Mick Hartley

Jonathan Glancey, at The Critic, on cooling towers:

These awe-inspiring structures, each taller than St Paul’s Cathedral and three times the diameter of its inner dome, were what had caught my eye. Now, I knew where I was. This was Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, closed in September 2024 and the last of its English coal-powered kind. King Coal may have been dethroned here, yet he has left monuments in his wake that some, if not all of us, can only look on with awe. 

Not so long ago, there were some 240 of these giant towers sited, for the most part, in the former realms of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Midlands coalfields. Just 37 remain and, immune from listing, they are likely to be extinct by 2030. Certainly, Historic England is no friend to them, telling governments that they “do not have the architectural interest requisite for listing”. 

This sentiment helps to get around the fact that despite their artistry, cooling towers were the work not of “interesting” architects but of skilled engineers. And what engineers they were: the concrete shells of these immensely tall and strong hyperboloid structures are just seven inches thick, the ratio of their diameter to the thickness (or thinness) of their walls less than that of an eggshell. 

In a foreword to the Twentieth Century Society’s suitably massive book Cooling Towers: A Celebration of Sculptural Beauty, Industrial History and Architectural Legacy (2025), Sir Antony Gormley sees them as “twentieth-century equivalents of Stonehenge”. 

Yes, I’m with this. Our industrial heritage is always under threat, as we reject the “satanic mills” of our grimy past. The urge to destroy, though – especially here in Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution – really needs to be checked. So many of these structures, from blast furnaces to railway bridges, have a beauty that flows directly from that form-follows-function aesthetic. No architectural rococo extravagance, just what works. And the most impressive, surely, are these huge towers. I wouldn’t go so much for that Stonehenge line, but yes, cathedrals of the coal age works for me.

In Derbyshire, not far from neolithic henges, the five cooling towers of Willington power station, closed in 1999, still stand. They feature on the badge of the local football club and on the school crest of the village’s primary school. Peregrine falcons survey the landscape from their hyperboloid concrete eyries. Meanwhile, if uncertainly, Drax Power Station near Selby, fully fuelled since 2018 by biomass, and with its dozen attendant cooling towers, steams on for now. Perhaps there is hope yet.