Designing Buildings at 05:26, 6 September 2026

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	Now that the early nuclear stations, and the conventionally powered oil and coal-fired stations, have reached the end of their lives, how can their heritage be acknowledged?		Now that the early nuclear stations, and the conventionally powered oil and coal-fired stations, have reached the end of their lives, how can their heritage be acknowledged?
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	At the end of the second world war, and well into the 1950s, coal remained the principal power source for industry, the railways, heating the home and public buildings, and through town gas works provided energy for cooking, heating and street lighting. Electricity was seen as the energy source of the future; to achieve this vision new generations of power stations would be required. Architecturally, in the decade following nationalisation of the electricity industry in 1948, they remained largely as urban brick cathedrals of power. Bankside, London, now Tate Modern, epitomises this era.		At the end of the second world war, and well into the 1950s, coal remained the principal power source for industry, the railways, heating the home and public buildings, and through town gas works provided energy for cooking, heating and street lighting. Electricity was seen as the energy source of the future; to achieve this vision new generations of power stations would be required. Architecturally, in the decade following nationalisation of the electricity industry in 1948, they remained largely as urban brick cathedrals of power. Bankside, London, now Tate Modern, epitomises this era.

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Now that the early nuclear stations, and the conventionally powered oil and coal-fired stations, have reached the end of their lives, how can their heritage be acknowledged?

At the end of the second world war, and well into the 1950s, coal remained the principal power source for industry, the railways, heating the home and public buildings, and through town gas works provided energy for cooking, heating and street lighting. Electricity was seen as the energy source of the future; to achieve this vision new generations of power stations would be required. Architecturally, in the decade following nationalisation of the electricity industry in 1948, they remained largely as urban brick cathedrals of power. Bankside, London, now Tate Modern, epitomises this era.

In the late 1950s, after concerns about a reliable coal supply had diminished, an ambitious scheme to build 13 super stations, known as ‘Hinton’s heavies’ after the chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board, was enacted. Ten were rated at 2000 MW, the coalfired stations each burning millions of tons of coal a year. In parallel, the world’s first civil nuclear power programme was initiated with a plan to have 12 Magnox stations operational by 1965.

Over the past 20 years or so, the early nuclear stations have reached the end of their design lives. So, too, have the conventionally powered oil and coal-fired stations, their demise often being hastened by governmental commitments to decarbonise the economy.

Ratcliffe, Nottinghamshire, was the last coal-fired station to close in September 2024, ending 140 years of coal-powered electricity generation in Great Britain, although Drax, North Yorkshire, will continue in operation for the foreseeable future, burning biomass fuel. The loss of coal and oil-fired power stations which once dominated our towns and countryside illustrates the transience of much modern infrastructure. Future researchers into the architecture, technology or social history of demolished stations will, however, be hard pressed to find any coherent archives. For the post-war stations, records for their period in public ownership may survive in the National Archives, but for the privately owned stations, which include the recently closed mega stations, the picture is very mixed. The content of written archives is also often very biased towards policy and administrative history, with less material surviving on their technical and social history.

Materially, it is unlikely that any of the large post-war power stations will remain after their operational life is over. In London a handful of earlier stations have been converted into luxury apartments, an art gallery and mixed uses. Elsewhere the economics will rarely work to permit such conversions. The post-war mega stations also lack the monumental permanence of the earlier stations. In many cases the structures were little more than weather shelters protecting some of the most sophisticated generation plant of their age.

The most iconic feature of many of these stations were the groups of cooling towers. By the 1960s they represented a well-established technology distinguished by their enormous size, some reaching 114 m high. Cooling towers were, however, only one component of a power station. To blend these huge stations into the local landscape careful consideration was given to the massing of structures, their colours, surface textures and cladding. At West Burton, Nottinghamshire, Derek Lovejoy and Associates, the lead landscape architects, used design models to arrange the towers to avoid ‘blocking’ when viewed from a distance. The architects, Rex Savidge and John Gelsthorpe, further reduced their impact by adding coloured tints to the concrete of a couple of the towers.

The scheme received a Civic Trust Award in 1968. The towers, constructed from reinforced concrete around 18 cm thick, derive strength from their hyperboloid form. Preserving a cooling tower would be both challenging and costly. As with any relatively thin concrete structure, spalling caused by thermal variation and corrosion of reinforcing rods requires constant attention. The individual towers are also single components of a wider composition and technologically are not the most significant part of a station.

If physical preservation is doubtful, how might the legacies of these huge stations be preserved? On closure, any large technological concern may be seen to be subject to taphonomic processes, akin to the processes of decay and dispersal living organisms undergo after death that may eventually leave an imperfect fossil assemblage of their form. For many of the earlier power stations few archives remain, and air photographs taken by the Aerofilms company, now online through the Britain from Above website, are often the most accessible images. The point of closure offers a unique opportunity to influence the quality of archives for future researchers and as a legacy for the hundreds if not thousands of people who worked at each station. One of the challenges that the heritage sector faces is the way in which responsibility for different aspects of a station’s heritage is split between various agencies. Assuming that the heritage interest of a power station has been recognised, there has often been an uncoordinated approach to securing a coherent archival collection.

The heritage of a station’s fabric represented by its buildings, often surrounded by a designed landscape, might generally be regarded as the responsibility of the local authority historic environment team, sometimes with advice from the national heritage agencies. Uniquely, within the heritage sector planning teams may be able to influence the creation of an archive through statutory controls. These may include the commissioning of historic building reports prior to demolition. In structure such reports may conform to formats used for earlier periods. New drawings are rarely required, although some may need reworking to aid clarity. Additional photography is often required to complement historic images or to fill gaps. Electronic 3D imaging also offers many possibilities to explain the operations within the stations, but it requires a clear understanding of why it is being carried out and clarity that suitable repositories exist to hold the data in accessible forms.

Many stations have voluminous archives, comprising many thousands of engineering drawings, operating manuals, personnel records, and sometimes film and photography. Although we cannot second guess what future researchers may find of interest, a highly selective retention policy will be required to reduce this mass to a size a repository might be prepared to accept. Selection has a cost and is often best performed by a knowledgeable member of station staff working to agreed guidelines. After closure the fate of some archives becomes difficult to track, as they pass from operating companies to estate managers, and perhaps to demolition contractors to inform their work. In the absence of a national power generation museum, a local county record office is often the best repository, while in other cases museums or national building archives may take material.

If a complete power station cannot be saved, could components or other artefacts be retained to represent the whole? Many of the objects that might be considered fall into the category of what our colleagues in the museum sector refer to as ‘big stuff’, with all the cost implications for transport, storage and display the term implies. In many instances industries are willing to donate objects, large and small, but local and even national museums lack the resources to curate the material. There are exceptions: the 1930s Battersea control room has been incorporated into a new events space and the Science Museum Group has acquired its 1960s equivalent room from Cottam, Nottinghamshire, for possible future display.

Through job losses the closure of any large industrial concern can have a catastrophic impact on its local community. In addition to what may be regarded as standard heritage responses to loss, arts projects may also offer opportunities to work with local people as their social and physical environment changes.

For the fleets of redundant nuclear stations, the decommissioned hulks of their reclad and reduced reactor buildings are likely to remain for many decades while their residual reactivity decays to permit more economic dismantling. At these and many of the post-war stations, although the principal station buildings may be lost, their surrounding designed landscapes of artificial screening landforms, hedges and plantations, analogous to the gardens of an abandoned country estate, will remain.

The recent loss of most of the large post-war electricity generation stations has provided an opportunity to promote the development of more comprehensive heritage strategies informed by advice in a Historic England guidance note.[1] This has included collaborations with site owners, local planning authorities, the Science Museum Group, and local and national archives. Examples of some historic building reports have been lodged with the Archaeological Data Service.

The recently published heritage strategy by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority provides a good example of an industry-wide initiative to acknowledge its heritage through tangible and intangible assets, objects and memories,[2] while also acknowledging the benefits that heritage projects can bring to local communities and stakeholders. It is a vision that could be adopted by other industries or tailored to address the closure of a single enterprise leading to more holistic legacies for our recent industrial past.

References:

[1] Historic England (2016) England’s Redundant Post-War Coal- and Oil-Fired Power Stations, Guidelines for Recording and Archiving Their Records

[2] Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (2024) NDA Group Heritage Vision and Strategy

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This article originally appeared in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) [https://ihbconline.co.uk/cont_arch/?p=1596 Context 186], published in December 2025. It was written by Wayne Cocroft, who has recently retired as a senior archaeological investigator with Historic England. All photos by the author.

--[[User:Institute_of_Historic_Building_Conservation|Institute of Historic Building Conservation]]

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* IHBC articles.
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[[Category:DCN_Commentary]] [[Category:History]] [[Category:Conservation]]

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Designing Buildings at 05:26, 6 September 2026

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