From your vantage point on a balcony overlooking the space, the mystery of this strange building is exploited to the full. The windows appear to be steamed up, or perhaps there's a fog outside. The water lies as still as a pond, exactly reflecting the columns, girders, tanks and brickwork above. The strands of light seem to disappear into the depths. And at intervals, like the tide coming in, a powerful ripple pulses across the surface, distorting and fragmenting the image.
She has caught the strange, rather sinister character of such buildings. The Pumping Station, built in 1890, was once part of an extensive hydraulic network, one of five stations delivering water along high-pressure pipes to silently power everything from dock gates to department store lifts and theatre curtains. First steam-driven, later electrically pumped, this now forgotten source of energy was the last of its kind in the world, only finally closing down in 1977. After that the invisible network of hydraulic pipes, radiating across London, was gratefully taken over by fibre-optic telecoms firms. But the little pumping station retains its power, the sense that it sits over an aqueous underworld of dripping caverns and sluices, and contains within itself enormous, perhaps dangerous, pressure.
You can see much of the equipment. Unlike the Tate Modern, which cleared out all its cyclopean turbines and boilers, the Wapping Project has retained as much as is sensible - given that you want some clear spaces to work in. Its equivalent of Tate Modern's huge turbine hall is the restaurant section, where diners are raised on a shallow podium surrounded by heavy bits of electrical machinery. Its version of the Tate's gallery spaces is the square boilerhouse. The boilers have long since gone from the floor, but the big pipes, valves and accumulator tanks are still perched high above. And all the walls are there on view, in their typically patched-up state. This not being an art gallery where valuable and often fragile artworks have to hang or stand, there is no curatorial need for climate-controlled cells.
Just as well, really, since the cost of all that would have been prohibitive. In fact there was an earlier, more ambitious £11m scheme for the pumping station, which was refused lottery money. Now, the Wapping Project's instigator, the theatre director Jules Wright (of the Women's Playhouse Trust, famously associated with the Royal Court Theatre, where Wright was once deputy artistic director), reckons it was probably a good thing they had to retrench and rethink. "We might have regretted it, tried to do too much, maybe lost it a little," she reflects as, sitting in her new meeting-room, we sip our way through a selection of the Oz wines she is to offer.
The Royal Court is a good comparison, a very different building similarly stripped back to essentials and archaeologically revealed in its recent revamp. But that was expensive: Wright points also to the earlier, low-budget Donmar Warehouse theatre. "We've left ourselves a really raw space," she says.
There's a mood among some younger architects to reveal and celebrate the construction history of the buildings they take on. This spirit of radical conservation certainly informs the work of architects and designers Shed 54, responsible for the Wapping Project. Where there are new insertions - particularly in the basement, which was dug out for the purpose - they are simple, direct, and modern, in steel, glass and concrete. Elsewhere, it is a question of subtly adapting what is there already. Even the new parts contain the echo of the old: new glazed-in spaces are etched with the arcane descriptive lettering found on the doors of the old machine rooms.
Wright has been staging works - in visual and performance media - at the previously semi-derelict pumping station since 1995, most memorably with Anya Gallacio's slowly-melting ice-block installation, Intensities and Surfaces, in 1996. That stood exactly where Jane Prophet's flood now laps, so the latter artist's response to the history of the building might be said to include her artistic predecessors. The trick has been to spend the money - much of it raised by selling some surplus land for a housing development alongside - to stabilise and improve the place without losing the character of the setting that made works such as Gallacio's so powerful.
There's no doubt that many of its customers will come to regard the Wapping Project as principally an upmarket restaurant, and will be pretty well-heeled. But Wright is in the Royal Court tradition. She likes the good things in life, and she also likes the radical dialectic that is possible when, in Sloane Square as here, two worlds collide. This very theatrical approach is rather a different proposition from the puritanical, even antiseptic world of the new modern art gallery.
