On a foggy Sunday morning, thousands gathered to watch the razing of four cooling towers at Fiddler’s Ferry power station near Warrington. Others viewed it on a live-stream thoughtfully provided by the demolition contractor. Local resident Grace Taylor, lucky winner of a detonation raffle, pressed a button to atomise the industrial colossi that had been part of the Cheshire landscape since 1971.
It all went seamlessly. Cascading to the ground like a quartet of dissipated drunks, the 114m-high towers were there one minute and gone the next. Demolitions of unloved or obsolete structures – cooling towers, chimney stacks, council estates – have become the modern equivalent of public executions. We feel a visceral thrill as the dynamite does its work.
Source:Shutterstock
Cooling towers at Fiddler’s Ferry, Meseyside, photographed shortly before demolition
For Fiddler’s Ferry, the death knell had come some time ago. In its pomp, it supplied electricity to two million homes, powered by coal from South Yorkshire’s apparently inexhaustible fields, but was finally closed in 2020 in line with government policy to cease coal-fired electricity generation by 2025. The site has been acquired by private developer Peel, which plans to terraform it into an industrial estate and housing. Demolition of the four remaining cooling towers at Fiddler’s Ferry will take place next year, along with the boiler house, chimney stack and administration buildings.
It’s a fate that will ultimately befall all of the UK’s coal-fired power stations, reflecting the necessarily changed dynamic of how our energy is produced and supplied. Yet in the rush to sweep away the ‘relics’ of an outdated era, there is also the risk that a unique part of the nation’s industrial heritage will be irretrievably lost. Distinguished by their curvaceously concave geometry, cooling towers have become familiar interlopers in Britain’s pastoral idyll. Like industrial versions of Stonehenge, these modern megaliths bestrode the horizon, enlivening car and train journeys. Philip Larkin mentions them in Whitsun Weddings, while Anthony Gormley has described them as ‘man-made volcanos … a relic of the carbon age, a memorial to our 200 year long romance with the second law of thermodynamics’.
Modern cooling towers were originally developed as part of the 1948 nationalisation of Britain’s electricity supply, when 10 new coal-fired ‘super power stations’ were commissioned to generate the electricity that fuelled the country’s post-war affluence. Designed to cool the high temperature steam driving power station turbines, cooling towers are an unalloyed marvel of engineering, employing an ingenious hyperbolic structure of extremely thin-shelled concrete.
Because of their monumental scale, great care was taken to integrate them within the landscape, but on occasion, there were inadvertent juxtapositions. Captured by architectural photographer Eric de Maré in 1960, the Victorian church of St Edward the Confessor flanked by the cooling towers of Ferrybridge B (pictured, top) epitomised the tension between old and new worlds.
Today, cooling towers face a precarious future. At their numerical peak in the mid-60s, there were around 250 spread across the UK. Following the recent Fiddler’s Ferry demolition, only 29 individual towers now remain and that number continues to decline. Despite energetic lobbying by heritage groups, including the Twentieth Century (C20) Society, Historic England takes the view that cooling towers are not sufficiently distinctive to merit protection. All pre-war examples have now been demolished, and a Certificate of Immunity from Listing has recently been renewed on all post-war specimens, effectively clearing the way for their eventual removal.
Although plans for a future energy supply based on renewables are clearly to be welcomed, the potential loss of such remarkable structures is dismaying. Elsewhere, more enlightened attitudes and strategies prevail. In Germany and South Africa, redundant cooling towers are being retained and repurposed as the centrepieces of amusement parks and extreme sports venues, while, during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, a cluster of towers that formerly served as a steel mill became an unlikely viral sensation as a dystopian backdrop to the ski-jumping competition.
Confronted with the prospect of an entire industrial building type being wiped out, the C20 Society is currently developing proposals for how the UK’s remaining cooling towers might be imaginatively preserved and reused. Emblematic of post-war modernising ambitions and superb expressions of the engineer’s art, these heroic titans of industry deserve better than to be thoughtlessly consigned to the wrecking ball.
Catherine Slessor is a writer and critic and president of the Twentieth Century Society