ARCHITECTURE
Keeping our cool
Magnificent sculptural giants or giant eyesores? The power station cooling towers that once dominated our landscape are disappearing fast. Should we save them?
by RACHEL CARLYLE
Winning wonders The towers at West Burton received awards when they opened in the Sixties
They rise up out of the landscape like giant, fluted terracotta vases of the gods, and were a staple of our childhood games of I Spy on long motorway journeys. But the iconic cooling towers of Britain’s post-war power stations are being toppled at an alarming rate.
At their peak in the Sixties there were 240 towers clustered in groups of (usually) four, six or eight next to the giant coal-fired power stations they served. Now there are just 45 left – and all attempts to save them have so far ended in failure.
‘We’ve lost more than 30 in the last decade,’ says Oli Marshall at the Twentieth Century Society, who is leading the fight against the demolition brigade. ‘And by the end of this decade almost all will be gone.’
You may well ask, why should we care? For a start, they are incredible feats of engineering. At 370ft-plus, most are taller than the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, yet in parts only 6-7in thick. That means their ratio of wall thickness to diameter is less than that of an eggshell. ‘If you see footage of one being demolished, they almost fold in like crepe paper,’ says Marshall. ‘There’s an incredible fragility when you see them fall that’s not evident when they’re standing.’