safety films landed so hard. The BFI record for Play Safe - Frisbee dates it to 1978 and gives the plot in almost perfect miniature: a girl urges a boy to enter a sub-station to retrieve a Frisbee. Another BFI record for Play Safe - Kites and Planes names David Eady as director, the Electricity Council as sponsor, and Brian Wilde in the cast. These were not gentle lessons. They were tiny moral panics with voltages attached. They belong to the same teatime culture of calibrated fear.

The fright worked because the setting was already familiar. Every child knew a substation, or thought they did. It was where the ball went. It was where the older boys pretended they had climbed in. It was where the council grass stopped being grass and became infrastructure. Public information films did not invent the terror; they gave it editing, music, and a corpse.

The adult version is less theatrical and more revealing. National Grid explains that substations change voltage so electricity can move across the network and then become usable again. Electricity may leave a power station at around 10 to 30 kV, get stepped up as high as 400,000 volts for transmission, then stepped down through the system for ordinary appliances. EMFs.info describes local distribution substations as the common near-home sort, transforming higher voltage electricity to normal mains voltage, with many hundreds of thousands of similar sites across the UK, each typically serving up to a few hundred houses.

That should make them banal. Instead it makes them stranger. The substation is the exact point where an abstraction becomes domestic: national power, bills, kettles, immersion heaters, bedroom lamps, the television warming up after school. A whole house enters through a forbidden brick kiosk nobody visits unless something has gone wrong.

Historic England's utilities guide is useful here because it refuses to treat such structures as invisible by default. Its electricity section notes that local sub-stations, distribution kiosks, and pylons can carry design or landscape significance; it also points to Moore Street Electricity Substation in Sheffield, listed Grade II for architectural interest. That is the part I like. The ugly little building is not automatically outside culture. Sometimes it is culture with a padlock on it.

Online maps have made service spaces more legible, though not less odd. You can now search, label, photograph, and complain. The old uncertainty has thinned out. A place that once existed as a warning sign and a neighbourhood rumour can become a pin, a planning document, a street-view angle. Yet the mood survives, because legibility is not intimacy. Knowing what a substation does does not make it welcoming.

The substation was not hidden. It was worse than hidden: visible, labelled, fenced, and unexplained. Children knew it mattered because adults had made it ugly on purpose, then surrounded it with the vocabulary of death. I am not sure childhood needed that much fear, but I do miss the seriousness it gave to small places. There was a time when a brick box behind a parade of shops could feel like the edge of the known world.

Sources:

Play Safe - Frisbee - BFI Collections Search

Play Safe - Kites and Planes - BFI Collections Search

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Electricity Pylons - National Grid

What Is a Substation? - National Grid

Infrastructure: Utilities and Communication Structures - Historic England

Living or Buying Near Substations - EMFs.info