On August 24th of this year, a small (and some would say insignificant) piece of architectural history was reduced to rubble. The world's oldest surviving hyperbolic cooling towers (in Sheffield, UK) were brought down around 3am in a controlled explosion watched by thousands of onlookers - though sadly not by myself. I was, at the time, on holiday in the Netherlands - which, ironically, is the country that gave birth to the hyperboloid cooling tower (above).A few press reports referred to the towers as being the oldest surviving pre-1950 examples in the UK. But I'm going to stick my neck out here and make a claim for these having been the oldest hyperboloid cooling towers in the world.
Widely reviled, and often used as a convenient symbol of environmental pollution, the hyperbolic cooling tower is, nevertheless, a unique structure which, for about half a century, has been a familar sight in the UK landscape, both urban and rural. In the last two decades, however increasing numbers of them have been demolished as their generating stations reach the end of their life. A typical plant is designed to function for between thirty and forty years, and most of the remaining coal fired stations in Britain (principally those of the South Yorkshire coal fields) were commissioned in the 1960s and 70s. In other words - they won't be around for much longer.
You can call me weird here, but I got interested in cooling towers at an early age. Their vastness and unique shape impressed me. There's nothing else like them in the landscape; in a sense, these monumental structures are the pyramids of the industrial age.
Around eight years ago, I moved to Burton on Trent in Staffordshire, and daily passed by the six surviving towers of Drakelow Power Station, a vast complex that had once comprised ten cooling towers, and was for a time Europe's largest coal-fired power plant. I began to notice how the appearance of the towers changed with the light and the weather, and, out of sheer perversity, if nothing else, painted a large landscape, dominated by the towers. Around this time, I began to compile a photo record of cooling towers from around the world, searching online for images and comparing the varied designs from power stations as far afield as Kazahkstan and China. I also began to learn some of the history attached to these structures.
The hyperboloid tower was conceived by Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov, and first appeared in 1896. The tower was of steel latticework construction, and its function was purely decorative. It wasn't until 1918 that the first familiar concrete cooling towers appeared.
As power plants began to spring up across the world, 'natural draft cooling towers' were introduced as an efficient means of cooling and recycling hot water. These were originally square-sided wooden structures, but in 1918 a new type of tower came into service - the concrete hyperboloid, designed by Theodore van Iterson for a coal mine in the Netherlands known by the oddly inappropriate name of 'Emma.' The design was soon adopted across Europe and South Africa, though oddly not in America, where hyperbolic towers did not appear until as late as 1963. Britain's first hyperbolic cooling tower was built in Liverpool in 1924 (and is long gone).
The towers at Tinsley, Sheffield, had survived for a staggering seventy years prior to their demolition. This fact alone surely makes them candidates as having been the oldest in the world. They were constructed in 1938 as an expansion of the Blackburn Meadows Power Station, which supplied power to the local steel industry. Although the rest of the plant was decommisioned and levelled in the 1970s, the towers remained. By this time, they overlooked the Tinsley viaduct, a twin-deck elevated section of road, carrying the M1 motorway. Demolition was obviously going to be problematic because of their proximity to the roadway: but in August of this year, after much prevarication, the job was finally carried out, with only partial success - a portion of the north tower had to be pulled down with diggers after the explosions failed to bring it down.
Some have called this an act of vandalism. Whilst one can, to a certain extent, appreciate the stance taken by the tower's owners, E-on, (who claimed that the site needed to be redeveloped and that to maintain these obsolete structures would have been cost prohibitive), it's still a shame that no one thought to examine the history of these structures a little more fully before pushing the button.
Does any of this even matter? Are cooling towers important, or just a temporary phase in the changing industrial landscape that must inevitably be swept away? It mattered to the late Bernd Becher, a photographer who dedicated much of his career to recording obsolete industrial structures, including gas holders and cooling towers, and captured many examples on film prior to their demolition.
Naturally, examples of cooling towers have not been preserved, and in general, they have disappeared as the plant surrounding them is either upgraded or closed. The Sheffield survivors only remained because of the sheer fluke of their being just 12 metres from a motorway. It's a virtual certainty that no older examples remain anywhere in the world.
The destruction of the Tinsley towers means that Britain's oldest hyperbolic cooling towers are now almost certainly the set of five that are still standing on the site of the former Willington Power Station in Derbyshire. These small concrete towers are themselves over fifty years old, but comparative newcomers next to the 70-year old towers at Sheffield. Will anyone think to preserve at least one of these idiosyncratic structures? It's unlikely. Fifty years from now, these curious concrete giants will exist only in photographs, and for most people it will be a case of good riddance. Whatever your opinion, next time you're passing a power station, have a closer look at those towers, and think how different your life might have been without them.
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