26 CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 WAYNE COCROFT Power for the people 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 Dungeness, Kent, a landscape of nuclear power, with the Magnox station (left) and the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (right)
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