Friday, 6 December. The cooling towers of Ironbridge B Power Station are being taken down today. A big event round this part of Shropshire where, for the entire lives of anyone aged much less than 60, the towers have been part of the skyline, but never quite part of the town: the eye-catching feature in someone else’s back garden. Roads within 350m of the site are closed, and everywhere around the exclusion zone crowds are gathering at viewpoints, craning over hedges and between gaps in buildings.
I go to watch the demolition from the garden of friends who live in – I’m not making this up – Upper Paradise. We have a perfect view down Coalbrookdale to the four brick-red towers of the Buildwas site, framed in the wooded folds of the Gorge. As we wait, the sun emerges.
At 11:00 precisely a siren sounds, shortly afterwards there is a flash, and simultaneously the first tower, the one furthest to our right, begins to sink. A rush of thoughts shoots through my mind (It’s too late! It’s too soon!) then everything happens very quickly. All the towers begin to fall, twisting and distorting, folding in on themselves, in one last dance. Only then does the sound of the detonations, four explosions in quick succession, reach us. Quieter than expected, or perhaps we notice the noise – which is heard ten or more miles away – less, because we are so amazed at how rapidly the great impassive bulks of the towers become suddenly so fragile, collapsing like a party of drunken skaters. Within a few seconds they are entirely gone. A little after, a line of smoke and dust rises where the towers had been, getting denser and pinker before it lifts and spreads, dispersing into a thin fog across the valley floor, reaching us as a bitter-tasting mist.
From detonation to disappearance, the whole thing had taken not much more than ten seconds. A thrilling ten seconds, that was for me a mind-changer.
I had wanted them to stay. Like many people, I’ve always loved cooling towers. I love their shape, clever and simple, that might have been were turned on a wheel and formed by hand, as a vase or a bowl. They are dainty as condiments or chess pawns. But in the landscape they have an awesome sculptural mass, industrial cathedrals, that surely can only have been built by creatures with some sense of glory. They are so pleasing to look at, so nicely balanced, majestic in their assumption of grace and gravity. And they stand for the attitudes of an earlier age, a very twentieth-century optimism, a beneficent modernism that speaks of shared prosperity. They have a guardian role in their provision of the nurture of warmth and light.
When I first saw the Ironbridge cooling towers, years back, I assumed from their colour they were built of millions of bricks, masonry masterpieces. Closer, I noticed joint-lines suggesting they were formed of larger blocks. Red sandstone? But that weathers so unevenly it could never hold its shape. Some sort of terracotta building blocks, then. Wrong on all counts: as I found out on Friday, they are reinforced concrete, scored to suggest mortar lines, stained with a red dye, as if dressed to honour the local legacy of red-clay tile and brick manufacture.
And this is where my second thoughts, my revisions, creep in. The colour is false, just as the impression of a material weight to rival the Pyramids is false. The towers are flimsy shells, in proportion as lightweight as the hull skin of one of the racing skiffs that pull past the power station along the Severn. When they came down, the towers folded like napkins. Those lovely lines are not there to wow, but to tension-stress, to add strength through curvature, like an egg shell.
Other delusions soon piled in. The cooling towers themselves only emitted innocuous steam, but they served the power station that consumed train-loads of coal at a time, toxic smoke billowing from the chimney. Operations had to be reduced in 2008 with an EU directive on pollution thresholds. The powerplant switched in 2012 to biofuel – wood pulp shipped from the USA – but the trial was never viable. The boilers were switched off for the last time in November, 2015.
Dirty, flimsy… what else? When the plant started operations in 1969, the towers were given a life expectancy of 25 years. An acquaintance in Buildwas reports that when the sun came round to the far side of the towers, he could see through the gaps in the concrete. The things had served their time, and were falling apart.
Everyone has their own idea of what to do with the site. The strongest objectors wanted the four towers preserved, memorial to the final fling of the town’s extraordinarily diverse industrial heritage, that sees already within a mile radius seven museums of materials and manufacture: iron, tiles and china among them. The towers would make a museum of… what? Atmospheric pollution? Acid rain? Non-renewable fossil fuels? At the same time as bequeathing a massive maintenance bill. Others say they should have retained just one of the unique pink towers, but the group effect would be lost. Covering the 350 acres with solar panels could have gone some way to mitigating the loss of power generation. Or an eco-village, to offset some of the carbon emissions from down the years.
As it is, once the developers have cleaned up the site, they will build over the next 12 years or so 1,000 homes, a primary school, commercial units, a village centre and medical facilities, set in open space and landscaping. There’s local opposition, but this dull, sensible, uninspiring plan is surely as good as we’ll get from this difficult brownfield site. The one bright note is that there are plans to reinstate the single-track railway that brought coal the few miles down from the Telford main line as a passenger service, that would have real benefits for the region’s economy.
There was one other thing that went through my mind when the towers came down. We’re a week away from the 2019 general election, the tension is building, the outcome uncertain. Who knows what part of our social structure, of the landscape of our lives, will be debris in the morning?
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With thanks for hospitality to Katherine Petty & Alec Connah
Photo: Express & Star