CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 27 INFRASTRUCTURE 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 Cooling towers at Ratcliffe, Nottinghamshire West Burton, Nottinghamshire. Careful spacing has prevented the blocking of structures on the horizon.
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