Billowing marvellous ... the cooling towers of Drax power station. Photograph: John Giles/PA
The back page of a recent edition of Building Design magazine alerted me to news that Didcot power station A, at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, might well close within the next few years. Few readers will mourn the loss of what was built between 1964 and 1968 as a coal-burning fire station and has long been seen as an eyesore, as well as, a source of unforgivable pollution.
But, I hope you won't mind if I say that I can't help admiring the great cooling towers of Didcot power station A, or those, come to that of any of Britain's most prominent power stations, whether Drax at Selby, Tinsley at Sheffield or the abandoned hulk of Thorpe Marsh at Doncaster. Each of these boasts magnificent hyperbolic, or double curved, concrete cooling towers. Some might indeed regard these as horrors, but I've always liked riding along past them in express trains and watching the great cumulus-like clouds of steam billowing gently from their gigantic concrete lips.
The cooling towers at Didcot were designed and grouped as well as contemporary architects and landscape designers could manage. The architect of Didcot A was none less than Sir Frederick Gibberd, better known for his work at Harlow New Town, Heathrow airport (in its early and far less crowded days) and for the radical design of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, or "Paddy's wigwam" as it's known locally.
The hyperbolic concrete cooling towers at Didcot are 325ft, or 99-metres high, as sky-reaching as the towers of our greatest cathedrals, and as enigmatic in their own way as Bronze Age barrows and stone circles. The shape of these structures is surely eye-catching. The hyperbolic form is a work of artistic, but mostly, though, of mathematical and engineering genius. For the record, hyperbolic towers were invented by Vladimir Shukhov (1853-1939) in Tsarist Russia; his first was a striking, steel-framed water tower for the All Russian Exposition held at Nizhny Novgorod in 1896. Concrete, and power stations, were still some years away.
When these mighty power stations are decommissioned, we will always associate their physical form with pollution, Co2 emissions and demonic global warming? Or, might we look at them as man-made markers in the landscape, as, perhaps, the white horses, chalk giants, or the Tintern Abbeys of the 20th century? I do not know. I think most people will simply say good riddance to old concrete rubbish and leave it at that. A love for cooling towers in our zealous, new-found "green age" is surely one that dare not speak its name.
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