Portraying Power Stations: Part 1 - the Legacy in our Landscape
Did you know that an interest in cooling towers can result in midnight visits from South Yorkshire Police? I did not, until I did.
Some material has been censored for your own protection.
In the 80s, cooling towers were an inevitable part of the British landscape. My family would regularly go on eight hour drives down the whole length of the M1 to see relatives, and it seemed as if these vases/egg-cups/brutalist sculptures had sprouted up of their own accord, or else been placed there by eccentric giants.
I’ll have to make my own map to work out how many coal-fired power stations we would have journeyed past, but it will have been many: in 1987, there were thirteen supported by the River Trent alone. The two that remain - West Burton and Ratcliffe - are amongst a small handful of coal power stations in the UK that have survived into the Twenty-twenties. They’re also the only two that have no plans to close or convert to other forms of power (a relief to fans of the view from East Midlands Parkway railway station).
Of the other four, Aberthaw in Glamorgan and Fiddlers Ferry in Cheshire are scheduled to close this March, and Kilroot in County Antrim has an uncertain future. The final power station burning coal, North Yorkshire’s Drax, has already converted two-thirds of its operations to biomass, and plans to convert the remaining units to gas.
Cooling towers at Drax, North Yorkshire
While I must have been told what the cooling towers were, I don’t think I really connected them with the depleting-coal-reserve-burning power stations that I’d learned about in primary school, though great clouds of steam were always frothing from them.
So although I’ve no sadness about our reliance on coal coming to a fairly abrupt end, I feel nostalgic about the changes to the landscape. I’m sure many locals will disagree with me, especially since the demolition of cooling towers is a major spectacle, but I view the power stations as having archeological significance, just like any other abandoned building or ruin (whether it is or isn’t deemed worthy of preservation).
The unmistakable footprint of Drakelow, one of the many former power stations of ‘Megawatt Valley’ along the River Trent.
Most of the coal power stations are gone without trace, but some have left huge footprints, even decades since they were flattened, with nature gradually advancing. Such is the current situation - three decades after the privatisation of the electricity industry - that uncertainty grips even closed sites, with companies holding onto land, selling it, wondering whether pieces of infrastructure can be reused, or perhaps just shirking from the cost of razing such monumental structures to the ground. The five cooling towers of High Marnham (which bizarrely live on on Google Maps) were demolished in 2012, nine years after the closure of the power station. Willington Power Station closed in the late 90s but, thanks to a pair of nesting peregrine falcons, the cooling towers remain to this day, though perhaps not much longer.
Three years ago, I decided to visit Yorkshire’s cluster of three power stations: Ferrybridge, Eggborough and Drax. I’d wanted to create something about power stations (and any large industrial sites, really) in the landscape for a long time, but I didn’t know what, or how to go about it. I’d already made a Park Hill design, and I was working on a Forgemasters print, and each of those had begun with me taking pictures, so I set off with my rubbish phone.
Ferrybridge, only a short drive from Leeds, had closed less than a year previously. At certain points in its career, it was pioneering and record-breaking, though it had a pretty ignoble start: design flaws led to three of the eight newly constructed towers collapsing in powerful gusts of wind. When I visited, it was possible to get very close to the cooling towers without having to go near a security gate, and I also realised that you could see both Eggborough and Drax on the horizon, the latter belching prodigiously.
Only three cooling towers remain, along with the two smokestacks. (There are thoughts that a gas power station might be built and make use of them.) The demolition footage from October 2019 is pretty impressive.
Eggborough also allowed me to get up close: I could hear the water dripping and running in the closest cooling tower, though there was no steam. Since my visit, it too has closed, and the site seems fated to be levelled to make way for either a gas power station or an industrial park.
Drax. It sounds like a villain from a comic book. All power stations are named after their locations, and I assumed that Drax must be a corporate anomaly, because no North Yorkshire village would have that name: Hemingbrough, Barmby on the Marsh, Newsholme, Camblesforth, Knedlington. Drax. It turns out that its name dates back to medieval times, and perhaps even earlier, so that shows how little I know.
Drax has two clusters of six cooling towers.
The cooling towers of Drax are organised in two groups: six arranged in an oval to the north of the power station, and a ring of six to the south. You can get close to the southern group from the main road, but the northern six are presumably best viewed from afar. My attempts at pictures are . . . cluttered.
I’d been in touch with Drax a few weeks earlier on Twitter, as I was thinking of doing a tour with friends, and their social media manager was friendly and enthusiastic. I foresaw no issues with taking an impromptu trip and getting some rubbish pictures on my decrepit phone. In any case, I parked in various different places to take pictures, including in the visitors’ car park right in front of the main entrance, which I’d also done at Eggborough. ‘I’m not going to look shifty if I park under the glare of half a dozen security cameras, metres away from the security office,’ I naively thought to myself.
But being conspicuous didn’t help. On my last stop, I was confronted by a hefty security guard who demanded to know what I was doing (I told him) as well as my name (I politely declined, since I was on public property). Maybe he was a former police officer who’d forgotten his de-escalation training (don’t confront people with your body face on, folks, and don’t try to intimidate them with your size), but more likely he was a bored jobsworth who enjoyed projecting his action-man fantasies onto mundane encounters with smallish women.
I was right to be bothered. The next morning, I discovered I had a missed call from the police around midnight, and a message from my downstairs neighbour (since I hadn’t been home at the time).
I was furious. I gathered a folder of ‘evidence’ on my laptop which detailed all of my correspondence with Drax, and images on my Instagram of other industrial sites, as well as my previous designs and products.
By the time the police officer arrived that evening, I was so psyched up that I said, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’ He was calm and understanding and not at all security-guard-like as I ranted at him, occasionally pausing to say, ‘I’m not angry with you - I’m just angry.’ I emailed him my evidence file, and he was perplexed that it had got this far. Proof enough, in my mind, that the security guard had wanted to punish me for not being cowed.
I laid into Drax online. They tried to claim that it was procedure and kept repeating, ‘Drax is responsible for 7% of the UK’s energy.’ But it didn’t and doesn’t ring true: do they really send police after every person who pulls up to take a picture? In what way were my phone pictures a threat to national security? There is nothing in any of my photos that you can’t see on Google Earth.
In case you hadn’t already guessed, I hate Drax. I hate it on a personal level and on an ethical level. It might no longer be the EU’s most polluting power station, and it now produces 5% (or sometimes 6% is reported) of the UK’s energy, but its plans for the future are hokey and are costing taxpayers preposterous sums of money that should be invested in green technologies. Instead, Drax is going to continue to burn fossil fuels and polluting biomass, using untested technology to justify doing so as its shareholders will only get richer. It’s not the answer to the climate crisis, and it sure as hell wasn’t the answer to my creative project.
More on that in a few days.
A Lengthy Addendum on Photography and the Law
After posting this blog, I received an odd comment telling me I was “lucky to not be arrested” from someone who should know better. I wrote a very long addendum here on 03/02/20, but I’ve since decided to move it to its own page. If you want to know more about what someone safely can or can’t photograph in the UK, you can read about that here. 05/02/20
