Britain’s 45 remaining cooling towers are architectural gems. Let’s save them

Cooling towers are some of the most majestic structures in Britain – form and function in perfect harmony – yet exempt from listed status. Even as they become redundant, those that remain deserve to be preserved as much as any church or castle

Consider cooling towers. They are monuments of industry, built at the size (and more) of pyramids and cathedrals, graceful in their geometry, the perfect marriage of form and function, that come not alone but in concrete choirs of up to 12 in number. They are big enough to capture cloud shadows, in the way that hills do, and when in use make (or made) their own atmospheres of vapour. At the scale of Britain, seen from railways and motorways from north to south and east to west, they are (or were) an index of national landscape, markers of journeys, always the same but always with local adaptation. Close to, they are objects of boggling majesty.

This country, if they all vanished, would be sadder and duller. Such, though, is their possible or even probable fate, as the coal- and oil-fired power stations they served are rightly being phased out. Immunity from listing, granted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, means that there is nothing to stop those that remain going the way of Didcot in Oxfordshire and Ironbridge in Shropshire, both demolished in 2019, and four of the eight at Fiddler’s Ferry near Warrington, which went last month. All could disappear in a series of balletic booms, dropping like ballerinas into skirts of dust, memorialised by YouTube videos of their detonations.

There’s a magic in their shifting relationships, the way your experience of them changes as you approach or move past them

British cooling towers are formed by the structural laws of engineering and bureaucracy. Their hyperboloid shape, pioneered in Limburg in the Netherlands in the 1910s, is extraordinarily efficient, their ratio of wall thickness to diameter being less than that of an egg. Their form also accelerates the flow of air up through their interior, which helps them do their job better. The most impressive examples in this country are creations of the British Electricity Authority, later the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), set up by the nationalisation of electricity supply in 1948, which in its time was the largest and biggest-spending state-funded body outside Whitehall.

This mighty organisation set out to concentrate new facilities for generation in a series of new power stations, 10 of them vast and efficient 2,000 megawatt coal-fired complexes. The latter, nicknamed “Hinton’s heavies” after the CEGB chairman Christopher Hinton, were located away from big cities, and close to the coalfields that supplied their fuel. As much as their towers might connect with the realm of clouds, they are also upward expressions of underground geology.

Each station was a complex the size of a town, furnished with cooling towers 375 feet in height, which is taller than the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, their uniformity an incarnation of the centralised authority that built them. They also came with subtler charms. The CEGB had the statutory duty, alongside that of providing power efficiently, to minimise impact on flora, fauna and scenery, which made it the largest patron of landscape design in the country.

Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe, two of the most significant landscape architects of their generation, who between them designed the settings for a number of power stations, helped to form the CEGB’s approach. Leading architects were also employed to advise on the composition of power station complexes and the design of some of their buildings. Frederick Gibberd, architect of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool, designed Didcot, reputedly with advice from Henry Moore on the grouping of the cooling towers.

The aim was not to conceal the towers – a futile task, given that they make trees look puny in comparison – but rather to integrate them and relate them to their surroundings, while screening the messier constructions at their base with woods and artificial hills. Sometimes, planting was used to frame and selectively reveal the structures as you approached them. At Ironbridge the concrete was tinted a ferrous red that both complemented the green of trees and evoked the local earth. British cooling towers were arranged not only by the rigorous logic of engineering but also by artistic composition. There’s a magic in their shifting relationships – the way your experience of them changes as you approach or move past them – that is at least partly intentional.

And so they have become part of the national topography. “An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,” wrote Philip Larkin in a litany of English scenes in The Whitsun Weddings, “And someone running up to bowl.” They inspire affection and fascination, evident in the opposition that proposals to demolish arouse and abundant postings of images on social media. “The public care a lot,” says Catherine Croft, director of the Twentieth Century Society, which is campaigning to preserve at least some cooling towers. “They are passionately and emotionally involved.”

The most obvious obstacles to keeping them are their scale and their shape. They’re too big to make into art galleries in the way that Tate Modern was made out of Bankside Power Station. Designed for one highly defined purpose, they’re not easy to adapt. But, as Croft points out, ways have been found. In Soweto, in South Africa, old cooling towers have become bungee jumping venues, their exteriors painted with vivid murals. The Inota music and arts festival in Hungary takes place among the towers and turbine halls of an old power station. They come with quantities of land around them that could profitably be developed for homes and business. Imagine how exceptional such places could be if the towers were kept in place.

There were once 241 CEGB cooling towers in Britain, of which 45 survive. They are some of the most astonishing structures ever built in this country. Given that we keep castles and gas holders and redundant churches and other constructions that are no longer useful, it would be a colossal failure of will and imagination to let these beautiful objects go.

Cover photo: ‘Concrete choirs’: the cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, the last operational coal-fired power station in the UK, which is scheduled to close in September. Photograph: Bill Allsopp/Alamy