Why Battersea Power Station Is on the Animals Cover and What It Means

The most interesting thing about the Animals cover isn’t the power station itself—it’s the pig that kept flying away. The band chose Battersea Power Station because it sat right across the Thames from their new studio, Britannia Row, and they wanted a stark, monumental image for an album filled with political disgust. The inflatable pig was an afterthought, but it immediately became the focus, and during the photo shoot the pig broke free, drifted into Heathrow flight paths, and gave the cover its accidental drama.

Symbolically, the power station works on two levels. First, it’s an industrial cathedral—a relic of post-war British heavy industry already in decline by 1977—which fits the album’s theme of a society trapped under a crumbling capitalist system. Second, the station’s four chimneys are like pillars supporting the sky, and the pig floating between them turns the whole thing into a giant, mocking middle finger at authority. Roger Waters later said he wanted the band to seem like “slightly anarchic outsiders looking in,” and the image of a pig hovering above a silent, outdated factory is the perfect visual for the album’s Orwell-inspired rage against the pigs in charge.