”Higher than the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral (300ft+), yet with a concrete hyperbolic structure in some places only seven inches thick, cooling towers are unlike any other structure in the British landscape”.
The recent closure of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station not only spelt the end of coal-fired electricity generation in Britain but with it the end of active life for cooling towers. Formerly a familiar site especially across Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, there will be no more vapour billowing from these man-made cloud machines.
My painting (
Drivepast 7, above) of the cooling towers at Ferrybridge was painted in 2016, based on a photo snapped from a car on the A1(M). These towers have subsequently been demolished.
What should happen to these structures? A campaign has been launched by The Twentieth Century Society to preserve at least some of them - from a peak of 240 in the 1960’s today only 45 remain over 5 sites with only one site not scheduled for decommission and demolition.
That site is presumably Drax, which has been repurposed to burn wood pellets as a rather spurrious eco-fuel, and which has drawn criticism of its
supposed environmental credentials.
From high on the North York Moors, on a clear day you can just about see Drax in the distance. Travelling from York to Leeds on the train I was often transfixed from the clouds drifting across the Vale of York from the 3 power stations of Drax, Eggborough and Ferrybridge, catching the low light from a winter sunrise. Now only Drax remains.
I not only love their sculptural qualities but their impact on the cloudscape, on still days adding towering clouds to the sky, while on on windy days elongated forms drifted across the flat vale.
As sculptural elements in the landscape, I believe that the cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar and elsewhere should be preserved, both as reminders of our industrial past and as marvels of engineering, but also for their majestic beauty.
